On a small wooden panel measuring just 30 inches by 21 inches, is the image of a woman. She’s not particularly beautiful. She’s pretty plain and dull. She gazes out at something to her left, the hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth, her right hand resting on top of her left, her body slightly turned as if she’s in motion, twisting around to look at someone who has just called her name. She wears a thin veil over dark hair. There’s nothing spectacular about her clothing, she is unadorned, no jewelry. She’s plain. She’s borderline boring. Her name? Lisa del Giocondo. Never heard of her? Well, neither had anyone else. And yet, this small oil painting is, without a doubt, the single most famousa painting in the world. Why? How does a relatively boring portrait of an inconsequential person find its way to international acclaim and why does almost everyone in the developed world know her face but not much else? Let’s fix that. 

 

Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix, where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I’ve seen the Mona Lisa. We visited the Louvre during our honeymoon trip to Paris back in 2017. If you’re a real OG and you listened to episode 1 about the Paris catacombs then you’ve already heard a little about this trip. We were only in Paris for a couple of days but of course, of course we had to see the Mona Lisa. Why? I don’t really know. As I said already, she’s not particularly interesting. The painting is altogether underwhelming. 

 

The Louvre museum in Paris, where the Mona Lives, is massive. I cannot express to you how gigantic this building is. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced. And of course my husband, Joey, had the flu and I’m dragging him all around this marathon of a building, bless him. This was pre-covid, so you could kind of do that back then. And we’re looking at all these amazing, massive, gilded masterpieces, but really, we’re just looking for the Mona Lisa. The whole time, we’re just looking for the Mona Lisa. We finally emerge into this huge gallery with this impossibly high ceiling. The room itself is ridiculous and straight ahead is just a massive crowd of people, just hording against the far wall. They’re frantically taking selfies and trying inch in closer and closer to get a better look.  We can’t even see what they’re looking at but what else could it be? 

 

We make our way towards the crowd and squeeze through, shuffle up to front, giving everyone the flu, I’m sure, dodging selfie-sticks as we go and there she is. Just this tiny little rectangle under bulletproof glass. Tiny. Absolutely tiny against this massively oversized wall. And she looks, exactly like we already knew she looked. There was really nothing at all impressive about it. It was incredibly underwhelming at yet this crowd, this frenzy, this wasn’t happening anywhere else in the museum. I have a short video of this exact moment, when we made our way through the crowd to first lay eyes on the Mona Lisa. Joey says, he didn’t know I was taking a video he says “She’s almost looking out at everybody and going ‘you’re stupid.’” Ever the comedian. I’m gonna put it on Instagram for sure so if you follow me on there you can see that. 

 

But yeah, it was underwhelming. We were all stupid. We stared for a few seconds and then we were like, eh okay, let’s get out of here. And that was that. And yet, the Mona Lisa is a BIG deal. I’ve known this my whole life. It’s just a thing people know. They know about the Mona Lisa and they know it’s a big deal. But few people actually question why. Today, we’re going to get to the bottom of that. 

 

The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in 1503ish. But Mona Lisa is really just the English name for it. In Italian, it’s called la Gioconda. And actually the English version of the name is misspelled. Mona should have two Ns. It’s short for mia donna, like a contraction of mia donna, mia donna mona which means my lady. So Mona Lisa means “my lady Lisa.” In Italian, la Gioconda, that's because the person depicted in the portrait is believed to be Lisa Gherardini or Lisa del Giocondo because she was married to a merchant from Florence named Francesco del Giocondo. 

 

So who was Lisa and why did da Vinci paint her in 1503? Well, she wasn’t anyone really. I mean, that’s kind of mean, she was someone. But she wasn’t really someone people knew or recognized. She wasn’t famous or well known. She was just the wife of a merchant who commissioned da Vinci to paint her portrait. That’s the boring truth behind it. Lisa was a nobody. Or that’s how it seems anyway because there’s just nothing about her life. We all know her face but we know nothing about who she was and what her life was like. That information was never recorded. 

