The actual size of the Mona Lisa is 77 x 53 cm (30.31 x 20.87 inches).
‘Mona’ is the spelling used in English countries; ‘Monna’ is Italian, which is the spelling recommended by the Louvre. The Mona Lisa is referred to as La Joconde in France and La Gioconda in Italy.
The masterpiece is displayed in the Louvre Museum, Paris, as a Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo.
In Leonardo’s eyes, Mona Lisa is incomplete. He started painting in 1503 and is thought to have ‘completed’ the work in 1514, but he never seemed quite satisfied. He kept the painting with him right up until his death in 1519, continually retouching and reworking.
Leonardo took Mona Lisa from Italy to France in 1516 when King Francis I invited him to work at what is now known as the Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise. In 1518, the king bought the painting for 4,000 écus, and so it was that the painting came to be in French hands – not Italian.
In the early 19th century, Mona Lisa came into the possession of Napoleon Bonaparte. He displayed the painting in his bedroom and also his bathroom, where water damage occurred to the varnish near the eye and chin.
In 1911, an Italian Louvre employee stole the Mona Lisa and hid it for two years. At the time, no one knew who stole the painting and the hunt spread far and wide. Even Pablo Picasso was implicated and questioned by police. The thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, was caught when he tried to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence with the intention of returning the piece to its ‘rightful home.’ He was hailed for his patriotism in Italy, where he served only a few months’ jail time for his crime. It wasn’t until recently that a tiny speck of orange paint was found on the Mona Lisa, thought to have been left there by Peruggia, who was also a building painter.
Until the mid-19th century, the Mona Lisa was not well known. The painting gained wide appreciation only when artists of the emerging symbolist movement discovered it, associating it with their ideas about the feminine mystique.
In 1956, the lower part of the painting was severely damaged when someone doused it with acid. On December 30 of that same year, Ugo Ungaza Villegas, a young Bolivian man, caused further damage by throwing a rock at it.
From December 1962 to March 1963, the French government lent Mona Lisa to the United States of America, to be displayed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
Mona Lisa is now considered far too valuable to move and lives permanently behind a purpose-built bulletproof glass enclosure in the Louvre.