Monalisa the most popular paintings in the world by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci

Certainly one of the most popular paintings in the world by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, between 1503 to 1506, is the Mona Lisa, a priceless work of art.  Despite her known features like her gaze.

Lisa del Giocondo June 15, 1479 – July 15, 1542).

Lisa del Giocondo was an Italian noblewoman and member of the Gherardini family of Florence and Tuscany. Her name was given to the Mona Lisa, her portrait commissioned by her husband and painted by Leonardo da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance.

Little is known about Lisa's life. Born in Florence and married in her teens to a cloth and silk merchant and shoemaker who later became a local official, she was a mother to five children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and ordinary middle-class life. Lisa outlived her husband, who was considerably her senior.

In the centuries after Lisa's death, the Mona Lisa became the world's most famous painting. In 2005, Lisa was definitively identified as the model for the Mona Lisa.

Early life and family

Lisa's Florentine family was old and aristocratic but over time had lost their influence. They were well off but not wealthy, and lived on farm income in a city that was among the largest in Europe. While economically successful, there were great disparities in wealth among Florence's inhabitants.

Antonmaria di Noldo Gherardini, Lisa's father, came from a family who had lived on properties near San Donato in Poggio and only recently moved to the city.

Antonmaria lost two wives, Lisa di Giovanni Filippo de' Carducci, whom he married in 1465, and Caterina di Mariotto Rucellai, whom he married in 1473. Both died in childbirth. Lisa's mother was Lucrezia del Caccia, daughter of Piera Spinelli, and Gherardini's wife by his third marriage in 1476. Gherardini at one time owned or rented six farms in Chianti that produced wheat, wine and olive oil and where livestock was raised.

Lisa was born in Florence on June 15, 1479, on Via Maggio, although for many years it was thought she was born on Villa Vignamaggio just outside Greve, one of the family's rural properties. She is named for Lisa, a wife of her paternal grandfather. The eldest of seven children, Lisa had three sisters, one of whom was named Ginevra, and three brothers, Giovangualberto, Francesco, and Noldo.

The family lived in Florence, originally near Santa Trinita and later in rented space near Santo Spirito, most likely because they were not able to afford repairs when their first house was damaged. Lisa's family moved to what today is called Via dei Pepi, and then near Santa Croce, where they lived near Ser Piero da Vinci, Leonardo's father. They also owned a small country home in St. Donato in the village of Poggio about 32 kilometres (20 mi) south of the city. Noldo, Gherardini's father and Lisa's grandfather, had bequeathed a farm in Chianti to the Santa Maria Nuova hospital. Gherardini secured a lease for another of the hospital's farms and, so that he could oversee the wheat harvest, the family spent summers there at the house named Ca' di Pesa.

In 2005, an expert at the University Library of Heidelberg discovered a margin note in the library's collection that established with certainty the traditional view that the sitter was Lisa. The note, written by Agostino Vespucci in 1503, states that Leonardo was working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. The Mona Lisa has been in custody of France since the 16th century, when it was acquired by King Francis I; since the French Revolution, it has been the property of the French Republic. Today about six million people visit the painting each year at the Louvre in Paris, where it is part of a French national collection.

Monalisa Paint

Mona Lisa, also called Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, Italian La Gioconda, or French La Joconde, oil painting on a poplar wood panel by Leonardo da Vinci, probably the world’s most famous painting. It was painted sometime between 1503 and 1519, when Leonardo was living in Florence, and it now hangs in the Louvre Museum, Paris, where it remained an object of pilgrimage in the 21st century. The sitter’s mysterious smile and her unproven identity have made the painting a source of ongoing investigation and fascination.

History

Leonardo da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa about 1503, and it was in his studio when he died in 1519. He likely worked on it intermittently over several years, adding multiple layers of thin oil glazes at different times. Small cracks in the paint, called craquelure, appear throughout the whole piece, but they are finer on the hands, where the thinner glazes correspond to Leonardo’s late period.

French King Francis I, in whose court Leonardo spent the last years of his life, acquired the work after the artist’s death, and it became part of the royal collection. For centuries the portrait was secluded in French palaces, until insurgents claimed the royal collection as the property of the people during the French Revolution (1787–99). Following a period hanging in Napoleon’s bedroom, the Mona Lisa was installed in the Louvre Museum at the turn of the 19th century.

In 1911 the painting was stolen, causing an immediate media sensation. People flocked to the Louvre to view the empty space where the painting had once hung, the museum’s director of paintings resigned, and the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and artist Pablo Picasso were even arrested as suspects. Two years later an art dealer in Florence alerted local authorities that a man had tried to sell him the painting. Police found the portrait stashed in the false bottom of a trunk belonging to Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian immigrant who had briefly worked at the Louvre fitting glass on a selection of paintings, including the Mona Lisa. He and possibly two other workers had hidden in a closet overnight, taken the portrait from the wall the morning of August 21, 1911, and run off without suspicion. Peruggia was arrested, tried, and imprisoned, while the Mona Lisa took a tour of Italy before making its triumphant return to France.

Facts about Mona Lisa

• Monna in Italian is a short form for Madonna which means ‘My Lady’. Mona Lisa was a spelling error.
• A Bolivian, Ugo Ungaza in 1956 threw a stone at the painting and this resulted in a small patch of damaged paint next to her left elbow.
• Mona Lisa is  priceless and so it cannot be insured.
• She is in the most expensive prison in the world. The painting has an exclusive room that costs the museum over seven million dollars. It is protected in a climate controlled environment and encased in bullet proof glass.
• She is a killer of men. In 1852, an artist named Luc Maspero threw himself from the fourth floor of a Parisian hotel, leaving a suicide note that read: “For years I have grappled desperately with her smile. I prefer to die.” Also in 1910, one enamored fan came before her solely to shoot himself as he looked upon her.

It has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". The painting's novel qualities include the subject's enigmatic expression, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modelling of forms, and the atmospheric illusionism.

It's an iconic portrait in Italy.... People travel all around the world to italy to see this portrait.