 

Diane Hales, author of the book “Mona Lisa, a Life Discovered” said in an interview with Antica Torre quote “With a crinkled map in hand, I traced Mona Lisa’s life literally step by step, beginning in the dark, dank alley where she was born in 1479. I followed the route she would have taken as a bride in 1495 to her husband’s family home. I returned often to the street where she gave birth to six children and to the church where she worshipped. I sadly beheld the dilapidated former convent where Mona Lisa died and was buried at age 63 in 1542. But the most surprising revelations concerned the lives of Renaissance women—from childhood to adolescence (when most entered arranged marriages) to their daily lives as wives and mothers.  Florentine women were not “liberated” in our sense of the word, but they were strong. They not only held up half the sky but served as the glue that held all aspects of Florentine society together. The woman whom Leonardo immortalized was no victim but a fully dimensional, confident, intelligent, intriguing, flesh-and-blood woman.” end quote. And I just love that because she’s just so plain and average and unknown and yet so interesting, fully dimensional, we just don’t get to know her story because no one ever wrote it down. 

 

There are other theories about who Mona Lisa is. Some people believe she is actually a self portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, I’m really not sure why. But all the evidence really does point to Lisa de Giocondo, the wealthy cloth merchant’s wife. But for whatever reason, Giocondo never got this painting he had commissioned of his wife. Da Vinci worked on it for 4 years and then just kept it. He never gave it to the man. Maybe he didn’t think it was good enough. Maybe he thought it was so good that he couldn’t part with it. I don’t know. But he did work obsessively on this painting. 4 years. That’s the same length of time it took Michelangelo to paint the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling lying on his back over 60 feet in the air. So, what the heck took da Vinci so long. Well he painted this thing meticulously, building up thin layers of paint one on top of the other to create a lifelike 3D appearance, letting each layer of oil dry before adding the next. Which, I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with oil paint. It does not dry quickly. He painted her in contrapposto which is that kind of twisted to the side look. He didn’t invent this. It existed in Greek sculpture already but he certainly popularized it to the point that it started to be called the Gioconda pose. He also used what’s called a sfumato technique, leaving the edges of the eyes and mouth kind of blurry. That way it’s sort of hard to tell whether or not she smiling. It leaves it up to the interpretation of the viewer. And because no one knew who Lisa de Giocondo was, there was no back story, a lot was left up to interpretation and this really added to the mystique of the Mona Lisa. She could be whoever you wanted her to be. 

 

Let’s pause for a minute to talk about Leonardo da Vinci. He was an enigma. De Vinci was an artist, of course, living during the Renaissance period at the very heart of the Renaissance itself, Florence, Italy. So the time and place he happened to exist in were very formative in who he was able to become. But it was more than just nurture. Da Vinci also had incredible natural talents. I always think about the nature vs. nurture balance with people like Da Vinci and how there has to be this perfect storm of natural ability and the ideal environment for it for someone like Da Vinci to come to be. Mozart is a really good example of this. He had undeniable natural musical talent, he was just born with it. But he also happened to be born into a musical family in a time and place that valued the type of music he happened to be naturally talented at creating. I have to imagine if Mozart was born somewhere else or even during another time period, into another family, we probably wouldn’t know his name now, regardless of his natural born talent. It really takes both. And Da Vinci had both. 

 

He was an artist, a painter, but he was also a scientist and an inventor, a true Renaissance man. The Museum of Science website says quote “Although he is best known for his dramatic and expressive artwork, Leonardo also conducted dozens of carefully thought out experiments and created futuristic inventions that were groundbreaking for the time. His keen eye and quick mind led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas. He was a vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons. He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.” end quote. Leonardo da Vinci was an enigma. And I think that, the ingenuity of the man himself, added to the popularity and fame of the Mona Lisa as something his hands had touched, something he had spent a great deal of time on, a window into his mind. 

 

Da Vinci invented all kinds of crazy things. One invention, in particular, was sent as a gift to the new King of France, Francis I in 1515. It was an animatronic lion made of wood, metal, and rope which in 1515 absolutely blew people’s minds. There are no surviving plans or blueprints for this invention but we do have a recorded description of the lion given by Franceso Melzi, one of Da Vinci’s students who said quote “once in front of Francis I, King of France, he made walk from his place in a hall, a Lion, made with admirable artifice, and after stopping, opened its chest full of lilies and diverse flowers.” end quote. 

