The
Mona Lisa is without doubt the
most famous work in the entire forty-thousand-year history of the
visual arts. It provokes instant shocks of recognition on every
continent from Asia to America, reduces the Venus of Milo and the
Sistine Chapel to the level of merely local marvels, sells as many
postcards as a tropical resort, and stimulates as many amatuer detectives
as an unsolved international murder mystery.
It
has been famous for a remarkably long, almost uninterrupted period.
When it was still in Leonardo's studio in Florence, and very probably
not yet finished, it was already inspiring imitations. By the
middle of the the sixteenth century it was being pronounced divine
rather than human in its perfection; by the middle of the nineteenth
it was a goal for pilgrimages and the object of a cult that mixed
romantic religiosity with eroticism and rhetoric. It is decidedly
not a painting like other paintings; it might be better described,
on the basis of the record, as a cross between a universal fetish
and a Hollywood-era film star.
Provenance:
Acquired by François I, either directly
from Leonardo da Vinci, during his stay in France, or upon his
death from his heirs, the painting remained in the royal collections
from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the creation of
the Central Arts Museum at the Louvre in 1793. We know that it
was kept at Versailles under the reign of Louis XIV and that it
was in the Tuileries during the First Empire. Since the Restoration,
the Mona Lisa has always remained in the Louvre Museum, a key
piece of the national collections.
Timeline of Leonardo's work | Timeline
of the Mona Lisa | Historical
Timeline
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![The Mona Lisa [Image]](tempimages/mona_lisa.jpg)
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