Mona Lisa also known as La Gioconda (la Joconde) is the 16 th century oil painting on popular wood by none other than the archetype “ Renaissance Man”, Leonardo da Vinci . Presently it's a property of French Government, and is hanging in Musée de Louvre, Paris. Mona Lisa is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, which finds its presence in almost every museum, although in form of a reproduction. There is very much substance or the secret in the Mona Lisa picture. Very f ew works of art have been subjected to such scrutiny, study, mythologizing and parody as Mona Lisa.

History related to painting “Mona Lisa”

It was year 1503 in which Leonardo da Vinci began painting Mona Lisa.It was completed in four years according to Vasari.French king FrancoiseI invited Leonardo to paint at Clos Luc é near his castle. He carried Mona Lisa along with. King liked “Mona Lisa” a lot and bought it for 4000 écus. He kept this painting in Fontainebleau. Until King Louis XIV moved it, it remained there in Fontainebleau.

French King Louis XIV moved the painting to Palace of Versailles. It was moved to Louvre after the French Revolution. It was personally liked by Napoleon I and he placed it in his bedroom at the Tuileries Palace. Later it was sent to Louvre again.

This Mona Lisa image was not well known until the mid-19 th century. It began getting recognition only after the emergence of Symbolist movement, which incorporated the ideas about the feminine mystique. Critic Walter Peter made serious observations in 1867 about Mona Lisa.He expressed his views 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.

The significance of Mona Lisa

This painting of Leonardo da Vinci is renowned to whole world for its aesthetic part.It was pyramid style which Leonardo craftily applied for painting Mona Lisa. The folded hands of the lady in the painting form the front corner of the pyramid.Her breast, neck and face glow in same proportion that gently models her hands. The light provides the variety of living surfaces an underlying geometry of spheres and circles.This painting was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter before an imaginary landscpe.

Mona Lisa Smile:

The most enigmatic and most sought after factor in the painting of Mona Lisa is its smile. This is understood that her smile has a number of things hidden.The most starking feature is that a viewer finds different shades in her smile. If one looks at it with full concentration, he finds that in beginning the painting seems to be smiling and in light mood. But after sometime the same painting seems to be catching a serious mood and the lightness fades away gradually.

Many scientists and researchers put their efforts to bring forth the secret behind this world famous oil painting. In late 2005, Dutch researchers from the University of Amsterdam scanned the image through an "emotion recognition" computer software developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The revelations of the software were very interesting. It found that the smile to be 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and not surprised at all. This study was not only a startling fact about the painting but it was the display of the new technique also that set accuaracy standards.