How the Mona Lisa Became the World's Most Famous Painting

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Today on the rest is history, we are looking at the history of the most famous painting in the world. Who was the Mona? Has the mystery of her identity been solved? Was she perhaps, as the great English critic Walter Peter suggested, a vampire? And why and how did the Mona become so famous? We will be answering all these questions. Enjoy.

[00:00:28]This episode is brought to you by Lloyds, which has been backing British ambition for over 250 years now. When you think about it, every dynasty in history has boiled down to two important elements, aspiration and action. And a classic example of this from British history, the rise of the House of Wessix, the family of Alfred the Great and his heirs who between them established the United Kingdom of England.

[00:01:02]>> Yeah, it's a great story, isn't it, Tom?

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[00:02:01]Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come. And the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh.

[00:02:12]The deposit little cell by cell of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.

[00:02:20]Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity. And how would they be troubled by this beauty into which the soul with all its maladies has passed?

[00:02:34]All the thoughts and experience of the world have edged and molded there in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form.

[00:02:43]The animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the pagan world, the sins of the borges. She is older than the rocks among which she sits. Like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave, and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her, and trafficked for strange webs with eastern merchants. And as leader was the mother of Helen of Troy, and as St. Dan, the mother of Mary, and all this has been to her, but as the sound of liars and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing linear and tinged the eyelids and hands.

[00:03:33]So that was the Victorian art critic Walter Patera in very Victorian pros and he was describing one of the most celebrated women who's ever existed. Her face familiar to probably not millions of people but hundreds of millions if not billions. A woman who's often regarded as the ultimate fam fatal.

[00:03:53]A woman into whom is poured well certainly according to Walter Peter every woman who has ever existed.

[00:04:00]beautiful, mysterious, exotic, erotic, and dangerous. Well, I say a woman, he's describing actually a painting of a woman. A painting which is surely the most uh well-known painting in the world. The Mona Lisa. Tom, the Mona Lisa. Are you a fan? Well, I I I've always taken it so for granted that I wouldn't really have called myself a fan. um its fame is and of itself such a fascinating thing that that's what prompted me to think that this might be a good topic for the rest of history.

[00:04:30]But having plunged into uh the deep waters of the Mona's history and explored the rocks that are older than time among which she sits. Um I am now definitely a fan. Yes.

[00:04:43]>> Oh, tremendous.

[00:04:45]>> It's a painting that is a lot more interesting than than I had thought. I mean, I think basically I've kind of been anized to its beauty and I guess that's true of lots of people. You kind of see it as a fridge magnet rather than as a painting, don't you? But it's >> it is fascinating and one of the reasons for its fame um is actually that passage that you read. It's one of the most kind of famous passages of purple pros in the whole of of English literature. He wrote that in 1869. back when he wrote that the Mona was not remotely as famous as it is today. And the reason for that is that the paintings that had cut through in the Victorian period were those that were very easily copied. So paintings with kind of clear boundaries, but there's a quality to the Mona which seems to defy reproduction. It's actually very very hard to reproduce.

[00:05:40]And this wasn't for want of trying.

[00:05:42]people have been trying to capture the essence of this extraordinary painting right from the beginning. So there's a famous copy of it in the Praau which was done while um the Mona had only just been painted but it's it you know it doesn't get its essence at all. Then they um in going into the 18th into the 19th century they try and do it with copper plate prints. Then of course photographs, but even photographers apparently to begin with struggled to um capture the Mona in their photographs because the the technology just wasn't up to reproducing it. And it's only by the 1880s that photography has evolved technologically enough to um allow for kind of accurate photographs of the Mona to be re reproduced on a mass scale. And as a result of that, of course, the image of the Mona Lisa gets spread um across Europe, across the world. And I think it is, I mean, you said maybe it's the most recognizable painting. I would say there's no doubt about it at all. It is the most recognizable painting that has ever been in the whole of history.

[00:06:47]And yet, at first glance, well, I mean, as you say, at first glance, you you barely notice it because it's ubiquitous. So, you don't really think anything of it. It's it's part of the furniture. But when you look at it, there's nothing remarkable about it.

[00:06:59]There's nothing exceptional about it compared with, for example, some of the paintings that you did on the rest is history club miniseries in L coming. A painting like Lasmanas by Balath is much more, you know, appears much more nuanced, much more layered, much more sophisticated. The Mona Lisa is just a woman sitting on a balcony looking out at you. What's so special, do you think about this that makes it hard to reproduce? Before we get into that, we should just describe it for the three people perhaps in the world who've never seen it. So, there's something distinctive about her pose. Distinctive certainly when when when it was painted.

[00:07:35]So, she's kind of sitting in profile, but she has turn her her torso has turned around so that her face is almost staring into the eyes of the the person who is standing in front of the painting. Her face is is pale. She's got brown eyes. She's got quite full cheeks.

[00:07:52]Um kind of she's certainly not thin. Um and she has no eyebrows. Um she has long, delicately curling hair, but this is covered by an almost translucent veil. She has a very plain dark dress.

[00:08:10]She has no jewelry, no adornments of any kind. And of course, the most famous thing about her expression, probably the most famous thing about the entire painting is her smile. And we'll be coming to that. Yeah, people go on about that, but I mean, I don't even think it really is much of a smile. If someone looked at me like that and said, "I'm smiling at you," I'd be like, "Are you really?" That is part of the mystery is that people respond to the smile in many different ways. But just before we come to that, the one thing about the painting that is overtly fantastical is the landscape against which the Mona is set. Um, so this is a landscape that's very barren. It's it's kind of wild.

[00:08:46]It's tortured. Um, you have jagged mountains, uh, rocks, lakes, and the only signs of a kind of human physical presence. There's a winding road and there's, um, an arched bridge crossing crossing a river.

[00:09:01]>> Tom, I commend you for this because you made me look at the painting already in a new way. I've never even noticed the background to be honest with you.

[00:09:08]I mean, >> okay. So, if you're looking at it, the the the striking thing about about the the quality of the paint. And I think this is the reason why it is so difficult to reproduce isn't the subject. It's it's the way in which this woman and the landscape have been painted. Um because there's a very distinctive quality to it. And it's traditionally described as famato, as smoky. Um, and the effect of this is brilliantly described by certainly the the leading British expert on the Mona, who is Martin Kemp, who isn't the basis from Spandow Ballet, not him. Um, I think he's the professor of art at Oxford or something. You know, you're an Oxford uh doctorate.

[00:09:51]>> Yeah, he actually is the same person.

[00:09:53]>> So, so, so Martin Kemp describes the effect of sumato as being the paradox of a precisely rendered indefinitess.

[00:10:02]So it's it's not precise. I mean there's a sense of kind of of smokiness to it. Now how do you render indefinitess precisely?

