48 Fun Facts About Mona Lisa

Which singer posed in front of the Mona Lisa with Jay-Z in the 2018 music video 'Apeshit'?

Beyoncé and Jay-Z filmed 'Apeshit' inside the Louvre, and the video is reckoned to have helped the museum draw a record 10.2 million visitors that year.

The Mona Lisa is painted in oil on a panel of which wood?

Poplar: the thin panel warped as the humidity around it changed, until a crack opened from the top edge down through the sitter's hair to her forehead.

Lisa del Giocondo, the Mona Lisa's likely sitter, was married to a merchant in which trade?

Silk was the trade of her husband, Francesco del Giocondo, yet he never received the portrait he is said to have ordered: Leonardo kept it and was still reworking it years later.

The Italian title La Gioconda puns on the sitter's married name and means what?

The happy one: gioconda is the feminine of her husband's surname, Giocondo, and also means cheerful, like the English 'jocund'. Her smile may be part of the joke, the emblem of a happy woman.

Which Renaissance biographer wrote in 1550 that Leonardo painted 'Mona Lisa' for Francesco del Giocondo?

Giorgio Vasari also wrote that Leonardo hired musicians and jesters to keep Lisa amused while she sat, to chase off the melancholy that painters tend to give their portraits.

What did a scholar find in a 1477 edition of Cicero at Heidelberg in 2005, proving Leonardo was painting Lisa by 1503?

A note in the margin: Agostino Vespucci, a clerk who worked with Machiavelli, read Cicero's mention of the painter Apelles and wrote that Leonardo was doing the same with the head of Lisa del Giocondo. He dated it October 1503.

What is Leonardo's soft, hazy blending of tones in the Mona Lisa's face called?

Sfumato comes from the Italian for 'smoked': Leonardo built the face from thin, barely tinted glazes, so light slides into shadow with no visible outline.

What does the Mona Lisa famously appear to lack?

Eyebrows and eyelashes are missing today, yet an early account praised her brows hair by hair. A 2007 high-resolution scan suggested Leonardo did paint them and that cleaning may have worn them away.

Harvard's Margaret Livingstone showed that the Mona Lisa's smile does what when you look straight at her mouth?

It seems to disappear because the smile is painted in soft shadows that the edge of your vision picks up better than its centre, so it is strongest while you look at her eyes.

Which French king hosted the ageing Leonardo and acquired the Mona Lisa?

Francis I lodged Leonardo at the manor of Clos Lucé, beside the royal castle at Amboise, and the painter probably brought the unfinished portrait with him, which is how it came to be in France.

Which physical problem around 1517 may explain why Leonardo left the Mona Lisa unfinished?

A paralysed right hand is what a visitor noted in 1517, writing that no more good work could be expected of the old master. Leonardo was left-handed and could still draw, but holding a palette may have been beyond him.

At which royal palace was the Mona Lisa kept when the French Revolution broke out?

Versailles had held it since the reign of Louis XIV, who moved it there. The Revolution then made the royal collection the property of the people, and the portrait went on public show at the Louvre.

Which ruler had the Mona Lisa taken from the Louvre to hang in his own palace apartments?

Napoleon kept it at the Tuileries for a short time, then sent it back to the museum. A century later the Italian who stole the painting claimed, wrongly, that Napoleon had looted it from Italy.

After the Mona Lisa's 1911 theft, crowds stared at what?

A bare wall, with its four iron hooks, drew thousands when the Louvre reopened. The writer Franz Kafka was among those who came to look at the gap.

Which painter did police question over the Mona Lisa's theft after arresting his friend, the poet Apollinaire?

Pablo Picasso had bought Iberian statuettes that an acquaintance of Apollinaire's had pilfered from the Louvre, so suspicion fell on both men. Neither had anything to do with the Mona Lisa, and both were cleared.

Vincenzo Peruggia, who stole the Mona Lisa, had earlier done what job at the Louvre?

Helped build the painting's glass case: Peruggia had worked for the glazier hired to protect the museum's prize pictures, so he knew how the case came apart, and a white workman's smock made him look like staff.

How was Vincenzo Peruggia caught, two years after he stole the Mona Lisa?

Offering it to an art dealer in Italy undid him: the dealer brought a gallery director to check the panel, they took it away for safekeeping, and the police arrested Peruggia at his hotel.

Where did Vincenzo Peruggia hide the stolen Mona Lisa for more than two years?

In a trunk in his room, under a false bottom, in a Paris boarding house. Police questioned him within months of the theft and did not treat him as a serious suspect.

What did a vandal throw at the Mona Lisa in 1956, chipping the paint by her elbow?

A rock, thrown hard enough to break the protective glass and chip the paint by her left elbow. The Louvre answered with a bulletproof case, which has kept later attacks from harming the picture.

What did a man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair throw at the Mona Lisa's glass in 2022?

Cake: he sprang from the wheelchair, smeared it across the bulletproof case and urged artists to 'think about the Earth' as guards led him away. The painting was unharmed.

The Mona Lisa was sprayed with red paint in Tokyo in 1974 in protest at what?

Lack of disabled access: to manage the crowds, the organisers had restricted visitors who needed assistance. The protester was detained and later fined 3,000 yen.

Which First Lady persuaded France's culture minister to lend the Mona Lisa to the United States?

Jacqueline Kennedy won André Malraux over at a White House dinner in 1962. Unveiling the portrait, her husband called it the second lady France had sent to America, after the Statue of Liberty.

Before its 1962 American trip, the Mona Lisa was valued for insurance at what record sum?

$100 million was the figure, but nobody ever bought the policy: the premiums would have cost more than the tightest security, so the money went on guarding it instead.

Where was the Mona Lisa hidden from the Nazis during World War II?

