80% of visitors to France’s Louvre Museum (world’s largest museum) only come to see the Mona Lisa. The portrait by Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci has been described as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world”. The subject’s expression in the painting is its most talked about feature and it is believed to be the portrait of Lisa Gherardini but there’s no proof to back this theory up. Millions of tourists travelling to Paris each year wait for hours to catch a glimpse of Mona Lisa at Louvre Museum.
The Mona Lisa became popular with the general public when it was famously stolen in 1911. The press jumped on the event: people wanted to know who could have stolen the Mona Lisa painting, why, and above all how. The painting was found, and the guilty party was an overly nationalistic Italian named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had intended to return the work to his home country.
Picture Credit : Google