The Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting. In fact, ‘she’ is the

Question

The Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting. In fact, ‘she’ is the most famous painting in the world. She is even considered to be the most famous work of art in the world. In your opinion after researching thoroughly, What is the primary reason for this evolution in fame? Do you think the original painting has been enhanced or diminished (reputation-not the actual work altered) by this change in status? Explain how and give specific examples from the internet of how her image has been ‘borrowed’ by contemporary advertisers. (50 points)

Explanation / Answer

The main reason that everyone quotes the Mona Lisa is because of her smile. People across the world are puzzled about her enigmatic half smile. From Sigmund Freud to Harvard Professors all are equally bewildered by her smile. After its completion in 1519 the Mona Lisa painting highly regarded. First it was owned by the King of France and later it got settled in the Louvre. But till that time it did not have international prominence. First time in the publication of Walter Pater’s 1867 Leonardo da Vinci essay. Pater later waxed poetic as the Mona Lisa was known after that and describing her as the ghostly beauty. It is probably one of the most famous piece of writing about a picture in the world by Pater.

In the da Vinci essay, he writes:

Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions... She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

But someone has rightly said that with popularity comes jealousy. After 50 years Pate’s essay was stolen from Louvre. The painting was shot in the museum. It took 2 years to find the painting.

As the theories say that the women in the picture could be vinci’s mother or lover or a disguised self-portrait has added to Mona Lisa’s legend.

With the advent of the printing press in the late 1800's, images of the painting were reproduced and circulated all over as it made news. When it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, there was a barrage of world wide media attention which brought unprecedented familiarity to all levels of society. When it was recovered in 1913 it made stops in Italy for viewing with celebration, adulation and more media.

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