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Mona Lisa biography of a woman. Leonardo da Vinci's technique revealed. Mona Lisa layer by layer. From king to king, from kingdom to kingdom

Introduction………………………………………………………………………3

1. Biography of the artist…………………………………………………..5

2. The mystery of the identification of the Mona Lisa model………………………………6

3. Technique of execution of Mona Lisa……………………………………...11

4. The composition of the picture…………………………………………………..16

5. Curious facts…………………………………………………… 18

Conclusion………………………………………………………………..20

List of sources and literature……………………………………….21

Appendix……………………………………………………………….22

Introduction

ital. Gioconda; Monna Lisa) is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, a young woman, painted by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci around 1503. The painting is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Refers to the Renaissance. Exhibited in the Louvre (Paris, France).

ital. Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo- Portrait of Mrs. Lisa Giocondo.

Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" is considered the most priceless painting of all mankind. The work was created over several years, it is unique. The picture is so familiar to everyone, so deeply imprinted in the memory of people that it is hard to believe that it once looked different.

The picture has been copied so often and has had such a strong (perhaps even too strong) influence on art that it is very difficult to look at it with an unbiased eye, but a close examination of color illustrations can lead to surprising discoveries even for those who are tired or think they are tired. , from Mona Lisa.

There are four main questions:

The genius of the creator of the painting, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Perfect technique of performance, secrets that are still unsolved

The halo of mystery of the woman (who posed)

· A picture story that is as amazing as a detective story.

You can talk about genius for a long time, it is better to read the biography on this site. Objectively, without artistic speculation. Although the abilities were bright, but the main thing is a huge capacity for work and a desire to know the world around. Leonardo studied topics that were then considered essential for an artist: mathematics, perspective, geometry, and all the sciences of observation and study of the natural environment. He also began studying architecture and sculpture. After completing his studies, he began his career as a painter of portraits and religious paintings, commissioned by wealthy citizens or monasteries. Throughout his life he developed his technical and artistic talents. Unusual ability to deal with any topic and in any field of life, he should have been better known as a talented engineer than as a painter, but he surprised even all his contemporaries, as well as his greedy curiosity with which he continuously studied natural phenomena: " Where does urine come from? ... and despite the fact that his technical experimentation in painting was not always successful.

1. Artist biography

Leonardo got his last name from the town of Vinci, west of Florence, where he was supposedly born on April 15, 1452. He was the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant girl, but was brought up in the house and his father, so he received a thorough education in reading, writing and counting. At the age of 15, he was apprenticed to one of the leading masters of the early Renaissance, Andrea del Verrocchio, and five years later he joined the guild of artists. In 1482, already a professional artist, Leonardo moved to Milan. There he painted the famous fresco "The Last Supper" and began to keep his unique records, in which he acts more as an architect-designer, anatomist, hydraulics, inventor of mechanisms, musician. For many years, moving from city to city, da Vinci was so fascinated by mathematics that he could not bring himself to pick up brushes. In Florence he entered into a rivalry with Michelangelo; this rivalry culminated in the enormous battle compositions that the two artists painted for Palazzo della Signoria (also Palazzo Vecchio). The French, first Louis XII and then Francis I, admired the works of the Italian Renaissance, especially Leonardo's Last Supper. Therefore, it is not surprising that in 1516 Francis I, well aware of Leonardo's various talents, invited him to court, which was then located in the Amboise castle in the Loire Valley. Leonardo died at Amboise on May 2, 1519; his paintings by this time were scattered mainly in private collections, and the notes lay in various collections almost in complete oblivion for several more centuries.

2. MysteryidentityMona Lisa models

The person depicted in the portrait is difficult to identify. Until today, many controversial and sometimes absurd opinions have been expressed on this subject:

    The wife of the Florentine merchant del Giocondo

    Isabella of Este

    Just the perfect woman

    A young boy in a woman's attire

    Self-portrait of Leonardo

The mystery that surrounds the stranger to this day attracts millions of visitors to the Louvre every year.

In 1517, Cardinal Louis of Aragon visited Leonardo at his atelier in France. The description of this visit was made by the secretary of Cardinal Antonio de Beatis: “On October 10, 1517, the monsignor and others like him visited in one of the remote parts of Amboise, visited sir Leonardo da Vinci, a Florentine, gray-bearded old man who is over seventy years old, the most excellent artist of our time. He showed His Excellency three paintings: one depicting a Florentine lady, painted from nature at the request of Brother Lorenzo the Magnificent Giuliano de' Medici, another depicting St. John the Baptist in his youth, and the third depicting St. Anne with Mary and the Christ Child; all are supremely beautiful. From the master himself, due to the fact that at that time his right hand was paralyzed, it was no longer possible to expect new good works.

According to some researchers, "a certain Florentine lady" means "Mona Lisa". It is possible, however, that this was a different portrait, from which neither evidence nor copies have been preserved, as a result of which Giuliano Medici could not have had anything to do with Mona Lisa.

According to Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), a biographer of Italian artists, Mona Lisa (short for Madonna Lisa) was the wife of a Florentine named Francesco del Giocondo, whose portrait Leonardo spent four years, yet left unfinished.

Vasari expresses a very laudatory opinion about the quality of this picture: “Any person who wants to see how well art can imitate nature can easily be convinced of this by the example of the head, because here Leonardo reproduced all the details ... The eyes are filled with brilliance and moisture, like living people ... Delicate pink nose seems real. The red tone of the mouth harmoniously matches the complexion ... Whoever looked closely at her neck, it seemed to everyone that her pulse was beating ... ". He also explains the slight smile on her face: "Leonardo allegedly invited musicians and clowns to entertain a lady bored from a long posing."

Maybe this story is true, but, most likely, Vasari simply added it to Leonardo's biography for the entertainment of readers. Vasari's description also contains an accurate description of the eyebrows missing from the painting. This inaccuracy could arise only if the author described the picture from memory or from the stories of others. The painting was well known among art lovers, although Leonardo left Italy for France in 1516, taking the painting with him. According to Italian sources, it has since been in the collection of the French King Francis I, but it remains unclear when and how he acquired it and why Leonardo did not return it to the customer.

Vasari, who was born in 1511, could not see the Mona Lisa with his own eyes and was forced to refer to information given by the anonymous author of the first biography of Leonardo. It is he who writes about the uninfluential silk merchant Francesco Giocondo, who commissioned a portrait of his third wife, Lisa, from the artist. Despite the words of this anonymous contemporary, many researchers still doubt the possibility that the Mona Lisa was written in Florence (1500-1505). The refined technique indicates a later creation of the painting. In addition, at this time, Leonardo was so busy working on the "Battle of Anghiari" that he even refused Princess Isabella d'Este to accept her order. Could a simple merchant then persuade a famous master to paint a portrait of his wife?

It is also interesting that in his description, Vasari admires Leonardo's talent for conveying physical phenomena, and not the similarity between model and painting. It seems that this physical feature of the masterpiece left a deep impression among the visitors of the artist's studio and reached Vasari almost fifty years later.

Who is Mona Lisa? There are many versions. The most plausible of them is the second wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo and the mother of five children. At the time of painting (about 1503-1506), the girl was, according to various sources, from 24 to 30 years old. It is because of her husband's surname that the painting is now known under two names.

