The Mona Lisa

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I have not come face to face with the Mona Lisa myself, but I have seen different copies of it by other artists in magazines, and I can testify how great and amazing those replicas of paintings of the Mona Lisa look with the smile Gurstein described as “legendary”. She went on to state Pater’s remarks on the smile which goes as “sometime she seem to mock us, and then again we seem to catch something like sadness in her smile.” This metaphor about the smile has made the Mona Lisa in my opinion, a mystery and a wonder, when a close look is taken at the painting. People visit the Museum Louvre today and all they crave to see is the almighty Mona Lisa. This famous smile also won the heart of Freud, and in his book, Leonardo da Vinci: A study in psychosexuality which he wrote in 1910, he interpreted it (Gurstein 44). There have been books written about her smile. In Plays and in songs the Mona Lisa’s smile has been referred to, and advertisements and merchandise have also used the image because of the smile.

On a much more note, the Mona Lisa has had celebrity status that is the glamor; it charms everyone who has heard of it or seen the very original portrait. It had in Leonardo’s era enchanted his contemporaries, captivated the heart of rulers who at the knowledge of having to possess the art work did not want to share it and so kept it privately to themselves and perhaps worshipped it. The portrait continued to intrigued spectators, art historians, writers, poets and artists all through the twentieth century (Gurstein 44).

More so the glamor of the Mona Lisa cannot be overlooked due to the powerful effect it has on people anytime they come close to it. It has from generations to generations stood so many tests and still is amazing as ever. The fame of the Mona Lisa was not intense before the nineteenth-century; it became critically acclaimed in the nineteenth-century after writers made it famous. The English essayist, Walter Pater again in his writings on Leonardo da Vinci and on his view concerning the Mona Lisa states, “And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing and the music of the mystical prose is as sweet in our ears as was that flute-player’s music that lent to the lips of La Giocondo those subtle and poisonous curves” (Sandrock and Wright 103).

A convoy of motorcade accompanied the Mona Lisa in December 1963 to the port of Le Havre on its way to the United States. It was seated in a specially fitted first class chamber, after it was welcomed by the captain of SS France (Edge 1). The first lady Jackie Kennedy at a glittering party welcomed the Mona Lisa. It was then that in honor of the visitor, President Kennedy attended a rare dinner at the French Embassy. An audience of 1.6 million people in a cold rain lined up to view the painting for just four seconds each. As today’s most famous painting the Mona Lisa attracts 5.5 million visitors to the Museum Le Louvre, the world’s most visited museum, annually. Thanks to the painting the museum has also gained fame.

There are currently numerous advertisements done in the name of the painting, from condoms to Giocondo liquid -latex to hairpins. There have also been songs about it by Cole Porter and Nat King so had some imitators. In 1974, a dazzling 1.6 million people crowded the painting in the Tokyo National Museum when it was sent there. In that same year, two million people teemed to see the portrait on its tour to the Pushkin museum in Moscow during the Mona Lisa’s triumphant tour. This is how people are in love with the ancient painting with modern features. People love to see and tell themselves that at least they too have seen the famous painting. The more that feeling intensifies the more the recognition the portrait gets also increases every passing hour.

The Mona Lisa is arguably a great painting and I will go by its popularity and the characteristics that made the Mona Lisa, the most important painting during Leonardo’s generation and now are the technique he used, the smile and the glamor. Of course there are several paintings which are beautiful like it or even better looking than it, some paintings from Renaissance artists including Leonardo’s contemporaries and even some artists of this generation, but the features that make the Mona Lisa, so alive that viewers of it even get to engage with it, is not experimental with other paintings I have seen. Not even Leonardo’s last supper which for some time was more popular than the Mona Lisa, and not even the works Michelangelo or Raphael who also painted beautifully and wonderfully. The Mona Lisa came to stay so is its fame. If there would come a time when these qualities that the portrait possesses would be matched or surpassed, and then it would lose its name as the world’s famous painting, but until then, it will always be the world’s most famous painting.

Works Cited

Ball, Phillip. “Behind The Mona Lisa’s Smile.” Nature. 5 August 2016, Vol. 466, p. 694.

Edge, Simon. “Mona Lisa: The Story Behind That Smile.” Express. 13 August 2009.

www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/120273/Mona-Lisa-The-story-behind-that-smile

Accessed 16 November 2016.

Gurstein, Rochelle. “The Mystic Smile.” The New Republic, 22 July 2002, pp 41-44. Sandrock, O. Wright. “Locating Italy: East and West in British-Italian Transactions.”

Editions Rodopi, 2013.

Accessed 10 November 2016.

Smith, Webster. “Observations on the Mona Lisa Landscape.” The Art Bullentin, 1 June 1985,

Vol. LXVII, No. 2, pp.184.

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