A series of French châteaux and abbeys sheltered it: crated up days before war broke out in 1939, it was moved from one country refuge to the next and came back to the Louvre in 1945.

As of 2025, the Mona Lisa hangs in which room of the Louvre?

Salle des États is the palace's biggest room, built under the Second Empire for sessions of the legislature. The museum moved its star there in 1966 to make room for her crowds.

Before portraits like the Mona Lisa, Italian painters usually showed their sitters in which pose?

Turned in strict profile was the Italian habit. Leonardo borrowed the three-quarter turn from Flemish painters and made it look like a woman turning to greet a visitor, and it became the standard pose for portraits.

Marcel Duchamp's 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. added what to a cheap print of the Mona Lisa?

A moustache and goatee, pencilled onto a postcard. The joke voiced Dada's scorn for the revered art of a civilisation that had just produced the First World War.

Which pop artist answered the Mona Lisa's 1963 visit to America with a Mona Lisa of his own?

Andy Warhol took the painting's American visit as his cue and screen-printed her face again and again across one picture, Colored Mona Lisa. In 2015 it sold for $56.2 million.

Which singer took 'Mona Lisa', an Oscar-winning film song, to number one in 1950?

Nat King Cole's record put the song on the B-side, and its co-writer Jay Livingston recalled that the first ads did not even mention it. It went to number one anyway.

After a 2012 cleaning, the Prado's copy of the Mona Lisa turned out to have been painted where?

In Leonardo's own studio: under a coat of black overpaint lay a landscape like the original's, and scans showed the copyist repeating the master's changes of mind as he made them.

The disputed Isleworth Mona Lisa, unveiled in 2012, shows Lisa looking how beside the Louvre's portrait?

Younger, by about a decade, which is why its backers call it Leonardo's first portrait of Lisa. Leading scholars such as Martin Kemp reject that: it is on canvas, and Leonardo usually painted on wood.

Which artist sketched the Mona Lisa in pen and ink around 1505?

Raphael saw the portrait while Leonardo was still working on it and reused its pose almost at once, in paintings such as his Portrait of Maddalena Doni.

Victorian critic Walter Pater wrote that the Mona Lisa 'has been dead many times', like which creature?

The vampire: Pater added that she had 'learned the secrets of the grave'. Passages like his recast a portrait once praised for being lifelike as a figure of mystery.

One famous theory says the Mona Lisa's smile was a memory of whose smile?

Leonardo's mother, Caterina, was Sigmund Freud's answer: he thought the sitter's smile had stirred a memory of hers that the painter did not know he carried.

One researcher argued the Mona Lisa's gauze veil was a type worn by whom?

Pregnant or recently delivered women wore such a veil, a guarnello, the argument ran. Others reply that Lisa shows no sign of pregnancy and that the veil may simply be Leonardo's invention.

Why were the Louvre's galleries almost deserted when the Mona Lisa was taken in 1911?

It was the weekly closing day, a Monday, so the few people about took a man in a workman's smock for staff. More than a day passed before anyone realised the painting was gone.

In which 2022 murder mystery does a tech billionaire's borrowed Mona Lisa go up in flames?

Glass Onion has its billionaire rent the painting from the Louvre during the pandemic. When a guest sets his island mansion ablaze, the portrait burns too, and his reputation with it.

Why does the Mona Lisa look so much darker and greener than Leonardo painted it?

Its old varnish has yellowed into a filter that makes the blue sky look green and dims the lower half. The cleaned copy in Madrid now gives a better idea of the original colours than the original does.

Which star played an art history teacher at Wellesley College in the 2003 film Mona Lisa Smile?

Julia Roberts was paid $25 million, at the time the biggest fee ever earned by an actress. Her character, teaching in 1953, pushes her students to want more from life than marriage.

In which Italian city was Lisa del Giocondo, the Mona Lisa's sitter, born in 1479?

Florence: born Lisa Gherardini, she married a merchant there at fifteen and died in the city in 1542. By then her portrait had been in France for a quarter of a century.

During the 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony, who 'stole' the Mona Lisa from the Louvre?

The Minions turned out to have the painting aboard their submarine in an animated sequence made for the ceremony. After the usual mayhem it surfaced, floating in the Seine.

In 2023 a historian claimed the bridge behind the Mona Lisa is a ruined Etruscan-Roman span over which river?

The Arno: Silvano Vinceti matched the painting's four arches to the ruined Romito bridge at Laterina, where a single arch still stands. The bridges proposed before had six arches or more.

As war loomed in 1911, Paris rumour blamed which foreign ruler for the Mona Lisa's theft?

Kaiser Wilhelm II was an easy villain as tension with Germany rose: the rumour ran that the Germans had taken the painting to humiliate France. The real thief turned out to be an Italian handyman.

In 1911 the Louvre's guards first assumed the missing Mona Lisa was where?

Being photographed was the guards' guess, because the museum's photographers regularly took paintings away to shoot them. The painter Louis Béroud had to press a guard to go and ask, and only then was the alarm raised.

Why can France never sell the Mona Lisa, whatever a buyer offers?

French heritage law forbids it: works in the collections of public museums are public property and cannot be sold. In the law's eyes the painting is owned by the people.

What shape are the two wooden braces set into the back of the Mona Lisa to hold its crack together?

Butterfly: early restorers let two butterfly-shaped keys into the wood to stop a split running down from the top edge. It worked, though the upper one later came loose.

Aboard which ocean liner was the Mona Lisa shipped to the United States in 1962?

SS France gave her a first-class cabin of her own, with guards keeping watch round the clock. Three months later she sailed home on the SS United States.

Before the recovered Mona Lisa returned to France in 1914, what did Italy do with it?

Sent it on a national tour: crowds mobbed the showings before the painting crossed the border. Stolen as a picture few outside the art world knew, it came home a celebrity.