According to the second version, the mysterious girl was not at all an angelic innocent beauty. At the time of writing, she was already 40 years old. The duchess was the illegitimate daughter of the ruler of Milan, the legendary hero of the Italian Renaissance, the Duke of Sforza, and became infamous for her promiscuity: from the age of 15, she was married three times and gave birth to 11 children. The Duchess died in 1509, six years after the start of work on the painting. This version is supported by a portrait of a twenty-five-year-old duchess who looks remarkably like Mona Lisa.

You can often hear the version that Leonardo da Vinci did not go far for a model for his masterpiece, but simply painted a self-portrait in women's clothing. This version is difficult to reject, because there is an obvious similarity between the Mona Lisa and the later self-portrait of the master. Moreover, this similarity was confirmed by a computer analysis of the main anthropometric indicators.

The most scandalous version affects the personal life of the master. Some scholars claim that the model for the painting was da Vinci's student and assistant Gian Giacomo, who was by his side for 26 years and may have been his lover. This version is supported by the fact that Leonardo left this painting to him as a legacy when he died in 1519.

However, no matter how much you solve the master's puzzle, there are still more questions than answers. The ambiguity in the name of the painting has caused a lot of speculation regarding its authenticity. There is a version that Contemporaries have repeatedly noted that the painting was not finished by the master. Moreover, Raphael, having visited the artist's studio, made a sketch from the still unfinished painting. The sketch turned out to be a well-known woman, on both sides of which Greek columns were located. In addition, according to contemporaries, the painting was larger and was made to order just for Mona Lisa's husband, Francesco del Giocondo. The author handed over the unfinished painting to the customer, and it was kept in the family archive for many centuries.

However, the Louvre exhibited a completely different canvas. It is smaller in size (only 77 by 53 centimeters) and looks quite finished without columns. So, according to historians, the Louvre painting depicts the mistress of Giuliano Medici - Constanza D'Avalos. It was this picture that the artist brought with him to France in 1516. He kept her in his room in the estate near the city of Amboise until his death. From there, the painting came into the collection of King Francis I in 1517. It is this painting that is called “Mona Lisa”.

Her enigmatic smile is mesmerizing. Some see it as divine beauty, others - secret signs, others - a challenge to norms and society. But everyone agrees on one thing - there is something mysterious and attractive in it.

What is the secret of the Mona Lisa? Versions are countless. Here are the most common and intriguing.


This enigmatic masterpiece has puzzled researchers and art historians for centuries. Now, Italian scientists have added another aspect of intrigue by claiming that da Vinci left a series of very small letters and numbers in the painting. When viewed under a microscope, the letters LV can be seen in Mona Lisa's right eye.

And in the left eye there are also some symbols, but not as noticeable as the others. They resemble the letters CE or the letter B.

On the arch of the bridge, against the background of the picture, there is an inscription either “72”, or “L2” or the letter L, and the number 2. Also in the picture there is the number 149 and the fourth erased number after them.

Today, this painting, 77x53 cm in size, is stored in the Louvre behind thick bulletproof glass. The image, made on a poplar board, is covered with a grid of craquelures. It survived a number of not very successful restorations and darkened noticeably over five centuries. However, the older the picture becomes, the more people it attracts: the Louvre is visited annually by 8-9 million people.

Yes, and Leonardo himself did not want to part with the Mona Lisa, and perhaps this is the first time in history when the author did not give the work to the customer, despite the fact that he took the fee. The first owner of the picture - after the author - King Francis I of France was also delighted with the portrait. He bought it from da Vinci for incredible money at that time - 4000 gold coins and placed it in Fontainebleau.

Napoleon was also fascinated by Madame Lisa (as he called Gioconda) and transferred her to his chambers in the Tuileries Palace. And the Italian Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911 stole a masterpiece from the Louvre, took it to his homeland and hid with her for two whole years until he was detained while trying to transfer the painting to the director of the Uffizi Gallery ... In a word, at all times the portrait of a Florentine lady attracted, hypnotized, delighted. ..

What is the secret of her attraction?


Version #1: classic

The first mention of the Mona Lisa we find in the author of the famous "Biographies" Giorgio Vasari. From his work, we learn that Leonardo undertook "to complete for Francesco del Giocondo a portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife, and after working on it for four years, left it incomplete."

The writer admired the skill of the artist, his ability to show "the smallest details that the subtlety of painting can convey", and most importantly, the smile, which "is so pleasant that it seems as if you are contemplating a divine rather than a human being." The art historian explains the secret of her charm by the fact that “while painting the portrait, he (Leonardo) kept people who played the lyre or sang, and there were always jesters who supported her cheerfulness and removed the melancholy that painting usually imparts to the portraits performed.” There is no doubt: Leonardo is an unsurpassed master, and the crown of his skill is this divine portrait. In the image of his heroine there is a duality inherent in life itself: the modesty of the pose is combined with a bold smile, which becomes a kind of challenge to society, canons, art ...

But is it really the wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, whose surname became the second name of this mysterious lady? Is the story about the musicians who created the right mood for our heroine true? Skeptics dispute all this, referring to the fact that Vasari was an 8-year-old boy when Leonardo died. He could not personally know the artist or his model, so he presented only information given by the anonymous author of the first biography of Leonardo. Meanwhile, the writer and in other biographies there are controversial places. Take, for example, the story of Michelangelo's broken nose. Vasari writes that Pietro Torrigiani hit a classmate because of his talent, and Benvenuto Cellini explains the injury with his arrogance and arrogance: copying the frescoes of Masaccio, in the lesson he ridiculed every image, for which he got in the nose from Torrigiani. In favor of Cellini's version is the complex character of Buonarroti, about whom there were legends.

Version #2: Chinese mother

Lisa del Giocondo (nee Gherardini) really existed. Italian archaeologists even claim to have found her tomb in the monastery of Saint Ursula in Florence. But is she in the picture? A number of researchers claim that Leonardo painted the portrait from several models, because when he refused to give the painting to the Giocondo cloth merchant, it remained unfinished. The master improved his work all his life, adding features and other models - thus he received a collective portrait of the ideal woman of his era.

The Italian scientist Angelo Paratico went further. He is sure that Mona Lisa is Leonardo's mother, who was actually ... Chinese. The researcher spent 20 years in the East, studying the connection of local traditions with the Italian Renaissance, and found documents showing that Leonardo's father, the notary Piero, had a wealthy client, and that he had a slave that he brought from China. Her name was Katerina - she became the mother of a Renaissance genius. It is precisely by the fact that Eastern blood flowed in Leonardo's veins that the researcher explains the famous "Leonardo's handwriting" - the ability of the master to write from right to left (this is how entries in his diaries were made). The researcher also saw oriental features in the face of the model, and in the landscape behind her. Paratico proposes to exhume Leonardo's remains and analyze his DNA to confirm his theory.

The official version says that Leonardo was the son of the notary Piero and the "local peasant woman" Katerina. He could not marry a rootless woman, but married a girl from a noble family with a dowry, but she turned out to be barren. Katerina raised the child for the first few years of his life, and then the father took his son to his house. Almost nothing is known about Leonardo's mother. But, indeed, there is an opinion that the artist, separated from his mother in early childhood, tried all his life to recreate the image and smile of his mother in his paintings. This assumption was made by Sigmund Freud in the book “Childhood Memories. Leonardo da Vinci" and it has won many supporters among art historians.

