In the Louvre museum, in the city of Paris, you can find one of the most famous pictorial works in history: the Mona Lisa, also known as A Gioconda. Its creator was the illustrious Leonardo da Vinci, a Florentine polymath of the Renaissance .
Data and curiosities of this world-renowned work
It is a portrait of a woman painted in oil and believed to be made between 1503 and 1506. As for the technique used , it is known as “sfumato”, which in Portuguese can be translated as smoky. At first, it is the representation of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francisco de Giocondo, but there is no absolute certainty about the true identity of the woman portrayed.
The most striking feature of the Mona Lisa is her strange smile, which can be interpreted as a gesture of joy or bitterness.
Several technical studies on this framework revealed important curiosities:
1) the woman pictured appears without eyelashes or eyebrows, but it can be seen that both eyelashes and eyebrows are included in the original portrait;
2) after observing the pupils with high resolution images, initials and numbers were found, which are believed to be related to the true identity of Mona Lisa (Leonardo liked esoterism and in his works introduced symbols to communicate messages);
3) at the bottom of the frame there is an image of a bridge on which there is a reference: numbers 7 and 2, which presumably refer to the floods that occurred on Ponte Vecchio, in the town of Bobbio, in northern Italy;
4) the hands of the woman pictured reveal that she is certainly pregnant;
5) in 1987 a self – portrait of Leonardo was superimposed on the Mona Lisa and it was proved that there was a great similarity between the facial features of both; this conformity gave rise to all kinds of speculation.
Mona Lisa’s famous robbery
In August 1911, the Mona Lisa inexplicably disappeared from the Louvre Museum. His theft became news with international projection. Two years later, the work could be recovered because the thief (a former employee of the Vincenzo Perugia museum) had tried to sell it to the owner of an art gallery, but he contacted the police and so the Mona Lisa was recovered . A few years later, it was discovered that the real mastermind behind the robbery was the Argentine crook Eduardo Valfierno.
The fact that the Mona Lisa was stolen has caused all sorts of conjecture and some scholars even say that the portrait of the mysterious woman in the Louvre could be a copy.
