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Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa. Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain · source

Leonardo da Vinci

Public domain1452-1519·Italian·painting·Wikipedia ↗

Who

Painter, draughtsman, engineer and anatomist, born near Vinci in Tuscany in 1452 and dead at Clos Luce, Amboise, in France, in 1519. Fewer than 25 major paintings are attributed to him, several of them unfinished, alongside the notebooks and drawings.

Why they matter

He made the portrait breathe: soft shadow instead of outline, a sitter turned and caught mid-thought, a landscape dissolving into haze behind her. The Last Supper set the pattern for a dramatic narrative scene for centuries. And the notebooks and drawings, on everything from water to anatomy to machines, are the reason "Renaissance man" means what it does.

What to buy

Prints: the National Gallery in London sells made-to-order reproductions of its own Leonardos - The Virgin of the Rocks and the Burlington House Cartoon - where you choose the size, material and frame. That is the honest source: the gallery's own photograph of the thing it owns. The Mona Lisa in poster form is everywhere and mostly muddy; the Louvre's own collection page is a better way to look at it. Books: Taschen's Leonardo. The Complete Paintings and Drawings by Frank Zollner and Johannes Nathan is the standard survey, with a catalogue raisonne of the paintings and almost 700 drawings; it is an XXL book of more than 700 pages, so check you have the shelf. Originals: not realistic. The paintings are in museums and a Milan monastery, and the one recent attribution to reach the market, the Salvator Mundi - attributed "in whole or part" to Leonardo - set the auction record for any painting in 2017. Anything offered as a Leonardo drawing on a marketplace is a facsimile.

Notes

The Louvre holds the Mona Lisa and the first version of The Virgin of the Rocks; the second version is in London. Ginevra de' Benci, bought from the Prince of Liechtenstein in 1967, is the only Leonardo painting on public view in the Americas. The Last Supper is painted on a wall of the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, so it can only be seen there.

Story

The Mona Lisa was not the most famous painting in the world until somebody stole it. On 21 August 1911, a day the Louvre was closed, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian who had worked at the museum and had helped build the painting's glass case, took it off the wall, removed the case and frame on a service stairway, and walked out after a plumber, taking him for an employee, unlocked a door for him. The police investigation that followed was enormous. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested and jailed, and he implicated his friend Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning; both were cleared. Meanwhile the painting sat in a trunk in Peruggia's Paris flat for two years. In December 1913 he took it to Florence by train and offered it to the dealer Alfredo Geri, signing himself "Leonardo V." Geri brought in Giovanni Poggi, director of the Uffizi, who confirmed it was the real thing, and the police arrested Peruggia at his hotel. He said he was returning the picture to Italy. The painting was shown at the Uffizi before going back to the Louvre on 4 January 1914. Peruggia was sentenced to a year and fifteen days and served seven months; the headlines had made the portrait a household image.

Key works

In museum collections

See the work

Louvre (Mona Lisa) ↗National Gallery, London (The Virgin of the Rocks) ↗National Gallery of Art (Ginevra de' Benci) ↗The Met ↗Art Institute of Chicago ↗Wikimedia Commons ↗

Prints

National Gallery Shop (made to order) ↗eBay ↗Amazon ↗

Books

Taschen: Leonardo. The Complete Paintings and Drawings ↗Bookshop.org ↗Amazon ↗

See also

Giorgione 1478-1510Michelangelo 1475-1564Raphael 1483-1520Titian 1490-1576Giorgio Vasari 1511-1574Paolo Veronese 1528-1588Giovanni Bellini 1430-1516Andrea del Verrocchio 1435-1488

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