Leonardo da Vinci Paintings - Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa Painting Painting

Mona Lisa Smile (also known as La Gioconda) is a 16th century portrait painted in oil on a poplar panel by Leonardo Da Vinci during the Italian Renaissance.

Leonardo da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 and, according to Vasari, "after he had lingered over it four years, left it unfinished...."He is thought to have continued to work on it for three years after he moved to France and to have finished it shortly before he died in 1519.

Mona Lisa Painting was not well known until the mid-19th century when artists of the emerging Symbolist movement began to appreciate it, and associated it with their ideas about feminine mystique. Critic Walter Pater, in his 1867 essay on Leonardo, expressed this view by describing the figure in the painting as a kind of mythic embodiment of eternal femininity, who is "older than the rocks among which she sits" and who "has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave."

"Why is Mona Lisa Painting so famous?"
There's a mystery surrounding the Mona Lisa, as to her identity. Some people even think that it was a self portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci as he saw himself if he were a woman.
"Mona Lisa had a makeover, 3D images reveal", Cosmos magazine, September 2006.