 

After receiving this jaw dropping gift, King Francis was a fan of the artist to say the least. Which was convenient because in 1516, Da Vinci’s patron died. So during this time, artists had patrons, rich people, that sponsored them, funded their lives so that they could go on creating art. In Florence, competition for patrons was fierce and at the age of 64, Da Vinci just didn’t feel like fighting for a new one. He’s too old and tired. He ain't got time for that. So he left Florence and moved to France, becoming Kings Painter for Francis I. He gets a hefty pension and a fancy, red-brick manor house. He brings the Mona Lisa painting with him. Keeps it with him for the rest of his life, for some reason, just some random dude’s random wife. We don’t know why he does this. But the Mona Lisa is there, in his French manor house when he dies, probably of a stroke, 3 years later, some legends say in the arms of the king himself. 

 

So Da Vinci dies in France, leaving the Mona Lisa in France. Which is huge. It’s the whole nurture nature debate again, the Mozart effect. The time and place matters. Had the Mona Lisa ended up somewhere else, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it right now. The fact that it was left behind in France, which had always maintained a leading role in art and admiration of beautiful things. It’s significant. King Francis buys the Mona Lisa from one of Da Vinci’s students who I guess he had left it to and it becomes part of the royal art collection in the palace where it remains for centuries. 

 

In 1625, the Duke of Buckingham, an English dude, visits France to retrieve the then King Louis the 13th’s sister Henrietta Maria. She’s supposed to marry the King of England Charles I so this Duke goes to get her to bring her back to England with him. He sees the Mona Lisa hanging in the palace and he finds it so striking, he has to have it. He is infatuated by the Mona Lisa. He tells Louis the 13th he’ll trade a Holbein and a Titian for the painting. Which, if you listened to my episodes about Henry VIII and his wives, you’ve heard of Holbein. He was like the portrait painter of the era. He was super famous, as was Titian. So Louis is like, yeah sure, two for the price of one, love it. But then his courtiers talk him out of it. They’re like, no, no, no, no, no, this is a Leonardo da Vinci. Forget Holbein and Titian. They can’t hold a candle to da Vinci. And that’s that enigma, that special genius touch Da Vinci had carrying through. He’s spesh. So Louis backs out of the deal and the Mona Lisa remains in France. He’s like you can have my sister, whatever, just don’t take this boring painting of some random lady. Okay, it’s Leonardo freaking Da Vinci. 

 

Jump forward to the late 18th century, France, not a great time for royalty in France. They are almost bankrupt because of their involvement in the American Revolution, thanks and sorry, and also the excessive spending of King Louis the 16th and his wife Marie Antoinette. There is a massive disparity between the quality of life of the elite, the aristocrats who just keep on spending money like it isn’t running out, and the poor who are literally starving. Bad harvests, drought, extremely high taxes on the poor without any government support or relief in return - the common man in France is livid. Tensions are unsustainably high. One major contributing factor was actually the skyrocketing price of bread. There are some really interesting facts and statistics about how the price of bread, specifically, has a lot to do with how stable or unstable a civilization is. Bread prices have caused more than one revolution, interestingly enough. Probably going to do an episode on bread. So, all of that boils over and the French revolution erupts in 1789. The royals and nobility and just a bunch of people really are executed, heads chopped off with the guillotine which became a symbol of the French Revolution. According to History Extra, at least 17,000 people were executed during the “Reign of Terror” that lasted from September 1793 to July 1794. 17,000 in less than a year. Also the guillotine remained France’s official method of capital punishment until 1977 which I find bananas. 

 

So now, this new post revolution government has taken over France. They have to decide what to do with all the artwork in the royal collection which is like 500 paintings. They end up gathering them all up and putting them in the Louvre palace in the middle of Paris, turning it into an art museum. So the Louvre was super old already. It was originally built as a fortress back in 1190. Then it was reconstructed in the 1500s as a palace and then pretty much every monarch from then on added to it, expanded it, and it just grew into a monster of a building with an area of 652,300 square feet today. In 1682, King Louis the 14th moved the royal residence from the Louvre to Versaille which is where Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette were living when the revolution broke out. The rebels forced them out of Versaille and imprisoned them in Tuileries (tooleries) Palace which was right next to the Louvre. This is where Louis and Marie were beheaded in 1793. So, kind of a grisly place for an art museum but whatever. It is in the the middle of Paris which is about to become the cultural epicenter of Europe. So once again, the Mona Lisa ends up in the right place at the right time. 

