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.
Mona Lisa replicas and reinterpretations
At a 2009 festival in Sydney, Australia, a group of eight people spent three hours creating a "Mona Lisa" replica from 3,604 cups of coffee. The mosaic effect in this case was created by adding amounts of milk, or sometimes none, to cups of black coffee. The final product, measuring 20 by 13 feet, was dubbed the ""Mocha" Lisa."
Maurice "Toastman" Bennet, known for recreating masterpieces using toasted bread, parodied "Mona Lisa" in a toast mosaic. At a 2010 food-art festival in Hong Kong, Bennet "tiled" together approximately 6,000 slices of bread, using a blow-torch to achieve the desired "tone" on each piece of toast.