A Moment with ‘Mona Lisa’

Viewing etiquette is instinctual amidst the crowd clambering to see the ‘Mona Lisa’.

There’s a quick a moment in which one can dreamily return her enigmatic smile. Perhaps one more to take a selfie in front of her bulletproof glass before slipping away past the throng of tourists who have entered through the Louvre’s iconic glass pyramid, frantically checking maps and following simple signs showing the way to ‘La Joconde’.

Once there, Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini is smaller than fame suggests. Just 77 x 53cm, oil painted on poplar wood using the brush mark disappearing sfumato technique, in the flesh, Mona Lisa is perhaps a little less than her legend.

But what a legend it is.

Never delivered to her patron whose identity has been disputed, Mona Lisa is the most widely recognised painting in the world and is often at the end of the beeline made by the Louvre’s over eight million visitors as tallied in 2017.

Previously gracing the wall of Napoleon’s bedroom, ‘La Joconde’ has been housed in the world’s largest museum since the 1800’s and was once stolen by a former Louvre employee. A man named Vincenzo Perrugia who simply snatched Mona Lisa off the wall in 1911 and hid her in his apartment for two years in a dubious bid to return the famed painting to Italy, home of Leonardo da Vinci.

An iconic High Renaissance piece and the Louvre’s star attraction amidst its 380 000 objects and

35 000 works of art, seeing ‘Mona Lisa’ seems a sine qua non. A twinkling merging of art history books, film, pop culture and reality, over too soon, experienced from afar and sealed with a smile.

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