 

And then it ends up somewhere rather unexpected. Napoleon Bonaparte, now emperor of this new France, takes a liking to the Mona Lisa. He catches the bug. He takes it from the Louvre museum and hangs it it on his bedroom wall in the Tuileries Palace next door. The same palace were Louis the 165h and Marie Antoinette were imprisoned and executed. It was burnt down by revolutionary forces in 1871, by the way, this palace doesn’t exist anymore. But there the Mona Lisa hung, overlooking Napoleon’s bed until it was eventually moved back to the Louvre museum next door a few years later, luckily, otherwise it would have been burnt to ashes with the rest of that palace later in the century. 

 

One thing France did after the revolution was change from a 7 day week to a 10 day week. Which I did not realize you could do, as a country. Just up and change the number of days in a week, but okay. The Louvre is open to the public just 3 out of 10 days. It’s closed 2 days a week for cleaning and then the other 5 days its reserved for artists. They can take the paintings off the walls, prop them up on easels, draw chalk lines over them. It’s less of an art museum and more of a classroom. A business springs up where artists create replicas of famous works from the Louvre to sell. A lot women started doing this, young, single, unaccompanied women. According to an episode of Short History of podcast about the Mona Lisa, because of this, the Louvre becomes, basically a pick up joint for single men who start hanging around these single women who are basically stuck their painting, copying these masterpieces and can’t escape the mostly unwelcome attention. But this, I think, transforms the Louvre into this romantic setting, almost like a lovers lane atmosphere. And here’s the Mona Lisa this plain but mysterious woman who has already captured the attention of men like Napoleon and the Duke of Buckingham. She obviously holds some weird power over men. And the Louvre is full of all these hopeful men swarming around these female artists. They start to notice the Mona Lisa as well. 

 

Art critics and connoisseurs, the men anyway, start writing about her in art journals, transforming her from an average housewife into a mysterious “femme fatale” character who mocks her lovers with her irresistible grin. She takes on this vixen character because, remember, no one knows who Lisa de Giocondo is. She can be whoever they want her to be. And they’re clearly quite lustful and probably being denied by these real life female artists they’re chasing after. So it seems like they turn to this fantasy of the Mona Lisa as this desirable, sought after, yet unattainable woman instead.

 

Females art critics don’t seem to be buying into the fantasy, writing things like quote “she is not beautiful, her cheeks are full, her eyes puffy,” and “it’s a very nice painting, end of story.” Which is kind of how I feel. So what is this spell the Mona Lisa casts on men? But at this point, these are just artists and art writers and critics and connoisseurs who know about the Mona Lisa. She’s still relatively unknown among the general public. If you weren’t somehow involved in the art world, you probably hadn’t heard of the Mona Lisa, yet. 

 

Then, on August 21, 1911, the painting is stolen from the Louvre by an Italian immigrant named Vincenzo Peruggia. He worked at the museum, he was a painter, like a maintenance guy basically and he believed that the French didn’t deserve all of these Italian masterpieces they had hanging in the Louvre. Napoleon had stolen most of those anyway. He wanted to return the Mona Lisa to Florence where he felt she belonged, to stick it to the French, cause he also kind of hated the French. They made fun of him, bullied him, called him Macaroni. And this rubbed him the wrong way so he was after revenge and stealing a priceless painting seemed to be the way to go. There were other priceless Italian paintings in the Louvre of course, but many of them were massive. There was no way to sneak them out. The Mona Lisa was conveniently quite small.

 

So normally, there were 160 some guards on duty at the Louvre museum. But Perrugia knew that on cleaning days, there were only 12. So one Monday, a cleaning day, he heads to the Louvre. Let’s himself in like he’s there to clean some stuff. Walks straight to the gallery where the Mona Lisa hangs and just lifts it off the wall, pops it right off the hooks. That’s how easy it was. He takes it into a service stairwell but is surprised to find that the door, the way out, is locked. He stashes the painting behind some student copies propped up against the wall of the stairwell and takes a screwdriver to the doorknob of the locked door, trying to get it open. The doorknob comes off and now he is really and truly stuck in this stairwell with the stolen Mona Lisa. He’s freaking out. He takes the painting out of its frame, hides the frame back behind the student copies and stashes the painting under his smock. And it’s not like a canvas he can roll up. It’s painted on a wooden board, a panel so it’s rigid, a big ol rectangle. But he tries to conceal it as best he can. Makes his way back up the stairway, he’s forced to walk back through the gallery and out to the street with the Mona Lisa hiding under his smock and I’m just picturing this awkward and very obvious rectangular shape under the guys shirt and he’s just like “uh, nothing to see here, don’t mind me.”