[00:10:14]This is the kind of question that already by the beginning of the 19th century was puzzling German idealist philosophers. So let's quote the most famous German idealist philosopher who is Hegel and he was lecturing in the 1820s on the Renaissance.

[00:10:28]>> Great to get Hegel on the show.

[00:10:30]>> Great to have Hegel back. So he wrote here is evident a supreme rounding.

[00:10:35]Nowhere is there any harsh or sharp line. Transition is everywhere. Light and shadow are not effective as purely direct light and shadow. But they both shine into one another just as an inner force works throughout an external thing. Now what that means in practical terms for the impact of this portrait of Mona is that the corners of her eyes and of her mouth are blurred. it it's hard to get an exact sense of what they actually look like. And as we've mentioned, there are no visible eyebrows and this makes it difficult to read her expression. And you've already touched on the most famous puzzle. Is there a smile at all? If it is a smile, is she looking happy? Is she looking sad? Is it a knowing smile? Is it um a modest smile? Is this the smile of a Florentine matron? Or is it the smile of a vampire who is older than the rocks among which she sits?

[00:11:32]>> See, to me, do you know I recognize that smile straight away. It's it's the weak smile of somebody who's heard a joke about the Kaiser a thousand times.

[00:11:42]It's thinking I should never have come to this rest is history get together.

[00:11:46]This is awful.

[00:11:48]>> Well, you see there is the power of the famato because each person will see in the smile what he or she >> Yeah. what they fear >> or perhaps desire, who knows? But certainly this is where I think um Walter Peter is coming in with his notion of her as you know um a kind of timeless infinite vampiric figure. The fact that there is a mystery to her, that her smile is something elusive and enigmatic and potentially tantalizing.

[00:12:18]Um, and it's this that really since the 19th century has made the Mona Lisa seem almost a sinister figure in the imaginings of many people and the painting to be something that contains codes, clues, directions to something that seems to lurk just beyond human comprehension. And this is an idea that of course is still going incredibly strong. and friend of the show, Dan Brown.

[00:12:46]>> Yeah.

[00:12:47]>> He's notoriously all over it. So, in the Da Vinci Code, the Mona, he says, embodies the sacred feminine. And in the in the in in the plot of the Da Vinci Code, the Mona is in the the Loura behind its stained glass window, and a clue is found written in blood on this stained glass window. And even though the the Mona actually doesn't feature very prominently in the plot of the Da Vinci Code, when they came to make a film and they wanted a poster, it's it's the Mona that is on the the poster, >> of course.

[00:13:20]>> And obviously the reason for why the Mona is on the film poster is because it's the world's most famous painting.

[00:13:27]And one of the reasons that it's the world's most famous painting is precisely because it seems so full of mystery. a painting suited to a film about kind of codes and ancient mysteries.

[00:13:37]>> So two obvious questions then. So first of all um is it only famous because of the mystery rather than because of any other quality? And secondly, what actually behind all the stuff about the mystery and the merc and the smokiness?

[00:13:51]What actually do we know about it? So let's take the first one. Um is it so famous purely because of this sort of the the questions rather than because of any innate quality? I mean, I think that is the big question and let's come to that later. So, we'll we'll kind of explore what it is that has made the Mona as famous as it is. And I think it it it's really interesting because it it tells us a lot about the history of how conceptions of culture have evolved over the centuries and particularly perhaps in the in the in the 20th century. Um, your second question.

[00:14:25]>> Yeah.

[00:14:25]>> I mean, let's assume the Mona Lisa isn't a portrait of a vampire. Then then who is it a portrait of? When was the painting begun? When was it finished? Uh I mean was was it ever finished? And these are all kind of pretty basic questions that have been furiously debated for centuries and centuries and centuries.

[00:14:44]>> But not unusual questions.

[00:14:46]>> No, Tom. Not unusual questions. I mean, these are the questions that people ask about all kinds of Renaissance paintings, don't they?

[00:14:51]>> Absolutely.

[00:14:52]>> You know, who who painted it, why, when, where, who's the sitter, all of that kind of thing.

[00:14:56]>> Yeah. And I think that the intensity of the controversy that seems to lie around these questions when it comes to the Mona Lisa is actually just another marker of how incredibly famous it is because every um art historian, everybody who who aspires to be an art historian knows that if you come up with a a a new theory about the Mona Lisa, you'll immediately get it into the newspapers. So there's a kind of incentive there to come up often with quite mad theories.

[00:15:20]>> Yeah. However, there is one thing that we absolutely do know about the painting, and that of course is the identity of the person who painted it, and even Dan Brown gets that right because it's there in the title of his book. It's Leonardo. Although, he gets the name wrong.

[00:15:38]Does he gets the name wrong cuz Leonardo da Vinci Da Vinci I mean, I can't believe there are any listeners who don't know this. Da Vinci is not his surname. Da Vinci just means from Vinci, which is where he was born. Like if Dan if Dan Brown wrote a book about you and he called it the from Ssbury code.

[00:15:54]>> Yeah. Exactly.

[00:15:56]>> So Leonardo da Vinci we know that he paints it and he of course is you know one of the great figures of European culture. An extraordinary man I think entirely deserving of his own series on the rest of history in due course. But for now let's zoom in on one particular moment in that extraordinary life of his. Um, and it is April 1500 and we are in Florence, which is Leonardo's native city. This is almost certainly where he'd been born 48 years before. Um, and he is the illegitimate son of um, a Florentine notary, Sir Pierro Davinci, who came from the small town of Vinci, which is about 20 mi west of Florence.

[00:16:38]So, hence the name. And Leonardo right from the beginning everyone recognizes that he is an astonishing talent. So he gets apprenticed very early um to a famous Florentine um artist. He works in his workshop. He qualifies as a master and he is recognized even in Florence which is a city I mean it's the archetype of a great center of culture renaissance Florence as a man of really stupifying talent and what strikes people as stupifying about him isn't necessarily his his talent as an artist.

[00:17:15]I think he is rated slightly below his younger contemporaries Michelangelo and Raphael on that score. But the sheer range of his interests. So he's a complete polymath. He's not just a painter. He's also um a wouldbe engineer. He's a natural philosopher.

[00:17:34]There is no limit to the things that he's interested in. And this of course makes him um an object of great interest to the cultural elites in Florence at the time. uh which Dominic we've we've done a series on and this is the Medi and specifically Lorenzo the magnificent the uh the guy who serves in the popular imagination as the archetype of the Florentine patrons of great art.

[00:17:59]>> Lorenzo took him up, didn't he? And used him as among other things as a as a kind of ambassador and but also as a kind of gift. So he sends him to Ludovviko Schwartzer who's the Duke of Milan.