Version #3: Mona Lisa is a man

Viewers often note that in the image of Mona Lisa, despite all the tenderness and modesty, there is some kind of masculinity, and the face of the young model, almost devoid of eyebrows and eyelashes, seems boyish. The famous researcher of the Mona Lisa Silvano Vincenti believes that this is no accident. He is sure that Leonardo posed ... a young man in a woman's dress. And this is none other than Salai, a student of da Vinci, painted by him in the paintings “John the Baptist” and “Angel in the Flesh”, where the young man is endowed with the same smile as Mona Lisa. The art historian, however, made such a conclusion not only because of the external similarity of the models, but after studying high-resolution photographs, which made it possible to discern Vincenti in the eyes of the model L and S - the first letters of the names of the author of the picture and the young man depicted on it, according to the expert .


"John the Baptist" Leonardo Da Vinci (Louvre)

This version is also supported by a special relationship - Vasari hinted at them - a model and an artist, which, perhaps, connected Leonardo and Salai. Da Vinci was unmarried and had no children. At the same time, there is a denunciation document where an anonymous person accuses the artist of sodomy over a certain 17-year-old boy, Jacopo Saltarelli.

Leonardo had several students, with some of them he was more than close, according to a number of researchers. Freud also talks about homosexuality of Leonardo, who supports this version with a psychiatric analysis of the biography and the diary of the genius of the Renaissance. Da Vinci's notes about Salai are also seen as an argument in favor. There is even a version that da Vinci left a portrait of Salai (since the painting is mentioned in the will of the master’s student), and from him the painting came to Francis I.

By the way, the same Silvano Vincenti put forward another assumption: as if the picture depicts a certain woman from the retinue of Ludovik Sforza, at whose court in Milan Leonardo worked as an architect and engineer in 1482-1499. This version appeared after Vincenti saw the numbers 149 on the back of the canvas. According to the researcher, this is the date the painting was painted, only the last number was erased. Traditionally, it is believed that the master began to paint Gioconda in 1503.

However, there are many other candidates for the title of Mona Lisa who compete with Salai: these are Isabella Gualandi, Ginevra Benci, Constanta d'Avalos, the whore Caterina Sforza, a certain secret mistress of Lorenzo Medici and even Leonardo's nurse.


Version number 4: Gioconda is Leonardo

Another unexpected theory hinted at by Freud was confirmed in the studies of the American Lillian Schwartz. Mona Lisa is a self-portrait, Lilian is sure. An artist and graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York in the 1980s compared the famous "Turin Self-Portrait" of a now quite elderly artist and a portrait of Mona Lisa and found that the proportions of the faces (head shape, distance between the eyes, forehead height) are the same.

And in 2009, Lillian, along with amateur historian Lynn Picknett, gave the public another incredible sensation: she claims that the Shroud of Turin is nothing more than a print of Leonardo's face, made using silver sulfate on the principle of a camera obscura.

However, not many supported Lillian in her research - these theories are not among the most popular, in contrast to the following assumption.

Version #5: Down Syndrome Masterpiece

Gioconda suffered from Down's disease - this was the conclusion in the 1970s by the English photographer Leo Vala after he came up with a method that allows you to "turn" the Mona Lisa in profile.

At the same time, the Danish doctor Finn Becker-Christianson diagnosed Gioconda with his diagnosis: congenital facial paralysis. An asymmetrical smile, in his opinion, speaks of mental disorders up to idiocy.

In 1991, the French sculptor Alain Roche decided to embody the Mona Lisa in marble, but nothing came of it. It turned out that from a physiological point of view, everything in the model is wrong: the face, the arms, and the shoulders. Then the sculptor turned to the physiologist, Professor Henri Greppo, who attracted Jean-Jacques Conte, a specialist in hand microsurgery. Together they came to the conclusion that the right hand of the mysterious woman does not rest on the left, because it is possibly shorter and could be prone to convulsions. Conclusion: the right half of the model's body is paralyzed, which means that the mysterious smile is also just a cramp.

The gynecologist Julio Cruz and Ermida collected a complete "medical record" of Gioconda in his book "A look at Gioconda through the eyes of a doctor." The result is such a terrible picture that it is not clear how this woman lived at all. According to various researchers, she suffered from alopecia (hair loss), high blood cholesterol, exposure of the neck of her teeth, loosening and falling out, and even alcoholism. She had Parkinson's disease, lipoma (a benign fatty tumor on her right arm), strabismus, cataracts and iris heterochromia (different eye color) and asthma.

However, who said that Leonardo was anatomically accurate - what if the secret of genius is precisely in this disproportion?

Version number 6: a child under the heart

There is another polar "medical" version - pregnancy. American gynecologist Kenneth D. Keel is sure that Mona Lisa crossed her arms over her stomach reflexively trying to protect her unborn baby. The probability is high, because Lisa Gherardini had five children (the first-born, by the way, was named Piero). A hint of the legitimacy of this version can be found in the title of the portrait: Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo (Italian) - "Portrait of Mrs. Lisa Giocondo." Monna is an abbreviation for ma donna - Madonna, mother of God (although it also means "my lady", lady). Art critics often explain the genius of the painting just by the fact that it depicts an earthly woman in the image of the Mother of God.

Version #7: Iconographic

However, the theory that the Mona Lisa is an icon where an earthly woman took the place of the Mother of God is popular in itself. This is the genius of the work and therefore it has become a symbol of the beginning of a new era in art. Previously, art served the church, power and nobility. Leonardo proves that the artist is above all this, that the most valuable thing is the creative idea of ​​the master. And the great idea is to show the duality of the world, and the image of Mona Lisa, which combines divine and earthly beauty, serves as a means for this.

Version #8: Leonardo is the creator of 3D

This combination was achieved using a special technique invented by Leonardo - sfumato (from Italian - "disappearing like smoke"). It was this pictorial technique, when paints are applied layer by layer, that allowed Leonardo to create an aerial perspective in the picture. The artist applied countless layers of these layers, and each was almost transparent. Thanks to this technique, light is reflected and scattered across the canvas in different ways - depending on the angle of view and the angle of incidence of light. Therefore, the facial expression of the model is constantly changing.

Mona Lisa is the first 3D painting in history, the researchers conclude. Another technical breakthrough of a genius who foresaw and tried to bring to life many inventions embodied centuries later (aircraft, tank, diving suit, etc.). This is also evidenced by the version of the portrait kept in the Madrid Prado Museum, written either by da Vinci himself or by his student. It depicts the same model - only the angle is shifted by 69 cm. Thus, experts believe, they were looking for the right point in the image, which will give the 3D effect.

Version number 9: secret signs

Secret signs are a favorite topic of Mona Lisa researchers. Leonardo is not just an artist, he is an engineer, inventor, scientist, writer, and he probably encoded some universal secrets in his best pictorial creation. The most daring and incredible version was made in the book, and then in the movie The Da Vinci Code. This is, of course, a fictional novel. However, researchers are constantly building no less fantastic assumptions based on certain symbols found in the picture.

Many assumptions are connected with the fact that another one is hidden under the image of Mona Lisa. For example, the figure of an angel, or a feather in the hands of a model. There is also a curious version of Valery Chudinov, who discovered in the Mona Lisa the words Yara Mara - the name of the Russian pagan goddess.

