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.
Mona Lisa (Prado's version)
Although there were elements that clearly distinguished the replica from the Louvre's version, the most striking point was the fact that until the restoration of the Prado's version, no landscape background was visible. That landscape was fully recovered through the restoration carried out by the Prado between 2010 and 2012, for a request to include the Prado's work in a temporary exhibition in the Louvre called "Leonardo's last masterpiece: The Sainte Anne", from 29 March to 25 June 2012. The oxidized varnishes indicated that the black repaint had been made 200 years after the copy was painted, that is to say, not before 1750. During this restoration process, the copy was also submitted to a study of infrared reflectography and radiography, where the results revealed that the painting had been made in the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci at the same time as the original "Mona Lisa" was painted. The "key" of this discovery was the underlying drawing, as it is the same but with different style in both paintings, as well as the drawing's corrections.