[00:18:09]Florence's relations with Milan enormously important in this period and Schwartzer um who's a patron of the arts himself is very taken with Leonardo doesn't he and Leonardo basically ends up working for Schwartzer for about almost 20 years 18 years >> yeah 18 years in all so by 1500 um Leonardo is returning from from Milan via Venice to Florence he's done pretty well for himself in Milan so he's um he's famous as as a great painter um He's he's done this mural, the Last Supper, very important in the Da Vinci Code, very important also in the history of Western art. Um, and two very innovative portraits of women. Um, and one of these portrays Ludvik Schwartz's young mistress, Chichilia Gallerani. Um, and she is shown rather coily kind of fondling and man.

[00:19:02]>> Yeah.

[00:19:02]>> And Taby's favorite picture, I think.

[00:19:04]>> I think so. Yeah. actually loves fondling and man, but the uh the other thing about Leonardo is that he's um he's got a utilitarian value as well as an aesthetic one, hasn't he? Because he's also designing all kinds of I mean, obviously he's designing all his mad stuff like parachutes and helicopters, tanks, but he's designing kind of hydraulics projects and stuff and city works and all these kinds of things and fortifications and defenses and things like this. I mean, your claim about him being a polymath is well borne out by all this. I gather that the kind of the mad stuff, so the tanks and the the helicopters, it's unlikely any of them would have worked even had the technology been available to make them work. But the fortifications and the and the canals and everything. Absolutely.

[00:19:46]And that essentially is why Schwartzer loved him. Um I mean the the the ability to paint his mistress fondling and man was was a a kind of an advantage, but it's the it's the engineering that really makes Leonardo's fortune. and he returns to um to Florence pretty well off. So he's um 4 months before he arrives in Florence, he sends a very large sum of money about 600 duckets um to a Florentine bank. So he'll have something there waiting for him when he he returns to Florence. And just to give people a sense of how much that is, 20 duckets will rent you a very nice house in the central Florence for a year. So So Leonardo, you know, he's he's done well for himself.

[00:20:27]>> But what did you say? This was 1,500. So 1500 by the time he comes back, Florence's golden age has passed.

[00:20:34]They've been through the whole business with the bonfire, the vanities and southern arola.

[00:20:37]>> Mhm.

[00:20:37]>> The Meduche have actually been kicked out of Florence, haven't they? And Florence is a republic again. And the biggest development, you know, one of the great developments in medieval Italian or early modern Italian history.

[00:20:47]The French invasion of 1494 has thrown Italy into total tumult. Schwartz has been kicked out in Milan. The French have been rampaging through um the Italian peninsula and they are the big power brokers now and basically Leonardo that leaves Leonardo a bit of drift doesn't it? He needs a new patron because he doesn't have the military he doesn't have Schwarzer. Yeah. So that's why he's left Milan is as you say Schwartzer has been kicked out but the problem is that even though he's a very big name I mean he's he's famous across Italy he does also bring a certain amount of baggage with him. So in particular he has a reputation for never finishing projects. So um Georgio Vasari um who will will write the first biography of Leonardo famously says of Leonardo that he started many things and never finished them. And the most notorious example of this had happened in Milan, which was a massive equestrian monument to the father of um Ludvikos Schwartza that ends up being um aborted when the French invade Italy because the Milanes need the uh the bronze that um that was going to be used for the mold.

[00:21:57]They need to turn it into artillery to try and stop the French. Doesn't work.

[00:22:01]And when the the the the French occupy Milan, they shoot up the great clay model of this equestrian statue that Leonardo had made. So there's there's nothing left of it. Um and this cast a slight shadow over his reputation. So there's a story that when um Michelangelo, who is younger than Leonardo and should probably be showing him respect, when Michelangelo meets Leonardo, he scoffs at him and says that um the casting of the bronze had been beyond Leonardo's technological abilities. And I think that this is a kind of um a reproach that he has to bear, however unfairly. There's also the problem that he hasn't actually done that many paintings while he was in Florence. And the most famous painting, the Last Supper, I mean, this isn't readily accessible for anyone from Florence and it's probably already starting to fade because Leonardo's experimented with mad kinds of paints.

[00:22:52]So he is actively looking for commissions and not just to make money but also I think as a way of advertising what he can do as an artist because every painting will be able to serve him as a kind of calling card. And so the first two years that he's back in Florence we know from his records that he is taking on a lot of work. He's doing a taking a lot of commissions.

[00:23:14]>> These commissions do not include the Mona because as I say we have detailed records. The Mona isn't mentioned in them. And in fact, it is a part of the mystery of the painting that the Mona isn't mentioned in any of Leonardo's surviving drawings, any of his surviving notebooks. So that, you know, that adds a certain quality of of of mystery to it. So he goes on, he he works, I mean, unbelievably, one day we'll do a series on the Borges. And he works for Chesari Bger, doesn't he? As chief engineer, so making tanks and helicopters for the Borges.

[00:23:47]>> Yeah. So that's in 1502 through the to the early months of 1503. And then 1503, the spring of 1503, he is back in Florence. Some critics and biographers think this is the point when he did the Mona Lisa. Others like Kenneth Clark who did the Great Civilization BBC series at the end of the 60s. He thought it might have been a year later, 1504.

[00:24:10]Um, so let's say 1503, 1504 or possibly even a later date. That's when he does the Mona Lisa.

[00:24:16]>> Yeah. So this is a debate that again has been running and running and running. So it's 1503 to perhaps 1511 1512. This this this is the kind of the yeah the range of dates.

[00:24:25]>> But the bigger question which I suppose is is allied to that is who is the person in the picture? And I mean the name Mona Lisa it's later. I mean it becomes popularized in the 19th century but it's first coined in what the 1540s by Georgio Vasari who you've already mentioned in his great book the lives of the artists the great biographer of Renaissance Italy. Yeah. So kind of 160 portrait sketches of of of the artists of the age. Visari's great hero is Michelangelo but he does give Leonardo a decent write up. And so if we if we estimate that the amount of space that Pasari gives to an artist is a reflection of um how much he esteems the artist then Michelangelo is number one.

[00:25:11]Uh then Raphael >> then Jotto um much earlier painter of course um and then Leonardo. So Leonardo is number four.

[00:25:20]>> Pretty good podium. I mean one of them one of one of them is not getting a medal.

[00:25:23]>> Leonardo not quite podiuming there is he? He's he's just missed bronze.

[00:25:27]>> Yeah. So this is what Fari has to say.

[00:25:30]He mentions the Mona explicitly. He writes, "Leonardo undertook to paint the portrait of the wife of Franchesco delgioondo."

[00:25:39]Mona Lisa. So I mean there's one thing.