Version #10: cropped landscape

Many versions are connected with the landscape, against which the Mona Lisa is depicted. Researcher Igor Ladov discovered a cyclicity in it: it seems that it is worth drawing several lines to connect the edges of the landscape. Just a couple of centimeters is not enough for everything to fit together. But after all, on the version of the painting from the Prado Museum there are columns that, apparently, were in the original. Nobody knows who cut the picture. If they are returned, the image becomes a cyclical landscape, which symbolizes that human life (in the global sense) is enchanted just like everything else in nature...

It seems that there are as many versions of the mystery of the Mona Lisa as there are people trying to explore the masterpiece. There was a place for everything: from admiration for unearthly beauty to the recognition of complete pathology. Everyone finds something of their own in Gioconda, and perhaps this is where the multidimensionality and semantic layering of the canvas manifested itself, which gives everyone the opportunity to turn on their imagination. Meanwhile, the secret of Mona Lisa remains the property of this mysterious lady, with a slight smile on her lips...


Today, experts say that the elusive half-smile of the Gioconda is a deliberately created effect that Leonardo da Vinci used more than once. This version arose after the recent discovery of an early work, La Bella Principessa (The Beautiful Princess), in which the artist uses a similar optical illusion.

The mystery of Mona Lisa's smile is that it is noticeable only when the viewer looks above the woman's mouth in the portrait, but once you look at the smile itself, it disappears. Scientists explain this with an optical illusion, which is created by a complex combination of colors and shades. This is facilitated by the features of the peripheral vision of a person.

Da Vinci created the effect of an elusive smile through the use of the so-called “sfumato” (“obscure”, “indefinite”) technique - blurry outlines and specially applied shadows around the lips and eyes visually change depending on the angle from which a person looks at the picture. So the smile comes and goes.

For a long time, scientists argued about whether this effect was created consciously and intentionally. Discovered in 2009, the portrait of La Bella Principessa proves that da Vinci practiced this technique long before the creation of the Mona Lisa. On the face of the girl - the same barely noticeable half-smile, like Mona Lisa.


Comparing the two paintings, scientists concluded that da Vinci also applied the effect of peripheral vision there: the shape of the lips visually changes depending on the angle of view. If you look directly at the lips - the smile is not noticeable, but if you look higher - the corners of the mouth seem to rise up, and the smile appears again.

Professor of psychology and expert in visual perception Alessandro Soranzo (Great Britain) writes: "A smile disappears as soon as the viewer tries to catch it." Under his leadership, scientists conducted a series of experiments.

To demonstrate the optical illusion in action, volunteers were asked to look at da Vinci's canvases from different distances and, for comparison, at the painting by his contemporary Pollaiolo "Portrait of a Girl". The smile was only noticeable in da Vinci paintings, depending on a certain angle of view. When blurring images, the same effect was observed. Professor Soranzo has no doubt that this is an optical illusion deliberately created by da Vinci, and he developed this technique over several years.

sources

Jean Franck, a French researcher and consultant at the Leonardo da Vinci Research Center in Los Angeles, recently announced that he was able to repeat the unique technique of the great master, thanks to which the Gioconda seems to be alive.

"In terms of technique, the Mona Lisa has always been considered something inexplicable. Now I think I have an answer to this question," says Frank.

Reference: sfumato technique is a painting technique invented by Leonardo da Vinci. It consists in the fact that objects in the paintings should not have clear boundaries. Everything should be like in life: blurry, penetrate one into another, breathe. Da Vinci practiced this technique by looking at damp stains on walls, ash, clouds, or dirt. He deliberately smoked the room where he worked in order to look for images in clubs.

According to Jean Franck, the main difficulty of this technique lies in the smallest strokes (about a quarter of a millimeter) that are not accessible for recognition either under a microscope or using X-rays. Thus, it took several hundred sessions to paint a da Vinci painting. The image of the Mona Lisa consists of about 30 layers of liquid, almost transparent oil paint. For such jewelry work, da Vinci, apparently, had to use a magnifying glass at the same time as a brush.
According to the researcher, he managed to reach only the level of the early works of the master. However, even now his research has been honored to be next to the canvases of the great Leonardo da Vinci. The Uffizi Museum in Florence placed next to the masterpieces of the master 6 tables of Frank, which describe in stages how da Vinci painted the eye of Mona Lisa, and two paintings by Leonardo recreated by him.

It is known that the composition of "Mona Lisa" is built on "golden triangles". These triangles, in turn, are pieces of a regular stellated pentagon. But the researchers do not see any secret meanings in this, they are rather inclined to explain the expressiveness of the Mona Lisa with the technique of spatial perspective.

Da Vinci was one of the first to use this technique, he made the background of the picture unclear, slightly blurred, thereby increasing the emphasis on the outlines of the foreground.

Riddles of the Mona Lisa

Unique techniques allowed da Vinci to create such a lively portrait of a woman that people, looking at him, perceive her feelings differently. Is she sad or smiling? Scientists have solved this riddle. The Urbana-Champaign computer program, created by scientists from the Netherlands and the USA, made it possible to calculate that Mona Lisa's smile is 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% full of fear and 2% angry. The program analyzed the main features of the face, the curve of the lips and wrinkles around the eyes, and then ranked the face in six main groups of emotions.

Painting Mona Lisa (Gioconda) of the Louvre Museum

The Mona Lisa (Gioconda) painting of the Louvre Museum is without a doubt a truly beautiful and priceless work of art, but the reasons for its incredible popularity must be explained.

It seems that the worldwide fame of this canvas is due not to its artistic merit, but to the disputes and secrets that accompanied the picture, as well as the special impact on males.

She liked it so much at the time. Napoleon Bonaparte that he moved it from the Louvre to the Tuileries Palace and hung it in his bedroom.

Mona Lisa is a simplified version of the spelling of the name “Mona Lisa”, which in turn is an abbreviation for the word madonna (“my lady”) - this is how the famous 16th-century historian Giorgio Vasari spoke with reverence about Lisa Gherardini depicted in the portrait in his book “Life eminent Italian architects, sculptors and painters.

This woman was married to a certain Francesco del Gioconda, it was thanks to this factor that the Italians, and after them the French, began to call the painting "Gioconda". However, there is no complete certainty that it is the Mona Lisa Gioconda that is depicted on the canvas. In the portrait that Vasari describes (although he himself has never seen him), the woman has “thicker eyebrows in some places” (Mona Lisa does not have them at all) and “her mouth is slightly open” (Mona Lisa smiles, but her mouth is closed) .

Another testimony comes from the secretary of Cardinal Louis of Aragon, the last person who met Leonardo da Vinci in France, where the artist spent his last years at the court of the monarch Francis I in Amboise.

It appears that Leonardo showed the Cardinal several paintings he had brought with him from Italy, including "a portrait of a Florentine woman painted from life." That's all the information that can be used to identify the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) painting.

It represents a fairly large range of possibilities for all sorts of alternative versions, amateur speculation and challenging the authorship of possible copies of the painting and other works by Leonardo da Vinci.

We can only say with certainty that the "Mona Lisa" was found in the bathroom Palace of Fontainebleau, which King Henry IV planned to restore in the 1590s. For a long time, no one paid attention to the picture: neither the public nor art connoisseurs, until finally, after a 70-year stay in the Louvre in Paris, the famous writer and poet Theophile Gautier, who at that time was compiling a guide to the Louvre, saw her.

