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.
Lillian Schwartz
Schwartz used the works of Leonardo da Vinci extensively in experiments with computers. One notable work she created is "Mona/Leo", for which she compared the image of a Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait with the "Mona Lisa", matching the two faces feature by feature to show their underlying structural similarity. Specifically, she replaced the right side of the "Mona Lisa" with the flipped left side of a red chalk self-portrait of Leonardo. Superimposed lines drawn on the image showing the close alignments of the bottom of the eye, eyebrow, nose and chin prompted her to argue that the Mona Lisa is in part a cryptic self-portrait of the artist. In further experiments along these lines, she removed the gray tones in Leonardo da Vinci's self-portrait and superimposed the "Mona Lisa" eye over it. Not everyone is convinced by her argument for the identity of Leonardo da Vinci and the "Mona Lisa"; one common counter-argument is that the similarities are due to both portraits having been created by the same person and therefore bearing the hallmarks of a characteristic style. Additionally, though the drawing on which Schwartz based the comparison is held to be a self-portrait, there is no firm historical evidence to support this theory.