[00:25:42]It's not the Mona Lisa, it's the Mona Lisa properly. Um but it gives us the name. Uh and Mona is Maisa. So my lady Lisa. But that sentence also gives us the name that is used in Italy and in France. So in Italy it's Lajia. In France it's um Ljacond and there's a pun there. So it's the feminine form of Lisa's husband's name. So essentially it's kind of Mrs. Giaondo Lajia.

[00:26:11]But Giaond and Jacond they mean in Italian and French respectively kind of happy, cheerful, joyous. Um, and Visari implies in his life of Leonardo that Leonardo leaned into this pun and that Mona's smile was key to his vision of the painting right from the very start.

[00:26:30]So, Vasari writes, "While he was painting Mona, who was a very beautiful woman, he had her constantly entertained by singers, musicians, and gesters so that she would be merry and not look melancholic as portraits often do. As a result, in this painting of Leonardo's, there was a smile so enchanting that it was more divine than human. And those who saw it marveled to find it so similar to that of the living original.

[00:26:53]>> I mean, I think again that's attributing the smile with more jolly than the painting deserves. Anyway, that anecdote may not even be true, right?

[00:27:02]>> Possibly, but possibly not because um when Vizari wrote up that anecdote, he was living in Florence uh just a short distance from the Geioondo family home at a time when Monisa was still alive.

[00:27:15]So it is perfectly possible that he got that directly from Lajia's mouth. I mean we can't know but it's possible I would say.

[00:27:25]>> So who is she? Who's who's her husband?

[00:27:27]What's going on there?

[00:27:28]>> I mean he's literally called Mr. Happy but um isn't >> well as well he should be because um Franchesco Deljondo is doing very well for himself. So he's very ambitious.

[00:27:40]He's very upwardly mobile and he's becoming incredibly rich. his of humble background his grandfather had begun as an artisan in the barrel making business and he ends up running an entire barrel making empire. Um then uh Franchesco's father had moved on from the barrel making um into textiles which is the obvious place that you go for kind of high-end products much more money to be made >> and Geocondo himself then expands into silks into money lending and into sugar.

[00:28:13]So this is the the early days of the Atlantic sugar economy.

[00:28:19]>> Yeah. Yeah. And it has been thought that perhaps um Mona had access to lots of sugar and her teeth rotted and this is why she's not showing her her her teeth.

[00:28:29]And that's one of the clues to the mystery of the smile. That's really trying too hard. But this is a very familiar Florentine journey. You start uh like the medi did. You make money in one thing, then you move into I mean textiles, wool is what um Florentine money is based on and then you move into banking or money lending or whatever and you diversify. So what Franchesco was doing is absolutely standard and and then he does the standard thing which is that he invests all a lot of his money into land doesn't he? So especially now that the war has broken out with the French and Italy is absolutely being ravaged and ripped apart it makes sense to invest in property and in land because that is the safest possible bet.

[00:29:07]And of course what you also do and this is a timeless story I mean we see it so much in English history as well is that if you are socially mobile from a humble background you invest in um an upperass wife and this is what Francesco does by marrying um Lisa Gerardini because Lisa Gerardini is from an ancient Tuscan family um that ranked as one of the original founders of the Florentine Republic. So, a tremendous aristocratic pedigree. It is obviously a bit embarrassing for Lisa that she has to marry the grandson of a barrel maker.

[00:29:47]But her father is is not a good businessman. He's running short of money. He needs money. And so, he essentially sells Lisa to Franchesco.

[00:29:57]And, you know, it's it's a good marriage. So, Lisa is 15 when she marries Franchesco. Um, Franchesco is 30 and she is his second wife and as we've heard will end up outliving him. And I think that although the um the context for the marriage is a mercenary one, it seems to have been a relatively successful marriage. So Franchesco keeps his side of the bargain by becoming fabulously rich and Lisa sticks to hers by having lots of children and she has six in all. Um, four of them survive infancy. And she also um she brings up a son of Franchesco's by his first wife and again their relationship seems to have been very good. All the evidence points to the fact that she was a a very kind and supportive stepmother.

[00:30:43]There is one scandal which erupts in 1512 and it's focused on Lisa's daughter Camila who the year before so in 1511 had become a nun at the age of 12. So I mean it's quite early but it's a way essentially um of avoiding having to pay a diary for her. So you either marry her off or you park her in a nunny and that's what they do with Camila.

[00:31:09]>> And in 1512 four men including madly a brother of the cardinal of Pavia um are reported to have climbed um up a ladder into the convent where Camila was installed. And two nuns it is said were waiting for them. And the uh the intruders, I quote, touched the breasts of the said nuns. And there was apparently lots of fondling and groping.

[00:31:32]And Camila is said to have been one of these two nuns. And the four men were found guilty, but the two nuns were absolved. So a whiff of scandal, but perhaps no more than that.

[00:31:43]>> Yeah. But apart from that, Lisa's life is pretty uneventful, isn't it? So as you said, Francesco 15 years her senior, he dies in 1537. And in his will, he says she is his beloved uh noble spirit, a faithful wife. She lives to a pretty good age for the time, 70. Shu dies about 12 or 13 years later. We don't know exactly when. And that's all we know. That's all we know of this character, >> which is amazing because if she is the person in the Mona Lisa, >> then her face has a claim to be the most famous face of anyone who's lived in the whole of history, which is a a kind of jaw-dropping thought.

[00:32:22]>> Wow. Yeah. But is she the woman? Because there are some critics who say this is not the woman. She may not have existed at all. This may be a fictional person.

[00:32:31]And this may be a kind of um just a generic embodiment of of female beauty or of um you know a feminine elegance and grace or whatever because for example there is no record of Leonardo having been paid by anybody for this painting right and if he had done it for a rich patron you would assume he would have been paid and he would have kept the receipt. Yeah. And he keep seems to have kept the painting with him until he died. Um we've got that landscape which is is not a realistic landscape. It's not a a landscape that anyone can identify. Um, so is this fantastical background painted in that way because it's appropriate to a woman who also is invented? And we do know from his notebooks that Leonardo was very interested in the the kind of the notion of there being ideal beauty. Is the Mona not a real person at all? But what if she's a real person? I think that certainly for the past 200 years there's been a feeling that the Mona Lisa is a bit boring. I mean she's just the wife of an Italian businessman. Um couldn't she be someone slightly more interesting?

[00:33:40]>> So there have been various candidates.

[00:33:42]So one of them is um a woman called Pacifica Brandano and she was the mistress of um the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, a guy called Juliano Demedi. Um and he ends up returning to Florence, reestablishing Meditary rule, and he's essentially the kind of the autocrat of Florence between 1513 and 1516.