 

He tosses the doorknob in a ditch, gets on a bus and then pretty quickly realizes it’s going the wrong way. He’s terrible at this, by the way, is he not? He gets off at the next stop and hops in a horse drawn cab which takes him home. Once there, he stashes the Mona Lisa in a wooden box in his apartment for the next two and a half years. 

 

At first, no one even realizes that it’s been stolen. Everyone who comes across the empty hooks on the wall just assumes the painting has been removed to be photographed for something, an article or a poster. It takes 24 hours for anyone to ask questions. An artist arrives at the Louvre with plans to paint a woman gazing at herself in the protective glass over the Mona Lisa. He arrives with his model and the painting’s not there. He starts asking questions, people quickly realize that no one actually knows where it is. No one authorized a removal. They realize it’s been stolen. A guard finds the empty frame hidden behind the student copies in the service stairwell and this confirms their worst fears. 

 

The media explodes. Now, the media, the popular media doesn’t typically care about art. It’s just not all that interesting to the masses. They only report on it if something interesting happens… like it being stolen. So the news takes off, everyone is talking about the Mona Lisa. The Louvre closes for a week and around 60 detectives start looking for the painting. When the museum reopens after a week, more people immediately come to see the empty hooks on the wall where the Mona Lisa once hung than came to see the painting itself the whole previous year. The Mona Lisa is reproduced everywhere. It’s on everything - postcards and matchboxes. It’s on the cover of all the magazines, front page of all the newspapers. Her face is everywhere and this is really when the common man, the masses learn about the Mona Lisa. This, the theft, is what makes her famous. No such thing as bad press, right? 

 

There are all sorts of theories cropping up about who might have stolen it. Was it the Germans? Did some rich American art collectors pay someone to steal it? Was it that one guy who always comes to stare at the painting, in love with the woman in the frame? Was it Pablo Picasso? After all he was involved in that other stolen art scandal not long ago when that ancient head sculpture he modeled his painting after turned out to be stolen from the Louvre. I mean, he didn’t steal it, but still, he used it. 

 

But, no, it wasn’t any of these people. It was Vencenzo Peruggia, the vengeful Italian maintenance man who still lives in Paris, still has the painting stashed in his apartment, even when police come by for a statement in regards to the case. The Louvre gets a couple of guard dogs. Two years go by. By 1913, the Mona Lisa is no longer listed in the museum catalog. It’s just gone. 

 

Then, in November of 1913, an antiques dealer in Florence, Italy gets a letter from a guy named Leonardo Vencenzo. In the letter, this guy promises to return an Italian treasure to its homeland in exchange for 500,000 lyra. The antiques dealer gets an art gallery curator buddy to go with him to meet this Leonardo Vencenzo guy, who, if you haven’t guessed yet, is actually Vencenzo Perrugia. Which like, Leonardo Vencenzo? Like a mix of Leonardo da Vinci and your own name. How obvious is this guy? I swear he’s like the worst criminal. But they go meet him at a hotel in Florence. He pulls the painting out of a wooden crate. He’s like “ta da.” And, I don’t know what he was expecting their response to be. Everyone knows the Mona Lisa was stolen. He should have known that they would have known this. And they do, of course. They put up a good front though. First they verify the Louvre inventory number on the back. Then tell him they need to take it somewhere to examine the cracks in the painting which identify it as the original. The cracks are documented, so they’re like a fingerprint basically. Only the original Mona Lisa has these exact cracks in these exact spots. They’re like “we’re just gonna go have a closer look at it. You stay put, if it’s the real deal, we’ll come back with your money.” And Perrugia is like “cool, that checks out.” They’re stopped by the hotel receptionist on their way out who thinks they’re stealing a painting from the hotel. They’re like “no, no dude, just, you’re in way over your head here. It’s not a painting from the hotel. You wouldn’t even believe us if we told you.” And they let them go. They go verify the painting officially using those fingerprint like cracks and then they immediately call the police. Peruggia is arrested. He’s sentenced to a year in prison but only serves around 7 months. They had to have been like “yeah this guys just really dumb. He’s not actually a real threat to society. We basically let him steal it.” 

