Mona Lisa
The painting is thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and is in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. It had been believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506; however, Leonardo may have continued working on it as late as 1517. Recent academic work suggests that it would not have been started before 1513. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Louvre Museum in Paris since 1797.
In Search of Mona Lisa
The album takes its title from a deeply personal experience that Carlos Santana had when he visited the Louvre Museum in Paris for the first time and saw Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece with his own eyes. The artist explains to "Rolling Stone" that although he had been playing concerts in Paris since the early Seventies, he had never visited the Louvre until 2016. And once he did, he noticed a line like "you'd see for Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Rihanna or Adele... I was like, 'Damn, "Mona Lisa's" really popular worldwide to this day.'"