[00:34:03]Um why does anyone think that um the Mona might be this this woman, Pacifica Brandano? There's actually quite a good reason. It's because the only person that we know of who saw the Mona in the lifetime of Leonardo and described it in writing, he claimed that the painting had been commissioned by Giuliano. um and if so then wouldn't it be his mistress?

[00:34:26]>> Then there's um another much more famous woman who is identified with the Mona and this is Isabella Deste who was the marquees of uh Manua and she's the most famous the most celebrated female patron of the arts in the Renaissance and again there are there are reasons for thinking that it might be her. So she was always imploring Leonardo to paint her portrait. Um, Leonardo actually went to Manua and made sketches of her. We've said that the the the backdrop to the Mona, the landscape is fantastical.

[00:34:57]Assuming that it isn't, assuming that it is actually a portrait of somewhere in Italy. Um, it might be the Doommites. I mean, much more likely to be the Doommites than Tuskanyany. Um, and Manua is quite near the the Doommites. And also uh in the painting she's seated on a chair with an armrest and the armrest apparently is uh often used to symbolize a ruler.

[00:35:23]>> I think the way that you're narrating that suggests to me that you absolutely do not believe it. I mean it doesn't look like the Dolommites at all.

[00:35:30]>> I think that there is a slight quality of people not wanting to believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays and it would be much more fun if it was the Earl of Oxford or Christopher Marlo or someone.

[00:35:38]>> That is exactly what I thought when I when you started down this line. And I thought this is exactly what it is.

[00:35:43]People just do not want a humd drum explanation and they're they're groping desperately for something exotic.

[00:35:48]>> Okay. Well well let's continue with some slightly more exotic ones. So um Sigman Freud guess who he thinks your laser is.

[00:35:56]>> Amaze me and tell me that it's not his mother.

[00:35:58]>> It is his mother. So Freud suggested that that the smile this famous smile was inspired by Leonardo's childhood memories of his mother's smile.

[00:36:08]>> Sometimes a smile is just a smile segment.

[00:36:10]>> Yeah. sometimes. Um, another very popular theory recently is that it's this guy Salai, who was Leonardo's apprentice, um, his friend, worked in his workshop, um, and was almost certainly his lover.

[00:36:23]>> Hold on. Salai is a bloke.

[00:36:24]>> Salai's a bloke. Yeah.

[00:36:26]>> Okay, that's a this is a stretch.

[00:36:28]>> So, Salai is, you know, he he serves Leonardo as a model for his painting of John the Baptist, which is in the Louvre together with the Mona. He provides a model for a sketch of of an angel.

[00:36:43]And the idea that uh the Mona might be another portrait of Salai was proposed um 15 years ago by an Italian art historian called Silano Vincenti. The reason that he advances this is that Vincenti says that um the Mona's facial features do resemble those of Salai and you can see them if you compare it to to Leonardo's painting of John the Baptist.

[00:37:04]Also, he says that you can see the letter S in Mona's eyes if you look very closely and squint and stand on your head while you're doing it.

[00:37:13]>> Right.

[00:37:13]>> Yeah. Good luck doing that in the Lou.

[00:37:16]>> And we compared it to Shakespeare. There was a guy, wasn't there, who went who wanted to dig up Shakespeare's body to prove that it wasn't actually Shakespeare. And has he's kind of he's very much on that groove because he wanted to go to the site um where Lisa Galadini had been buried and to dig her up and to find a skull, use it to reconstruct her features and thereby prove that she couldn't have been the sitter um in the Mona. Then two final theories just before we come to the break. One theory is the Mona is a portrait of Leonardo himself.

[00:37:51]And this was first suggested back in 1913 by a French painter called Maurice V. And he argued that the lower half of the face is female, but the upper half is Leonardo's. And in 1987, an American artist called Lilian Schwartz made a famous computer mashup of the Mona with the self-portrait of Leonardo, the kind of famous one. It's presumed to be self-portrait. We don't know for sure, but it's the one where he kind of looks like Gandalf. He's got the long white hair and the, you know, they match up pretty well. And can kind of see how perhaps there's a hint there of them having the same facial features. And then finally, we have um a theory that's been proposed by top symbologist Robert Langon.

[00:38:35]Um, and he proposes that the Mona Lisa is an androgynous fusion of the Egyptian god Ammon, so A M O N, >> an anagram of Mona, and the goddess Isis, aka Lisa, so Mona, Lisa, it's all there. Um, and Robert Langdon, of course, is the hero of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. Um, and this is what Dan Brown has Langden say. Gentlemen, not only does the face of Mona Lisa look androgynous, but her name is an anagram of the divine union of male and female.

[00:39:11]And that, my friends, is Da Vinci's little secret. Da Vinci again and the reason for Mona Lisa's knowing smile.

[00:39:18]>> Do you know who says this? Tom Hanks.

[00:39:20]Tom Hanks says it in the film. A person who's been on the rest is history and yet and had no shame about his involvement in that film.

[00:39:28]>> So, uh, are you convinced by any of those?

[00:39:30]>> No, of course. I mean, I have to say, Tom, I think the way you've set it up suggests to me that it's none of these people because you've said it with a degree of skepticism. I mean, it's definitely not that bloke who's a bloke.

[00:39:40]I I think that's a definite no. And I also don't think it's half of it is Leonardo da Vinci's face. Okay. However, what is undoubtedly the case is that throughout the 20th century, it was generally accepted by art historians that absolute certainty about the identity of the Mona Lisa was impossible. So I will quote Donald Cissoon who is the author of the definitive history of the Mona. I've drawn a lot on his book for for for this episode and at the end of his book he declares himself agnostic as to who the painting portrays. So to quote him, my conclusion is that the evidence is too scanty for us to arrive at any firm identification. We shall never know. Not that this will stop people from trying.

[00:40:20]And of course he's quite right. People do continue to try. He then added this reflection. There is always the remote possibility that some new evidence will be unearthed. And do you know Dominic?

[00:40:32]Do you know listeners? He was not wrong because four years later after Donald Cassoon wrote that in 2005, exactly such a piece of new evidence was unearthed. And the brilliant thing about it, it conclusively proves who the woman portrayed in the Mona Lisa had been. And more than that, it specifies pretty precisely exactly when Leonardo had begun painting it.

[00:41:03]>> Criy, what a bombshell. Ladies and gentlemen, do not go away. We will return after the break with these stunning revelations.

[00:41:18]Welcome back everybody to the rest is history. I am waiting with baited breath to find out who the Mona Lisa really was and when the great painting was painted.