Gauthier highly appreciated the picture and called it “delightful Gioconda”: ​​“A sensual smile always plays on the lips of this woman, she seems to be mocking her many admirers. Her serene face expresses confidence that she will always be amazing and beautiful.

A few years later, the indelible impression that the Gioconda painting made on Gauthier became even deeper, and he was able to finally formulate the peculiarity of this masterpiece: “her sinuous, serpentine mouth, the corners of which are raised up in the lilac penumbra, laughs at you with such grace, tenderness and the superiority that, looking at her, we are shy, like schoolchildren in the presence of a noble lady.

In the UK, the picture became known in 1869 thanks to the prose writer Walter Pater. He wrote: This feeling, which in such a strange way arises near the water, expresses what men have been striving for for millennia ...

This woman is older than the rocks she is near; like a vampire, she had already died many times and learned the secrets of the underworld, she plunged into the abyss of the sea and kept the memory of it. Together with Eastern merchants, she went for the most amazing fabrics, she was Leda, the mother of Elena the Beautiful, and St. Anna, the mother of Mary, and all this happened to her, but was preserved only as the sound of a lyre or flute and was reflected in the exquisite oval of the face, in the outlines eyelids and hand position.

When on August 21, 1911 the Mona Lisa painting was stolen by an Italian guard, and soon found in December 1913, the "prima donna" Renaissance was given a separate place in the Louvre Museum.

Criticism and shortcomings of the canvas Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)

A little later, in 1919, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp bought a cheap postcard with a reproduction of the canvas, drew a goatee on it and signed the letters "L.H.O.O.Q" on the bottom, which in French read almost like elle a chaud au cul, meaning something like "she's hot girl." Since then, the glory of Leonardo da Vinci's painting has lived its own life, despite numerous protests from outraged art critics.

For example, Bernard Berenson at one time expressed the following opinion: “... (she) is in an unpleasant way different from all the women I have ever known or dreamed of, a foreigner who is difficult to understand, cunning, wary, self-confident, filled with a sense of hostile superiority, with a smile of anticipation of pleasure.

Roberto Longhi said that he prefers women from Renoir's paintings to this "nondescript nervous woman". However, despite all this, many more photographers gather near the portrait of Mona Lisa every day than near the most famous film stars at the annual Oscar ceremonies. Also, attention to the Mona Lisa increased significantly after she appeared as an episodic character in Dan Brown's sensational book The Da Vinci Code.

However, it should be noted that the name "Mona Lisa" is not a coded version of "Amon L" Iza, a combination of the names of the ancient Egyptian gods of fertility Amon and Isis. In other words, Mona Lisa (Gioconda) cannot be interpreted as an expression of a bisexual "female deity". after all, the name Mona Lisa is just the English name for a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, a name that didn't exist at the time the painting was made.

Perhaps there is some truth in the fact that the Mona Lisa is just a self-portrait of Leonardo in a woman's dress. Experts know that the painter really liked to paint bisexual figures, which is why some art critics saw a similarity between the proportions of the face in the picture and the sketch of Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait.

These days, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci does not make any impression on many visitors at all. the Louvre Museum, as well as Roberto Longhi or the heroine of Dan Brown's book, Sophie Neve, who generally believed that this picture was "too small" and "dark".

The canvas of Leonardo really has very small dimensions, namely 53 by 76 centimeters, and in general it looks quite dark. In truth, it is simply dirty, because while on most reproductions the original colors of the painting are "corrected", not a single restorer has yet dared to offer to "correct" the original.

However, sooner or later, the Louvre Museum in Paris will still have to deal with the restoration of the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda), because, according to the restorers, the thin base of poplar wood on which it is painted will deform over time and will not last long.

In the meantime, the glass frame of the painting, designed by a Milanese company, helps to preserve the canvas. If you manage to get through the crowds of visitors, as well as through the plaque of glory, the dirt of centuries and your own wrong expectations of the picture, you will end up with a beautiful and unique creation of painting.

Ritratto di Monna Lisa del Giocondo- "Portrait of Mrs. Lisa Giocondo." In Italian ma donna means "my mistress" (cf. English. milady and fr. "madam"), in an abbreviated version, this expression was transformed into monna or mona. The second part of the model's name, which is considered the name of her husband - del Giocondo, in Italian also has a direct meaning and is translated as “joyful, playing” and, accordingly la Gioconda- “cheerful, playing” (cf. with English joking).

The name "La Joconda" was first mentioned in 1525 in the list of the legacy of the artist Salai, heir and student of da Vinci, who left the painting to his sisters in Milan. The inscription describes it as a portrait of a lady named La Gioconda.

History of the painting

Even the first Italian biographers of Leonardo da Vinci wrote about the place that this painting occupied in the artist's work. Leonardo did not shy away from working on the Mona Lisa - as was the case with many other orders, but, on the contrary, gave herself to her with some kind of passion. All the time that remained with him from work on the Battle of Anghiari was devoted to her. He spent considerable time on it and, leaving Italy in adulthood, he took with him to France, among some other selected paintings. Da Vinci had a special attachment to this portrait, and also thought a lot during the process of its creation, in the "Treatise on Painting" and in those notes on painting techniques that were not included in it, one can find many indications that undoubtedly refer to the "Gioconda » .

Vasari's message

Most likely, Vasari simply added a story about jesters for the entertainment of readers. Vasari's text also contains an accurate description of the eyebrows missing from the painting. This inaccuracy could arise only if the author described the picture from memory or from the stories of others. Aleksey Dzhivelegov writes that Vasari’s indication that “work on the portrait lasted four years is clearly exaggerated: Leonardo did not stay in Florence for so long after returning from Caesar Borgia, and if he had begun to paint a portrait before leaving for Caesar, Vasari would probably , I would say that he wrote it for five years. The scientist also writes about the erroneous indication of the incompleteness of the portrait - “the portrait, undoubtedly, was painted for a long time and was brought to the end, no matter what Vasari said, who in his biography of Leonardo stylized him as an artist who, in principle, could not finish any major work. And not only was it finished, but it is one of the most carefully finished things of Leonardo.

An interesting fact is that in his description, Vasari admires Leonardo's talent to convey physical phenomena, and not the similarity between model and painting. It seems that this "physical" feature of the masterpiece left a deep impression on the visitors of the artist's studio and reached Vasari almost fifty years later.

The painting was well known among art lovers, although Leonardo left Italy for France in 1516, taking the painting with him. According to Italian sources, it has since been in the collection of the French King Francis I, but it remains unclear when and how he acquired it and why Leonardo did not return it to the customer.

Other

Perhaps the artist really did not finish the painting in Florence, but took it with him when he left in 1516 and applied the last stroke in the absence of witnesses who could tell Vasari about this. If so, he completed it shortly before his death in 1519. (In France, he lived in Clos-Luce near the royal castle of Amboise).

Although information about the identity of the woman is given by Vasari, there has still been uncertainty about her for a long time and many versions have been expressed:

However, the version about the correspondence of the generally accepted name of the painting to the personality of the model in 2005 is considered to have found final confirmation. Scientists from the University of Heidelberg studied the notes on the margins of a tome owned by a Florentine official, a personal acquaintance of the artist Agostino Vespucci. In notes on the margins of the book, he compares Leonardo with the famous ancient Greek painter Apelles and notes that "da Vinci is currently working on three paintings, one of which is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini". Thus, Mona Lisa really turned out to be the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo - Lisa Gherardini. The painting, as scientists prove in this case, was commissioned by Leonardo for the young family's new home and to commemorate the birth of their second son, named Andrea.

