Mona Lisa

About this book

"For nearly five hundred years the painting - and the smile on the face of the sitter - has been a source of mystery, speculation and reverence. In this new book Donald Sassoon describes not only the Mona Lisa and its history, but its mythology, and the processes which have combined to raise it to its current unrivalled level of fame. He examines Leonardo's innovative techniques; the problems concerning the identity of the sitter; what happened to the painting after it left Italy when Leonardo joined King Francois I's court in France; the copies made in the seventeenth century; its celebration by nineteenth-century intellectuals; its theft and disappearance early in the twentieth century; the surrealists', other avant-garde artists' and cartoonists' uses of it; its politically motivated trips to the United States and Japan in the 1960s and 1970s; its appropriation by the advertising industry; and the never-ending flood of new and 'conclusive' theories about Mona Lisa's smile."--BOOK JACKET.