[00:41:28]Tom, you promised us an absolute bombshell. I hope you're going to deliver. Okay, so let's go to the Florentine Chancellory in October 1503 where a clark in the chancel is reading an addition of the letters of the great Roman orator Cicero. This is a guy called Agostino Vaspuchcci. He's a very clever, very well-connected man. So, he's a humanist scholar. And of course, humanist scholars, all they do at this point is read Cicero.

[00:41:56]>> Yeah.

[00:41:56]>> He's an assistant to uh Nicolo Machaveli, famous uh author of uh political treatises. and he is a professional associate of Leonardo because he's one of the administrators who just recently have signed a a contract with Leonardo to paint the the great council hall in Florence with a spectacular battle scene, an illustration of a a great Florentine victory. And as he's reading this book, this guy Vaspuchcci comes across um a reference in one of Cicero's letters to a famous Greek painter called Appelles.

[00:42:32]As Cisro describes the Pelleles as someone who had completed with the most polished art the head and bust of Venus but left the other part of her body in Kuwait. Vaspuchcci is very struck by this and he um reaches for um a pen and he makes a note in the margin and he writes a pelle is the painter. That is what Leonardo da Vinci does in all his pictures as in the head of Lisa Delgiaondo and Anne the mother of Mary.

[00:42:59]We will see what he will do in the hall of the great council which he has now contracted to decorate and then he dates it 1503 October.

[00:43:06]>> Whoa.

[00:43:07]>> So a massive massive bombshell. Freud is wrong. Dr. Robert Langden is wrong. I mean everyone who thought it wasn't the Mona is wrong. And so a huge shout out to Dr. Armen Schleer who is a librarian in the university library in H Highleberg. Um and he made the discovery in 2005. And just to list what it proves to make it clear, Vasari was absolutely right. The Mona Lisa is a portrait of Franchesco Delicaconda's wife, Lisa Gardini. Leonardo began the painting in 1503, which makes perfect sense because, as we said, in 1502, he'd been off um in Rome working as chief engineer for Cheser Borgger. And in 1504, of course, he's going to start work on this great battle scene in the the Florentine Council Hall. We also know that Lisa had just given birth to her second son. And so you can imagine that that might be a cause of celebration, something that her husband might want to mark by commissioning a portrait. And we can even work out um who might have introduced Leonardo to Francesco because Leonardo's father, Sir Pierro, was Franchesco's lawyer. And so I think that this clearly in a sense dethizes the Mona. It's it's not a portrait of Leonardo in drag. It it's not his mother. It's not the sacred feminine. We can set the commissioning of the Mona absolutely in the context of daily life in Florence. These kind of networks of social relations that made the city run.

[00:44:45]you know, family proud businessmen, commissions, lawyers, all of this. So, on one level, there's no mystery.

[00:44:53]However, >> yeah, there are lots of questions, aren't there? Because, for example, if he did this as a commission, why does he not hand it over and get paid for it?

[00:45:02]Why doesn't he give it to the Jacondo family?

[00:45:04]>> Yeah, I mean, that's that is a massive question. So, I mean, various answers to that question have been suggested. maybe the chance to use it as a calling card, as um an advertisement for his talents, it ends up being worth more to him than the the fee he would have got from Franchesco. Um maybe he can't bear to to finish it. So Visari in his biography says that Leonardo never finished it. Or maybe, you know, it does have some special meaning for him. Maybe he does see it as his great masterpiece. Maybe he just can't bear to be separated from it. And it's certainly the case that right from the beginning it is viewed by everyone who sees it as a really revolutionary painting. So the pose of its sitter, the lielike quality of the portrait, the mysterious quality of the landscape, all of this combines to make it seem to people who come and see it really kind of thrilling, really innovative. So that really surprises me because as a Mona Lisa skeptic as it were, I'd always assumed that the aesthetic value of it was, as it were, projected onto it later. Once it became famous, people said, "Oh, it's obviously brilliant, blah, blah, blah." But people probably didn't think it was brilliant at the time. But you're telling me that's wrong. And that even at the time, for example, other Renaissance painters thought, "This is special."

[00:46:23]>> Yeah. So Raphael is in Florence at the time when Leonard is painting it. um he comes and sees it and he's blown away by it and it's a patently a massive influence on Raphael's painting and this distinctive pose that the Mona Lisa has it's very widely copied um so much so that that pose comes to be called the geoconda so it's that famous and by the end of his life Leonardo has become a tourist attraction in his own right and having the chance to see the Mona Lisa is a part of the package when people come and visit Leonardo they want to see this painting Um now when Leonardo dies he's not actually in Florence he's not even in Italy he is um in France at on the Lir um he dies there on the 2nd of May 1519 and the story is that he dies in the arms of the French king Frua Premier Francis I because Leonardo had gone to the court of Francis I in 1516 and he goes there partly because there are just no patrons worthy of his status who are willing to employ him in Italy and partly because Francis I really really wants him and is willing to pay anything. And it actually reminds me a bit of the way in which Muhammad bin Salman, the strong man of Saudi Arabia, um paid an obscene amount of money for the Salvati, this painting that has been attributed to Leonardo. There are, you know, there are plenty of people who think it isn't a Leonardo. Um, but it's now gone to Saudi Arabia rather in the way that Leonardo went to the court of Francis I.

[00:47:57]And when Leonardo dies, Francis I makes sure to buy the Mona.

[00:48:03]And the result of this is that the painting is going to end up becoming part of the cultural patrimony not of Italy but of France. And this is crucial for its future history. So it's become part of French tradition. But in the next couple of centuries, the French don't make a huge amount of it, do they?

[00:48:25]So, for example, in 1625, Louis the 13th actually gives it away. He well, he agrees to give it away to the Duke of Buckingham with his famously long legs, great favorites of uh James I.

[00:48:37]Basically, Buckingham's going to give him a holine and I think a tish and it's actually Louise Cortiers who say, "Hold on, this is actually quite a good painting. Don't give it away."

[00:48:46]>> Yeah. It's such a shame because the Mona Lisa could have ended up in London. See, I think if it had ended up in London, maybe it wouldn't have been such a big deal.

[00:48:52]>> I think you're absolutely right. But it is you're you're right that kind of for two centuries after Leonardo's death, the painting does go into eclipse. So, you know, it it's not showcased. It's not a great treasure of the French king.

[00:49:04]Um, in 1695, it it gets moved to Versailles, but it's put in a pretty obscure corridor. I mean, it's not something that most people would would would notice. And then in 1750 there's a very clear demonstration of of how the Mona is rated because 110 of the best paintings in the royal collection at Versailles are put on display at the Pal de Luxmbborg in Paris for the delectation of invited visitors. So 110 paintings. The Mona is not one of those 110 paintings. So it's not even top 100.