  • The lower edge of the painting cuts off the second half of her body, so the portrait is almost half-length. The armchair in which the model sits stands on a balcony or on a loggia, the parapet line of which is visible behind her elbows. It is believed that earlier the picture could have been wider and accommodated two side columns of the loggia, from which at the moment there are two bases of columns, whose fragments are visible along the edges of the parapet.

    The loggia overlooks a desolate wilderness of meandering streams and a lake surrounded by snowy mountains that extends to a high skyline behind the figure. “Mona Lisa is represented sitting in an armchair against the backdrop of a landscape, and the very comparison of her figure, which is very close to the viewer, with a landscape visible from afar, like a huge mountain, gives the image extraordinary grandeur. The same impression is facilitated by the contrast of the increased plastic tangibility of the figure and its smooth, generalized silhouette with a landscape that goes into a foggy distance, like a vision, with bizarre rocks and water channels winding among them.

    Composition

    Boris Vipper writes that, despite the traces of the Quattrocento, "with her clothes with a small cutout on the chest and with sleeves in free folds, just like with a straight posture, a slight turn of the body and a gentle gesture of the hands, the Mona Lisa belongs entirely to the era of classical style" . Mikhail Alpatov points out that “La Gioconda is perfectly inscribed in a strictly proportional rectangle, its half-figure forms something whole, folded hands complete its image. Now, of course, there could be no question of the whimsical curls of the early Annunciation. However, no matter how softened all the contours, the wavy lock of the Gioconda's hair is in tune with the transparent veil, and the hanging fabric thrown over the shoulder finds an echo in the smooth windings of the distant road. In all this, Leonardo shows his ability to create according to the laws of rhythm and harmony.

    Current state

    "Mona Lisa" has become very dark, which is considered the result of its author's tendency to experiment with paints, because of which the fresco " The Last Supper"In general, almost died. The artist's contemporaries, however, managed to express their enthusiasm not only about the composition, drawing and play of chiaroscuro - but also about the color of the work. It is assumed, for example, that initially the sleeves of her dress could be red - as can be seen from a copy of the painting from the Prado.

    The current state of the painting is quite bad, which is why the Louvre staff announced that they would no longer give it to exhibitions: “Cracks have formed on the painting, and one of them stops a few millimeters above Mona Lisa’s head.”

    Analysis

    Technique

    As Dzhivelegov notes, by the time of the creation of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s skill “has already entered a phase of such maturity, when all formal tasks of a compositional and other nature have been set and solved, when Leonardo began to think that only the last, most difficult tasks of artistic technique deserve to be to take care of them. And when he found in the face of Mona Lisa a model that satisfied his needs, he tried to solve some of the highest and most difficult tasks of painting technique that he had not yet solved. He wanted, with the help of techniques already developed and tested by him before, especially with the help of his famous sfumato, which gave extraordinary effects before, to do more than he did before: to create a living face of a living person and reproduce the features and expression of this face in such a way that they reveal to the end the inner world of a person. Boris Whipper asks the question, “by what means is this spirituality achieved, this undying spark of consciousness in the image of Mona Lisa, then two main means should be named. One is the marvelous Leonard's sfumato. No wonder Leonardo liked to say that "modeling is the soul of painting." It is sfumato that creates the Gioconda's wet look, her smile, light as the wind, and the incomparable caressing softness of the touch of her hands. Sfumato is a subtle haze that envelops the face and figure, softening contours and shadows. Leonardo recommended for this purpose to place between the source of light and the bodies, as he puts it, "a kind of fog."

    Alpatov adds that “in a softly melting haze enveloping the face and figure, Leonardo managed to make one feel the boundless variability of human facial expressions. Although the eyes of the Gioconda look attentively and calmly at the viewer, due to the shading of her eye sockets, one might think that they are slightly frowning; her lips are compressed, but barely perceptible shadows are outlined near their corners, which make you believe that every minute they will open, smile, speak. The very contrast between her gaze and the half-smile on her lips gives an idea of ​​the inconsistency of her experiences. (...) Leonardo worked on it for several years, ensuring that not a single sharp stroke, not a single angular contour remained in the picture; and although the edges of objects in it are clearly perceptible, they all dissolve in the subtlest transitions from penumbra to half-light.

    Scenery

    Art critics emphasize the organic nature with which the artist combined the portrait characteristics of a person with a landscape full of special mood, and how much this increased the dignity of the portrait.

    Vipper considers the landscape the second means that creates the spirituality of the picture: “The second means is the relationship between the figure and the background. The fantastic, rocky, as if seen through the sea water landscape in the portrait of Mona Lisa has some other reality than her figure itself. The Mona Lisa has the reality of life, the landscape has the reality of a dream. Thanks to this contrast, Mona Lisa seems so incredibly close and tangible, and we perceive the landscape as the radiation of her own dream.

    Renaissance art researcher Viktor Grashchenkov writes that Leonardo, also thanks to the landscape, managed to create not a portrait of a specific person, but a universal image: “In this mysterious picture, he created something more than a portrait image of the unknown Florentine Mona Lisa, the third wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The appearance and mental structure of a particular person are conveyed to them with unprecedented syntheticity. This impersonal psychologism corresponds to the cosmic abstraction of the landscape, almost completely devoid of any signs of human presence. In smoky chiaroscuro, not only all the outlines of the figure and landscape and all color tones are softened. In the subtlest transitions from light to shadow, almost imperceptible to the eye, in the vibration of Leonard's “sfumato”, all definiteness of individuality and its psychological state is softened to the limit, melts and is ready to disappear. (...) "La Gioconda" is not a portrait. This is a visible symbol of the very life of man and nature, united into one whole and presented abstractly from their individual concrete form. But behind the barely noticeable movement, which, like light ripples, runs along the motionless surface of this harmonious world, one can guess all the richness of the possibilities of physical and spiritual existence.

    "Mona Lisa" is sustained in golden brown and reddish tones of the foreground and emerald green tones of the distance. “Transparent, like glass, paints form an alloy, as if created not by a human hand, but by that inner force of matter, which from a solution gives rise to crystals perfect in shape.” Like many of Leonardo's works, this work has darkened with time, and its color ratios have changed somewhat, however, even now, thoughtful comparisons in the tones of carnation and clothes and their general contrast with bluish-green are clearly perceived. "underwater" tone of the landscape .

    Gioconda's smile

    The art critic Rotenberg believes that “there are few portraits in the entire world art that are equal to the Mona Lisa in terms of the power of expressing the human personality, embodied in the unity of character and intellect. It is the extraordinary intellectual intensity of Leonard's portrait that distinguishes it from the portrait images of the Quattrocento. This feature of his is perceived all the more acutely because it refers to a female portrait, in which the character of the model was previously revealed in a completely different, predominantly lyrical figurative tone. The feeling of strength emanating from the "Mona Lisa" is an organic combination of inner composure and a sense of personal freedom, the spiritual harmony of a person based on his consciousness of his own significance. And her smile itself does not at all express superiority or disdain; it is perceived as the result of calm self-confidence and complete self-control.

