Tina Thrush, age 10, of Lansing, Mich., for her question:
WHY DID THE MONA LISA BECOME FAMOUS?
The great artist Leonardo da Vinci lived during the Italian Renaissance between 1452 and 1519. Many of his ideas about art, science and engineering were put into notebooks. Included were such advanced thoughts as an Experimental Flying Machine and a Movable Bridge. Notes with his drawings, for some strange reason, were written backward so they can be read best with a mirror.
Leonardo da Vinci, called Leonardo almost all of the time now, is rated as one of the world's greatest artists. And his portrait called Mona Lisa is one of the world's most famous oil paintings. It was painted on wood in about 1503.
Mona Lisa is a portrait of Lisa del Gioconda, the wife of a Florentine merchant. The picture is often called La Gioconda and it is now hanging in the Louvre in Paris.
Mona Lisa is so famous, most likely, because of the very mysterious smile which is on her face. Leonardo painted the woman's face either moving into or out of a smile, and the result has captivated people for 475 years.
There's something else special about the Mona Lisa: Leonardo arranged the woman's hands in such a way that the figure formed a pyramid design. Leonardo also solved a problem in technique that earlier portrait painters faced when they only pictured the head and upper part of the body. Pictures by earlier artists seemed to cut their subjects off at the chest but Leonardo's placement of the hands gives the woman a more complete, natural appearance.
As famous as the Mona Lisa is Leonardo's fresco called The Last Supper. Painted on a wall of the dining hall in the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazi, the painting shows Jesus Christ and His 12 Apostles just after Jesus announced that one of them will betray Him. Leonardo's composition created an active and centralized design by arranging the figures in several small groups rather than lining up 13 figures.
An artist who uses the fresco method of painting must work quickly. Leonardo wanted to work slowly and use lots of shadows, so he developed a new way of coating the wall with a compound he created. Unfortunately, the compound didn't protect the paint from moisture and soon after the picture was completed, it started to fleck away. Although The Last Supper still exists today, it is in very poor condition.
Leonardo was a very versatile artist. After having his own studio for many years in Florence, he moved to Milan where for 17 years he was the court artist for the duke, Lodovico Sforza. He designed artillery and planned the diversion of rivers as a military engineer, and designed revolving stages for pageants as a civil engineer.
In addition he did painting and sculpturing.