Description
Leonardo da Vinci – Mona Lisa
The most famous painting in the world is smaller than most people expect, and it is not painted on canvas. The Louvre records it as the Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, painted in oil on a poplar panel, under inventory number INV 779. That married name is why Italians call her La Gioconda.
Who the woman is
Lisa Gherardini (Florence, 1479–1542) was the wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. She was not nobility and she was not famous; the commission was an ordinary middle-class one. Leonardo never delivered the painting to the man who ordered it – he took it with him to France and was still working on it years later. That is why the museum dates it across 1503–1519, although older references often give only 1503–1504.
How it became the most famous painting on earth
On 21 August 1911 Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman and former Louvre employee, lifted it off the wall of the Salon Carré, took it out of its frame in a service stairway and walked out with it under his coat. For two years it was simply gone. He was arrested in December 1913; the painting was back in the Louvre by January 1914, and around 120,000 people came to see it in the first two days. The theft is what turned it into an icon.
What Peruggia believed was not true
Peruggia claimed he was returning the painting to its homeland, believing Napoleon had looted it from Italy. The museum’s own record says otherwise: King Francis I bought it in 1518, paying Leonardo’s pupil Salaì 2,604 livres for painted panels. It came to France by purchase, more than two and a half centuries before Napoleon. It is a good story, and it is wrong – so we finish telling it.
What the museum record says
The data below follows the Louvre’s own record. Two figures differ from older listings: the size is 53.4 × 79.4 cm (older sources give 53 × 77 cm), and the technique is oil on poplar, not on canvas.
| Year of creation: | 1503–1519 |
| Original size: | 53,4 cm x 79,4 cm |
| Painting style: | High Renaissance |
| Original technique: | Oil on poplar panel |
| Located: | Louvre, Paris |
Our hand-painted reproduction
In the photographs above you can see our own hand-painted reproduction of this painting. Every hand-painted painting on canvas is made to order in our workshop and never printed. As canvas wall art or a painting on canvas, the Mona Lisa is the most frequently chosen reproduction of all. Among the other Leonardos the Louvre holds, see also The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, The Virgin of the Rocks and La Belle Ferronnière.
- Subject: Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–1519
- Technique: hand-painted oil painting on canvas, reproduction
- Sizes: 8 dimensions, from 40 × 60 cm to 150 × 220 cm, stretched on a wooden frame on request
- Fact: the original is not painted on canvas but on a poplar panel
