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.
Speculations about Mona Lisa
The artist Susan Dorothea White has interpreted the masculine proportions of Mona Lisa's cranial architecture in her anatomical artworks "Anatomy of a Smile: Mona's Bones" (2002) and "Mona Masticating" (2006). Lillian Schwartz of Bell Labs suggests that the "Mona Lisa" is actually a self-portrait. She supports this theory with the results of a digital analysis of the facial features of the woman in the painting and those of the famous "Portrait of a Man in Red Chalk". However, the drawing on which Schwartz based the comparison may not be a self-portrait.