Mona Lisa Trivia
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48 free Mona Lisa trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Mona Lisa trivia quiz covers the most famous painting in the world, from the Florentine silk merchant's wife who probably sat for it to the cake and soup thrown at its bulletproof glass in the 2020s. The easier questions handle the essentials: who painted it, where it hangs, the country that owns it and the name of the woman who was Leonardo's likely subject. The harder end is for people who have queued in the Salle des États: the wood the panel is painted on, the marginal note in a Cicero that dated the work to 1503, the king who bought it after Leonardo's death, the emperor who hung it in his bedroom, the glazier who walked out of the Louvre with it in 1911 and the poet and painter arrested in his place, the rock attack of 1956, the 1963 American tour and the record insurance figure, the Duchamp parody with a rude French pun, Nat King Cole's Oscar-winning song, and the workshop copies in Madrid and Isleworth. There are also questions on sfumato, the missing eyebrows and the science of the smile. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the painting, its sitter, its thief, its copies and the museum that holds it before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Leonardo da Vinci, art history, Renaissance and Paris quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which singer posed in front of the Mona Lisa with Jay-Z in the 2018 music video 'Apeshit'?
Beyoncé
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.
Q 02The Mona Lisa is painted in oil on a panel of which wood?
Poplar
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.
Q 03Lisa del Giocondo, the Mona Lisa's likely sitter, was married to a merchant in which trade?
Silk
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.
Q 04The Italian title La Gioconda puns on the sitter's married name and means what?
The happy one
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.
Q 05Which Renaissance biographer wrote in 1550 that Leonardo painted 'Mona Lisa' for Francesco del Giocondo?
Giorgio Vasari
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.
Q 06What 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
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.
Q 07What is Leonardo's soft, hazy blending of tones in the Mona Lisa's face called?
Sfumato
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.
Q 08What does the Mona Lisa famously appear to lack?
Eyebrows and eyelashes
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.
Q 09Harvard's Margaret Livingstone showed that the Mona Lisa's smile does what when you look straight at her mouth?
It seems to disappear
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.
Q 10Which French king hosted the ageing Leonardo and acquired the Mona Lisa?
Francis I
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.
Q 11Which physical problem around 1517 may explain why Leonardo left the Mona Lisa unfinished?
A paralysed right hand
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.
Q 12At which royal palace was the Mona Lisa kept when the French Revolution broke out?
Versailles
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.
Q 13Which ruler had the Mona Lisa taken from the Louvre to hang in his own palace apartments?
Q 21The Mona Lisa was sprayed with red paint in Tokyo in 1974 in protest at what?
Lack of disabled access
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.
Q 22Which First Lady persuaded France's culture minister to lend the Mona Lisa to the United States?
Jacqueline Kennedy
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.
Q 23Before its 1962 American trip, the Mona Lisa was valued for insurance at what record sum?
$100 million
Napoleon
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.
Q 14After the Mona Lisa's 1911 theft, crowds stared at what?
A bare wall
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.
Q 15Which painter did police question over the Mona Lisa's theft after arresting his friend, the poet Apollinaire?
Pablo Picasso
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.
Q 16Vincenzo Peruggia, who stole the Mona Lisa, had earlier done what job at the Louvre?
Helped build the painting's glass case
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.
Q 17How was Vincenzo Peruggia caught, two years after he stole the Mona Lisa?
Offering it to an art dealer
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.
Q 18Where did Vincenzo Peruggia hide the stolen Mona Lisa for more than two years?
In a trunk in his room
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.
Q 19What did a vandal throw at the Mona Lisa in 1956, chipping the paint by her elbow?
A rock
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.
Q 20What did a man disguised as an old woman in a wheelchair throw at the Mona Lisa's glass in 2022?
Cake
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.
$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.
Q 24Where was the Mona Lisa hidden from the Nazis during World War II?
A series of French châteaux and abbeys
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.
Q 25As of 2025, the Mona Lisa hangs in which room of the Louvre?
Salle des États
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.
Q 26Before portraits like the Mona Lisa, Italian painters usually showed their sitters in which pose?
Turned in strict profile
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.
Q 27Marcel Duchamp's 1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. added what to a cheap print of the Mona Lisa?
A moustache and goatee
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.
Q 28Which pop artist answered the Mona Lisa's 1963 visit to America with a Mona Lisa of his own?
Andy Warhol
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.
Q 29Which singer took 'Mona Lisa', an Oscar-winning film song, to number one in 1950?
Nat King Cole
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.
Q 30After a 2012 cleaning, the Prado's copy of the Mona Lisa turned out to have been painted where?
In Leonardo's own studio
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.