 

Before the Mona Lisa goes back to France, it’s displayed at a gallery in Florence where 30,000 people come to see it in just 4 hours. There’s a riot amongst the folks outside who didn’t make it into the gallery. The painting is returned to the Louvre in Paris and its fame takes off even more. It’s another breaking news story. Once again, her face is everywhere. And it’s remained in the Louvre ever since, for the most part. It was removed briefly during World War II for safekeeping which was smart considering Paris was run by Nazis for 4 years and they were notorious art thieves. It was sent to the US in the 60s where it was briefly displayed in New York City and Washington DC. Next it went on tour to Japan and Russia. And then other countries started requesting the painting and they had to put their foot down. It’s 500 years old and made of wood. So the Mona Lisa no longer tours, she just chills in that huge gallery at the Louvre, photo bombing all the selfies and staring out at all the giddy onlookers as if to say “you’re stupid.” 

 

Her face has been repurposed into newer works of art. Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp famously added a mustache and goatee to it in 1919 and since then it’s become kind of a thing. Putting a mask on her during the pandemic or just replacing her face entirely with that of someone else, a politician or someone. Actually, my husband’s facebook profile picture, he literally never gets on Facebook but for years, probably over a decade, as long as I’ve known him at least, his facebook profile picture has been the Mona Lisa with the face of Zack Galifinakis. I have no idea why. But that’s what it is. 

 

But, you know, like all popular things, there are going to be haters. In 1956 there were two attacks on the Mona Lisa. First, someone threw acid at the painting which slightly damaged the lower half. It was on display outside of the Louvre during this incident so I don't know if it didn’t have the protective glass over it at the time or what. Then, later that year, a homeless man from Bolivia threw a rock at it in the Louvre, shattering the glass and nicking the painting near the left elbow. He supposedly offered quote “I had a stone in my hand and suddenly had the idea to throw it at the painting,” as his reason for doing so. But a Harper’s Bazaar article by Dani Maher about this suggests that he was probably trying to go to jail so that he would have a warm place to sleep. In 1974, when it was on display in Japan, a woman protesting the museums’ lack of handicap accessibility attempted to spray it with red spray paint but just got the protective glass cover, of course, and the painting was fine. In 2009, a Russian woman threw a ceramic mug at it which shattered against the protective glass, leaving the painting itself unharmed. By the way, today the glass is like indestructible. It’s bullet proof. You can throw anything at it. You can shoot it with a machine gun. You’re not getting past the glass now. So the mug didn’t do anything but make a statement. And a mess. This woman was mad that she wasn’t granted French citizenship. So she took it out on the Mona Lisa which isn’t even really French, but whatever. And then of course in 2022, you probably heard about this one, from that Harper’s Bazaar article, Dani Maher writes quote “The most recent attempt to vandalise the Mona Lisa occurred when an apparent climate protestor dressed as a woman using a wheelchair to manipulate his way into getting closer to the famed work, per the Louvre’s standard procedures for people with reduced mobility. Once close, he jumped from his wheelchair, tried and failed to smash the bulletproof glass protecting the painting, then smeared cake on the glass and “threw roses everywhere”. While being escorted out by security, the 36-year-old told other visitors “There are people who are destroying the Earth, think about it. All the artists tell you, think about the Earth, all artists think about the Earth, that’s why I did this. Think about the planet”. A statement from the Louvre said the attempted attack “had no effect on the painting, which was not damaged in any way”.” end quote. 

 

And I am wracking my brain trying to make a connection between the Mona Lisa and climate change. And yeah it’s just not clicking. The cake? Is it like a play on the whole Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake thing?” I don’t get it. But these protests are recurring, they’re statements about social issues these people feel are important. Homelessness, disabilities, citizenship, climate change. And I don’t think any of them have all that much to do with the Mona Lisa itself, just her fame. They’re just taking advantage of the painting’s fame to gain publicity. Fame, that seems unwarranted. Just some random Italian guy’s wife, da Vinci never even finished it, was never satisfied with it. And yet, the Mona Lisa has become the most famous painting in the world because of a series of particular events, coincidences, dumb luck. Born in Florence - the heart of the Renaissance, left behind in France, admired by the king, transferred to Paris, fast becoming the cultural center of Europe, stolen and then recovered, all over the media. She’s not a seductive temptress. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the painting at all. She was just always in the right place at the right time. And sometimes, it’s really just that simple. 

 

Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and maybe you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.  

Information used in this episode was sourced from a Short History of Podcast episode about the Mona Lisa, Encyclopedia Britannica, Antica Torre, the Museum of Science, thehistoryblog.com, History Extra, Live Science, and Harper’s Bazaar. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.