Mona Lisa replicas and reinterpretations
At the start of the 16th century, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by Florentine nobleman Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his wife, Lisa.
The painting is believed to have been undertaken between 1503 and 1506.
Leonardo's portrait of "Mona Lisa" ("Mona" or "Monna" being the Italian honorific for "Madame") has been on display as part of the permanent collection at Paris' Louvre museum since 1797. It is also known as "La Joconde" in French and "La Gioconda" in Italian, and has been known by other names in the past. There is a new study setting the beginning of the Mona Lisa to an earlier date that thought before, pre-1478, contrary to Vasari's narrative.
Replicas of "Mona Lisa" date back to the 16th century,
including sculptures and etchings inspired by the painting.
But even by the start of the 20th century, historian Donald Sassoon has stated, "Mona Lisa" was still "just a well-respected painting by a famous old master, hanging in one of the great museums of the world."
The image had yet to gain iconic status, and, Sassoon adds, was "not even the most valued painting in the Louvre."
The painting's theft on August 11, 1911, and the subsequent media frenzy surrounding the investigation and its recovery are contributing factors which ignited public interest and catapulted "Mona Lisa" to its current standing.
Speculations about Mona Lisa
In December 2010, Italian art historian Silvano Vinceti reported that the Mona Lisa appears to have tiny letters and numbers in her eyes which are only apparent when viewed with a magnifying glass and shortly afterwards said that the model was Leonardo's male apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti (known as Salaì) and that the letters were clues to his identity. The Louvre, pointing out that he had had no access to the actual painting, said that after "every laboratory test possible" in 2004 and 2009 that "no inscriptions, letters or numbers, were discovered during the tests." and that "The ageing of the painting on wood has caused a great number of cracks to appear in the paint, which have caused a number of shapes to appear that have often been subject to over-interpretation".