    Boris Whipper points out that the above-mentioned absence of eyebrows and a shaved forehead, perhaps unwittingly enhances the strange mystery in her expression. Further, he writes about the power of the picture’s influence: “If we ask ourselves what is the great attractive power of the Mona Lisa, its truly incomparable hypnotic effect, then there can be only one answer - in its spirituality. The most ingenious and most opposite interpretations were put into the smile of the Mona Lisa. They wanted to read pride and tenderness, sensuality and coquetry, cruelty and modesty in it. The mistake was, firstly, that they were looking for individual, subjective spiritual properties at all costs in the image of Mona Lisa, while there is no doubt that Leonardo achieved precisely typical spirituality. Secondly, and this is perhaps even more important, they tried to attribute emotional content to Mona Lisa's spirituality, while in fact she has intellectual roots. The miracle of the Mona Lisa lies precisely in the fact that she thinks; that, being in front of a yellowed, cracked board, we irresistibly feel the presence of a being endowed with reason, a being with whom one can speak and from whom one can expect an answer.

    Lazarev analyzed it as an art scientist: “This smile is not so much an individual feature of Mona Lisa, but a typical formula of psychological revival, a formula that runs like a red thread through all the youthful images of Leonardo, a formula that later turned, in the hands of his students and followers, into traditional stamp. Like the proportions of Leonard's figures, it is built on the finest mathematical measurements, on strict consideration of the expressive values ​​of individual parts of the face. And for all that, this smile is absolutely natural, and this is precisely the strength of its charm. It takes everything hard, tense, frozen from the face, it turns it into a mirror of vague, indefinite emotional experiences, in its elusive lightness it can only be compared with a swell running through the water.

    Her analysis attracted the attention of not only art historians, but also psychologists. Sigmund Freud writes: “Whoever presents the paintings of Leonardo, the memory of a strange, captivating and mysterious smile that lurks on the lips of his female images emerges in him. The smile, frozen on elongated, quivering lips, became characteristic of him and is most often called "Leonard's". In the peculiarly beautiful appearance of the Florentine Mona Lisa del Gioconda, she most of all captures and confuses the viewer. This smile demanded one interpretation, but found the most diverse, of which none satisfies. (…) The conjecture that two different elements were combined in Mona Lisa's smile was born by many critics. Therefore, in the expression of the face of the beautiful Florentine, they saw the most perfect image of the antagonism that governs the love life of a woman, restraint and seduction, sacrificial tenderness and recklessly demanding sensuality, absorbing a man as something extraneous. (...) Leonardo in the face of Mona Lisa managed to reproduce the double meaning of her smile, the promise of boundless tenderness and an ominous threat.

    The demonic charm of this smile especially fascinates the viewer. Hundreds of poets and writers wrote about this woman, who seems to be seductively smiling, then frozen, coldly and soullessly looking into space, and no one guessed her smile, no one interpreted her thoughts. Everything, even the landscape, is mysterious, like a dream, tremulous, like a pre-storm haze of sensuality (Muter).

    Place in the development of the genre

    "Mona Lisa" is considered one of the best works in the portrait genre, which influenced the works of the High Renaissance and indirectly through them - on the entire subsequent development of the portrait genre, which was "should always return to the Mona Lisa as an unattainable, but obligatory model" .

    Art historians note that the Mona Lisa portrait was a decisive step in the development of Renaissance portrait art. Rotenberg writes: “although the Quattrocento painters left a number of significant works of this genre, their achievements in portraiture were, so to speak, disproportionate to the achievements in the main pictorial genres - in compositions on religious and mythological themes. The inequality of the portrait genre was already evident in the very "iconography" of portrait images. Actually, the portrait works of the 15th century, with all their indisputable physiognomic similarity and the feeling of inner strength they radiated, were still distinguished by their external and internal constraint. All that richness of human feelings and experiences that characterizes the biblical and mythological images of painters of the 15th century was usually not the property of their portrait works. Echoes of this can be seen in earlier portraits of Leonardo himself, created by him in the first years of his stay in Milan. (...) In comparison with them, the portrait of Mona Lisa is perceived as the result of a gigantic qualitative shift. For the first time, the portrait image in its significance has become on a par with the most vivid images of other pictorial genres.

    In his pioneering work, Leonardo transferred the main center of gravity to the face of the portrait. At the same time, he used his hands as a powerful means of psychological characterization. Having made the portrait generational in format, the artist was able to demonstrate a wider range of pictorial techniques. And the most important thing in the figurative structure of the portrait is the subordination of all particulars to the guiding idea. “The head and hands are the undoubted center of the picture, to which the rest of its elements are sacrificed. The fairy-tale landscape, as it were, shines through the sea waters, it seems so distant and intangible. Its main purpose is not to draw the viewer's attention away from the face. And the same role is called upon to fulfill the robe, which breaks up into the smallest folds. Leonardo consciously avoids heavy draperies that could obscure the expressiveness of the hands and face. Thus, he makes the latter perform with special force, the more, the more modest and neutral the landscape and attire, assimilated to a quiet, barely noticeable accompaniment.

    Leonardo's students and followers created numerous replicas of the Mona Lisa. Some of them (from the Vernon collection, USA; from the Walter collection, Baltimore, USA; and for some time the Isleworth Mona Lisa, Switzerland) are considered authentic by their owners, and the painting in the Louvre is a copy. There is also an iconography of the “Nude Mona Lisa”, represented by several options (“Beautiful Gabrielle”, “Monna Vanna”, the Hermitage “Donna Nuda”), apparently made by the artist’s own students. A large number of them gave rise to an unprovable version that there was a version of the nude Mona Lisa, written by the master himself.

    • After the Mona Lisa gained incredible popularity due to its theft in 1911 (see section below), artists took notice of it, making it an object of experimentation and giving an additional impetus to its popularity. “Malevich and Duchamp opposed their anti-art of experiment to traditional art with all its “bourgeois” values. The public was offended to the core, and the Mona Lisa became even more famous.

      • Kazimir Malevich in 1914 made a collage "Composition with Mona Lisa", where he crossed out the image of her reproduction twice and wrote "Partial Eclipse" at the top.
      • The Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in 1919 created the L.H.O.O.Q. , which was a reproduction of the famous mustache painting. The name hid the smut: if you quickly say “L.H.O.O.Q.”, then in French you get the phrase "Elle a chaud au cul"(“she has a hot ass”, that is, “the girl is very aroused”).
      • Fernand Léger in 1930 painted Mona Lisa with the keys.
      • Rene Magritte in 1960 created the painting "La Gioconda", where there is no Mona Lisa, but there is a window.
      • Salvador Dali in 1964 painted "Self-portrait" as Mona Lisa.

      The Mona Lisa's world exhibition tour in the 1960s contributed to the globalization of its fame (see below). This was reflected in art: “American avant-garde artists did not overthrow the Mona Lisa from the pedestal, as their European counterparts once did. On the contrary, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and other stars of pop art began to exploit the image of the Mona Lisa in the same way as other products of popular culture - from a can of Campbell's soup to Marilyn Monroe.