[00:49:38]So that complicates things because you said right at the beginning, oh, people thought it was amazing right from the start. But obviously now there's a period where people don't think it's amazing and something changes, doesn't it? That is because Renaissance painting goes out of fashion. There isn't a category of Renaissance painting at that point and Leonardo's luster has dimmed.

[00:49:56]Theostumous reputation of Leonardo is also bound up with the kind of the the decline in the the the value of the Mona.

[00:50:03]>> So what's changed? What changes? And when is it the the wake of the French Revolution? It's always the French Revolution, isn't it? Yeah, French Revolution is crucial because of course suddenly, you know, these paintings are not stuffed away in a royal palace. They are being brought out for the people to admire and enjoy. And the revolutionaries um set up a great new museum in the Louvre um and the Mona is moved there. It it it is briefly transferred to Napoleon's bedroom along with a load of other paintings. So it's in Napoleon's bedroom from 1800 up to when he becomes emperor in 1804. And the Mona then goes back to the Louvre and from that point on the Mona is on public display in the world's largest and most prestigious museum. You know Paris is the acknowledged capital of European high culture. And so it's in the right place now for it to start ascending the list to go up, you know, towards the kind of the the top of the pops, but slower process than you would think. So it 1852 there was a list drawn up a sort of estimate of all the artworks in the Louvre and they they ranked their value, didn't they? And the Mona Lisa was ranked at 90,000 Franks, but there's a painting by Tishon at 150,000. And there's one by Raphael at 400,000 Franks. Another Raphael at 600,000 Franks. So by those criteria, the Mona Lisa is still relatively a minnow. Yeah.

[00:51:34]But then progressively over the course of the 19th century, um the Mona starts to benefit from really quite profound changes in cultural and intellectual tastes. And I guess that the most influential of those is romanticism. You know, it's a very broad brush word, but let's use it as a shorthand. So, it's shorthand for the worship of genius, admiration for works of art that have a sense of mystery, perhaps of incompletion about them. Um, and of course, a fascination with wild and sublime landscapes. Romantics love a wild and sublime landscape. And all of this massively helps to inflate the reputation of Leonardo who over the course of the 19th century starts to be seen as not just a genius but the supreme genius of as we will see what comes to be called the Renaissance. And the reason for this is precisely the range of things that he does. You know he's a painter. He leaves lots of his paintings unfinished. Romantics love that. But he's also someone who's interested in mountains and tanks and fetuses and swans and eyeballs and everything, just everything. And so people, you know, romantics love that.

[00:52:47]And so he comes to be seen as a universal genius. And if he's a universal genius, then what can the Mona Lisa be but a universal woman? So in other words, the fating of Leonardo, the establishment of Leonardo as the archetype of a great genius is the absolutely necessary precondition for the fating of the Mona as the greatest painting of all time. So to quote Donald Cissoon, the Mona acquired its special status because of its association with Leonardo, not the other way round. So I think Leonardo as supreme genius that is one crucial um influence on the inflation of the Mona Lisa's reputation. The other one and this is what Walter Petra is all about.

[00:53:35]Romantics have a massive thing for for predatory females for for for fatal as they come to be called. And there's a brilliant book which um was published way back in 1933 which covers this. Um it's called the romantic agony translated into English. It's by an Italian critic called um Mario Praz. And he writes brilliantly about how over the course of the 19th century male artists and writers become obsessed with a a very distinctive vision of female beauty and to quote PR tainted with pain, corruption and death. And Praz writes about how by the end of the 19th century, this beauty had become illumined with the smile of the Giaond.

[00:54:20]And this is where Walter Peter comes in.

[00:54:22]He's a massive massive influence on the English speaking world. That passage that you read, I mean, it may seem kind of, you know, purple to us, but it it it it determines how people in the English speaking world see the Mona for generations and generations. But the guys who really go big on this unsurprisingly since they own it are the French. So I'll cite two two writers in particular. And the first is Teil Goier who was a poet um a novelist a critic and he is the guy who before Peter establishes Mona as not just as an archetype of beauty but as an eternal archetype of beauty. Someone who has essentially existed since the beginning of time. She's older than Egypt. She's older than Greece. older than Rome. So to quote uh Goautier, she is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. So a bit like Cleopatra there who Cleopatra was supposed to to sleep with men and then kill them. She has the supreme countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beautiful forever and certain to be greater than the ideal of poets and artists. So again, perhaps the hint there of the vampire, someone who is always beautiful, feeding off the blood of her prey. People are projecting an awful lot onto Mona Lisa, aren't they? But but I mean another example, the historian Jean Mishle wrote an enormous history of the French Revolution. The first historian to use the word Renaissance by the way um or at least to to take it back up from Visari and to popularize it. And and Mich goes even further, doesn't he? He basically says, you know, the Monaise is a um is a dominatri. Is that too strong? A dominatrix?

[00:56:00]>> Well, you can read read what he said about her. This canvas attracts me, revolts me, consumes me, and I go to her in spite of myself as the bird of the snake. But you can see, I mean, this is all kind of very exciting for people in Victorian parlor reading this kind of thing. And of course, as the 19th century goes on towards the 20th century, photography for the first time is starting to um be equal to the challenge of capturing the image of the Mona. So by the end of the the 19th century, you've got all this purple pros about uh vampires and snakes and things and for the first time you have images of the Mona that are very easy to reproduce and so people can can actually look at it without having to go to the Louver and kind of see it in the flesh as it were.

[00:56:51]And I would say that by the beginning of the 20th century, the Mona is probably the most famous painting in the Louvrea, probably one of the the most famous paintings in the world. It's kind of had a very meteoric rise. But there's one final thing that's needed to complete its ascent to the absolute top of the echelon. And this happens on the 21st of August, 1911.

[00:57:16]And what happens puts the Mona on the front page of newspapers around the world. So 21st of August 1911, it's a Monday and the Louvera is shut for cleaning. While it's shut, people walk through the room in which the Mona is kept and they find that it's gone. There is only the empty frame in which it had been contained and there is complete outrage. the director of France's museums is sacked. Um, the Petty Parisier, which is at the time was the world's largest circulation newspaper, splashed the painting on the front page together with the the brilliantly costly comment. Well, at least we still have the frame. Um, the news goes around Paris, around France, around the world. huge crowds kind of descend on the louver go to look at where the painting had been much larger crowds than had ever assembled when the Mona Lisa was actually in situ and there's a desperate kind of inspector type pursuit of the of the painting which is always raking up ludicrous suspects. So one of them is uh the famous poet Guom Apollinaire who is arrested and Apollinaire and a friend of his who is an upand cominging Spanish painter resident in Paris at the time called Pablo Picasso um actually end up on trial u both a polinaire and Picasso are acquitted. It's a suggestion of how this crime um is not only inflating the reputation of the Mona Lisa, but is also kind of rubbing up against artists and poets and painters who are the cutting edge of the avantgard which I think is another part of why the Mona suddenly comes to seem much more interesting to people than it had previously done.