      • Andy Warhol in 1963 and 1978 made the composition "Four Mona Lisa" and "Thirty Are Better Than One Andy Warhol" (1963), "Mona Lisa (Two Times)" ().
      • The representative of figurative art Fernando Botero in 1959 wrote “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve”, and in 1963 he created an image of Mona Lisa in his usual manner, exaggerating her weight.
      • Jasper Johns used her likeness for Figure 7 in 1968.
      • Robert Rauschenberg created Pneumonia Lisa in 1982.
      • The famous graffiti artist Banksy created a drawing of Mona Lisa, depicted in full growth, turning her back to the viewer, raising her hem and showing her naked ass. He also owns "Mona Lisa Mujaheddin" - Gioconda with a grenade launcher.
      See also en:Mona Lisa replicas and reinterpretations

      In the new time

      Location

      By the day of his death in 1525, Leonardo's assistant (and possibly lover) named Salai owned, judging by references in his personal papers, a portrait of a woman called "Gioconda" ( quadro de una dona aretata), which was bequeathed to him by his teacher. Salai left the painting to his sisters who lived in Milan. It remains a mystery how, in this case, the portrait got from Milan back to France. It is also not known who and when exactly cut off the edges of the painting with columns, which, according to most researchers, based on comparison with other portraits, existed in the original version. Unlike another cropped work by Leonardo - “Portrait Ginevra Benchi”, the lower part of which was cut off, as it suffered from water or fire, in this case the reasons were most likely of a compositional nature. There is a version that this was done by Leonardo da Vinci himself.

      King Francis I is believed to have bought the painting from Salai's heirs (for 4,000 écus) and kept it in his Château de Fontainebleau, where it remained until the time of Louis XIV. The latter moved her to the Palace of Versailles, and after the French Revolution she ended up in the Louvre in 1793. Napoleon hung the portrait in his bedroom of the Tuileries Palace, then she returned back to the museum. During the Second World War, the painting was transported for security reasons from the Louvre to the Amboise castle (the place of death and burial of Leonardo), then to the Abbey of Loc-Dieu, and finally to the Ingres Museum in Montauban, from where, after the victory, it returned safely to its place.

      One of the mysteries is related to the deep affection that the author had for this work. Various explanations were offered, for example, romantic: Leonardo fell in love with Mona Lisa and deliberately dragged out the work in order to stay with her longer, and she teased him with her mysterious smile and brought him to the greatest creative ecstasies. This version is considered mere speculation. Dzhivelegov believes that this attachment is due to the fact that he found in it the point of application of many of his creative searches (see the Technique section). Despite the fact that the "Mona Lisa" was highly appreciated by the artist's contemporaries, in the future her fame faded. The painting was not particularly remembered until the middle of the 19th century, when artists close to the Symbolist movement began to praise it, associating it with their ideas regarding feminine mystery. The critic Walter Pater, in his 1867 essay on da Vinci, expressed his opinion by describing the figure in the painting as a kind of mythical embodiment of the eternal feminine, who is "older than the rocks between which she sits" and who "died many times and learned the secrets of the afterlife" .

      The further rise of the painting's fame is associated with its mysterious disappearance at the beginning of the 20th century and a happy return to the museum a few years later, thanks to which it did not leave the pages of newspapers. Art critic Grigory Kozlov in his study "Attempt on Art" in the chapter "La Gioconda. How to Become a Star details her path to fame through the ages. He compares her fame to the spread of circles on the water from a fallen stone, and points out that over the centuries this glory has gone through several stages:

      • 1st circle: artists and critics (XVI century). Contemporaries of Leonardo, who were engaged in art, highly appreciated this work. Among the admirers of the "Mona Lisa" were Raphael, Vasari and others.
      • 2nd circle: kings (XVI-XVIII centuries). Location in the collection of Francis I of France (who hung it in his favorite room - the bath), then her journey through the royal palaces (Fontainebleau, Louvre, Versailles, Tuileries). However, by the 18th century, it darkened and was completely forgotten, but the French Revolution changed everything - the painting was confiscated for the world's first public museum in the Louvre, where Fragonard saw it and appreciated it, including it among the most valuable paintings of the museum. Napoleon, having come to power, took her to his bedroom, which became for her a "springboard to glory", but after becoming emperor, after 3 years he returned her to the Louvre Museum, which was named after him. However, the picture was well known only to connoisseurs and was by no means considered the best work of the artist.
      • 3rd circle: intelligentsia (19th century). In the Louvre, the "Mona Lisa" did not immediately take the leading place - the "prima donna" of the museum was the "Ascension of the Virgin Mary" by Murillo (now in the Prado). For the first time in a picture depicting the interior of the Louvre, she appeared in 1833 (art. S. Morse). The decisive role at this stage was played by romantic writers who found in her the ideal of a femme fatale created by Leonardo, whom they worshiped (Walter Pater, Theophile Gaultier - who “invented” a smile, Jules Verne - who invented the author’s love story for the model and a love triangle with her husband ). The “discovery” of the smile became the “discovery” of the picture for intellectuals. The invention of photography contributed to the spread of reproductions. “Intellectuals of the Victorian era became a cult that worshiped a mysterious and fatal woman, whose photo they kept on their desk. The words of Walter Pater: "She, who is older than the rocks ..." - became their password. Merezhkovsky's European bestseller The Resurrected Gods about Leonardo picked up the theme.
      • 4th circle: crowd (since 1911). A qualitative leap in the painting's fame is associated with its theft and return (see section below). Then the avant-garde artists took a step, choosing her as the object of their experiments.
      • 5th circle: the age of globalization (2nd half of the 20th century). De Gaulle, having sent the picture in 1962 as a "diplomat" to the United States, contributed to further fame. Jacqueline Kennedy was the personal patron of the famous work of Leonardo during the visit of the "Mona Lisa", and the media compared both ladies - Gioconda and Jacqueline, calling the second modern American-French Mona Lisa. America was embraced by Giocondomania, after which the picture appeared in advertising and became a trademark. And American artists (Warhol, Rauschenberg, etc.) introduced her to pop art, like Marilyn Monroe. During the further tour of the picture, which was covered in detail by the press, millions saw it, for example, in the USSR, 4,600 people watched it a day. She was repeatedly attempted (see the Vandalism section below), and each incident spun the flywheel of fame even more.

      Theft

      Mona Lisa would have long been known only to connoisseurs of fine art, if not for her exceptional history, which ensured her worldwide fame.

      A contemporary of her adventures, critic Abram Efros wrote: “... the museum watchman, who has not moved a single step away from the painting, since its return to the Louvre after the abduction in 1911, has been guarding not a portrait of Francesco del Giocondo’s wife, but an image of some kind of half-human, half-snake creature, either smiling or gloomy, dominating the chilled, bare, rocky space that stretched out behind him.

      Vandalism

      • In 1956, the lower part of the painting was damaged when a visitor poured acid over it.
      • On December 30 of the same year, the young Bolivian Hugo Ungaza Villegas threw a stone at her and damaged the paint layer at the elbow (the loss was later recorded). After that, the Mona Lisa was protected by bulletproof glass, which protected her from further serious attacks.
      • In April 1974, at an exhibition in Tokyo, a woman, upset by the museum's policy regarding the disabled (who were not allowed to the exhibition to increase the capacity of the hall), tried to spray red paint from a can.
      • On April 2, 2009, a Russian woman who did not receive French citizenship threw a clay cup at the glass. Both of these cases did not harm the picture.

      In culture

      • The crater Mona Lisa on Venus is named after her.
      Literature:
      • The theft of the Mona Lisa is dedicated to the short story by Georg Game "The Thief" (), which gave the name to the collection of short stories of the same name.