[00:59:04]However, the police seem helpless. A year passes. Um, there are no leads and by 1913, so that's a couple of years after the theft, the Mona is removed from the catalog of the Louver. It's basically an admission of defeat. You know, this painting is gone. We're never going to get it back. But then, as dramatically as it had vanished, the Mona reappears. And it reappears because in Florence where of course the Mona had originally been painted an antique dealer called Alfredo Jerry gets a letter which has been signed Leonardo.

[00:59:41]And in this letter Leonardo says that he wants to hand over the Mona to the Aitzy the great gallery in Florence and he hints that he wants to do this for patriotic reasons. He does also say that he wants 500,000 LAR to cover his expenses, but he he's going very big on the fact that he's he's he's Italian and he's doing this for patriotic reasons.

[01:00:01]So, the antique dealer um arranges to meet him and Leonardo, Julie, arrives from Paris um and Jerry and the head curator from the Aitzy um asked to see the Mona. He kind of pulls the Mona out from his suitcase, unwraps it. The head creator of the Fitzy inspects it. It's clear it is indeed the Mona. And so uh they have the thief arrested and he turns out to be a guy called Vincenzo Perucha and he was um an Italian painter decorator who had been working um in the Loura painting the walls on the fateful Monday that the painting was stolen and he seized his chance and he just lifted it out from his frame, hidden it under his coat, um walked off um across the courtyard of the louver. He'd kind of waved at a guard and gone out through the door and that was that. and he kept it for a year and a half hidden under his bed. And you know his his motivation which he he holds to throughout his subsequent trial is that he was outraged that the Mona was in Paris. Um he thought it should be in Florence and one of the reasons why he's so outraged is he thought that Napoleon had stolen it from the Aitzy. So this was his motivation >> and there's no reason to doubt that he was genuinely sused with kind of nationalist enthusiasm, is there? The problem is he he turns out to be really boring. You know, people had wanted a a master criminal, a kind of gentleman cracksman. Um, and he's not at all. And because he does not become the focus of media attention, which he might otherwise have done, instead the the star is Mona and what the previously the painting had been called it. It's from this point on that the Mona starts to be feminized. The Mona is she. She is coming back to Paris. She is returning to the Louvrea. She is being put back in her frame. And when she is put back in her frame in the Loura, she sits from that point on as the absolute symbol, the absolute embodiment of high art, of high culture with capital letter, both of them, capital letters.

[01:02:08]Um, and from that point on, the reputation of the Mona as the embodiment of the Renaissance, of Western art, of art full stop is absolutely secure.

[01:02:19]Although it does have the kind of paradoxical effect that now the Mona Lisa is the icon of high art. Of course, enthusiasts of high art start to turn against it and to say, "Oh, it's a bit vulgar. It's a bit trashy. It's She becomes the embodiment of middlebrow art enthusiasm, doesn't she?" I mean, isn't that the, you know, somebody, if you're a student and you go in and somebody's got a print of the Mona Lisa on their wall, you kind of think you don't really know much about art, don't do you not think?

[01:02:44]>> Yeah, it's a classic FM of of art. But this internal course, I mean, only um fuels her further ascent into the stratosphere of fame and you can see it operating in all kinds of ways. So, because she's famous, because people are meant to take her seriously and and kind of offer her obeasance, of course, she starts to be parodyied. And the most famous of these parodies is done in 1919. So only you know um a few years after her her abduction and return. And this is done by the artist Marcel Duchamp who's also very keen on um urininals. And he gets a postcard of the Mona and he draws a mustache and a goatee on it. Um and he calls it in English uses the um the letters L H O O Q. But Dominic, with your mastery of French, do you want to just explain to people what that means in French? It's a tremendous example of French humor. L H O O Q in French is L au which means she is basically she's hot in the ass. She's hot in the behind. Um so tremendous banter there from Marcel Gong.

[01:03:49]>> Outrage and constonation and of course the scandal just further amplifies the Mona Lisa's fame. Um, then of course there's mass reproduction. So the more scope for reproducing the Mona laser, the more she's reproduced. Um, and it's really telling that in 1963 she is the first painting to be uh reproduced by Andy Warhol. I mean that's the true measure of fame. Um, and Warhol had been inspired to do it by the fact that in 1963 the Mona had come to uh to America, a kind of diplomatic gift from dele Kennedy. And so that makes the Mona even more famous in America. Then in 1974 it visits Japan and that kind of lights the fuse on Japanese enthusiasm for going to the Loura and taking photographs of the Mona Lisa. And I would say that it's not an exaggeration that now the Mona ranks not just as the archetype of high art but kind of as the ultimate global icon of tourism. I mean, it's the one object in the world probably that tourists, the mass of tourists want to see more than anything else. I mean, it is the single most popular object held by any museum in the world. And the Louvre is the most visited museum. Um, you have 9 million people going there a year and I think according to surveys, more than half of those people say that they're going specifically to see the Mona Lisa. So, it it now has its own dedicated room.

[01:05:19]It's got its own kind of crowd management procedures. It's got its own security arrangements, but it's still kind of messing up the ability of the louver to present all its other paintings because the the curators in the Louvre have always insisted that the Mona be presented as a Renaissance painting. So alongside other Renaissance paintings and the effect is that people just you know they rush past all the other Renaissance paintings including Leonardo's picture of John the Baptist and they all kind of gather around uh the Mona and so the plan now this is part of uh President Mron's kind of Napoleonist ambitions his grand prog his uh is going to be his kind of final legacy project and he's called it the new renaissance um he so the Mona Lisa is going to be moved to an underground gallery is going to be entirely exclusive to the Mona Lisa. There will be no other work of art inside it and that is scheduled to open in 2031.

[01:06:14]So Lisa Gerardini will end up having her very own suite of rooms in the most visited museum in the world. Um, and I think that I love it that an otherwise entirely obscure Florentine woman is so astronomically insanely famous. Such an interesting story. And yet, I have to say I find it quite an unbelievably uninteresting painting. But it is a fascinating story.

[01:06:43]I think the more I I trace the history of how it's come to be famous and the the many ways in which it's been understood, the more you can see that that all these everything that people have seen in it is kind of there. I mean, it's it is kind of infinite in the ways that it can be interpreted and seen. And that might not be true of other paintings. I think the story is so interesting and it's such an interesting case study in art history and art criticism. But frankly, as a painting, I can think of hundreds of paintings I'd rather look at than the mainly. So anyway, that does not in any way diminish the story, which is fascinating. Tom Messiu and Arieti.

[01:07:23]Bye-bye.