Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

In this episode of 'Why'd They Put That in a Museum?' hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees discuss how Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting, the Mona Lisa, ended up in the Louvre (hint—it was brought to the Louvre before the Louvre was a museum!). They also talk about the time the Mona Lisa was stolen from the museum and Picasso was accused of the robbery. Beth asks Sarah why art curators think Mona Lisa is such a great masterpiece so you can decide if you agree whether it's one of the best pantings in the world.

© 2025 Why'd They Put That In A Museum podcast hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees.

Transcript

'Why'd They Put That in a Museum?' Episode 4: The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

Beth Bacon: Hello and welcome to our podcast. Why'd they put that in a museum?  I am Beth Bacon, and I am here with Sarah Lees.

Sarah Lees: Hey, Beth. This is Sarah. And, yeah, we're going to explore an interesting question, and interesting art, from the angle of why they put it in a museum.

So today we're looking at a rather famous icon by the artist Leonardo da Vinci called the Portrait of Lisa Ghirardini and more known as the Mona Lisa. 

Beth Bacon: Think I've heard of that painting. And why is it in a museum? 

Sarah Lees: Well, as you  might find out, it's going to be a bit of a surprise.

Beth Bacon: You know, sometimes I walk through a gallery and I wonder why is this object here? So in this podcast, we're diving deep into the stories behind some of the artifacts that we find kind of interesting.

Sarah Lees: Right, so for each episode, we'll start with one thing in one specific place, and then sort of wander off from there, um, exploring the thing and its history and the cultural ideas that surround it to see where they take us. And eventually, usually coming back to the original thing and then seeing if it looks or feels different as a result of what we have discovered.

Beth Bacon: So Mona Lisa. What arguably is the most famous piece of art in the world. Sarah 

has a little bit of expertise in this. 

Sarah Lees: Well, I am a museum curator and researcher. And,  occasionally have had to justify why something should be in a museum. Hopefully everyone has a visual image in their mind, at least a little bit of what the Mona Lisa looks like. It's always helpful if you can find an image of the work that we're going to be talking about so you can see,  as you listen, what we are in fact talking about. So in this case, we're  looking at a portrait of a woman named Lisa Ghirardini del Giocondo. She lived in Florence, which is where Leonardo da Vinci, who painted her portrait, also was in 1503, which is the year that he started making this portrait. She looks to be seated, so the image is from sort of waist level up. She is turned so that her face is towards us, her shoulders are slightly at an angle, typical sort of portrait stance and she has her hands folded roughly at her waist and maybe resting on the armrest of the chair.

And then the background is a landscape with a winding road and a body of water and then some trees in the background. 

Beth Bacon: What was it like then? Was Florence like a city state? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, so Italy was not a country. In 1500, in fact, it was a whole sort of patchwork of different territories. If you think of the middle of the boot, that was the Papal States, headed by the Pope, obviously, in Rome. Most of the lower half was the Kingdom of Sicily, which is actually ruled by the Spanish King. That included the island of Sicily and Sardinia, of course. And then the north, the top of the boot, was basically a patchwork. There were republics of Florence and Siena, so those were nominally republics. There were duchies headed by dukes in Milan and Savoy, and then a bunch of other smaller territories and city states.

That explained a lot of Leonardo's own history, in that he tended to work for the powerful people who lived in these different regions and territories. They were often either secular, military, or political leaders. Or they could be religious groups. And often he moved in order to live near the person who was employing him.

Beth Bacon: Were the Giocondos an important family? 

Sarah Lees: Well, in fact, they weren't among the most powerful. Some of the names that Leonardo worked for were like, Borgia, Medici, Hoplio the Tenth, the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, and the del Giocondo were not of that level. Lisa's husband was a wealthy man, and  it's likely that Francesco del del Giocondo commissioned or asked Leonardo to paint this portrait. But it's also possible that Leonardo did it kind of as of his own accord.  That is not something that we know for certain.

Beth Bacon: So 1503. Yeah. just a few years after the 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. So that's the time frame we're talking about. This is not even part of American history. It's so long ago. 

Sarah Lees: True. Yeah. I just considered, if you know a bit about the Italian Renaissance, it's the midpoint of that time period, it's like 520 years ago. It was a long time ago. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Beth Bacon: So tell me artistically why people think this is a good painting. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, no, it's a good question. First of all, it's not very big. It's only about two feet by two and a half feet. One can argue about, the beauty of the woman herself, plus or minus. I would say there's a lot of things about the way that it's painted that are really engaging. And some of them have to do just with the composition itself. So for example, the way that she is seated, in front of a landscape, which has the effect of pushing the figure forward towards us as the viewer. I also, of course, have to mention her enigmatic expression, right? The Mona Lisa smile. I think the fact that it's a little hard to interpret, whether she is smiling, whether she's just looking neutral, I think that, again, makes it more interesting. Because as humans, you know, we want to, Kind of read someone's expression and try to figure out what they're thinking or feeling.  And in this way, you kind of want to know more about this woman sitting in front of you.

It almost looks as if with her hands resting. right in the foreground as if her knuckles were almost brushing against the inside surface of the painting, almost as if she were about to emerge into our space. So I think that grabs your attention. And—

Beth: Is that uncommon to do in portraits back then?

Sarah Lees: Well, it was a newer development. Portraits of maybe say 20, 25 years earlier were often painted in profile, they're like less engaging, right? A figure in profile, you don't get the sense that the painted figure is looking at you as a viewer.  So the fact that it's painted,  frontally, and the idea of illusionism, of course, single point perspective is also part of this idea.

And that was adopted into painting, not that much before this moment, kind of in the late,  1400s or 1470 or so, and we're now in 1503, so that was a relatively new development in painting. 

Beth Bacon: Single point perspective is when,  you can see what's in the background,  go back in, in sort of a triangular direction…

Sarah Lees: What it is, is a systematic implementation of certain rules for painting what is meant to look three dimensional on a flat surface. So artists had previously done it kind of ad hoc, and you would find sometimes, if you looked at the left half of a painting, it would recede into the distance in one direction, and the right half would recede in the other direction.

So an artist called Alberti developed a system, by which if you did put a single point at the horizon line and had the lines converging towards that single point, that was this— basically a system of representation called single point perspective. 

Beth Bacon: If you're looking at a painting that has that, I think that it looks good.

Sarah Lees: Precisely because it was established in the Renaissance and it has had a tradition of, as you say, like 500 plus years. We, as Western Europeans, are used to seeing paintings look like that. Of course, if you look at other traditions, say, you know, in Asian countries, China, Japan, they don't use single point perspective. So it's a different custom, basically. But yes, you and I, given our backgrounds and histories. find that system to be the most logical if you want to make something look quote-unquote real, right? So it uses single point perspective, she is right up at the picture's surface, this kind of conceptual idea of the painted world versus our world we're almost meeting at this thin surface that is the surface of the panel. 

Another thing that both enhances the illusionism and I think makes the painting more engaging, more appealing maybe is Leonardo's use of a technique that is called sfumato. 

Beth Bacon: Sfumato. 

Sarah Lees: Sfumato, S F ….

Beth Bacon: It starts with S F?

Sarah Lees: S F. Yeah. So this is from the Italian, verb fumare, which is to dissipate like smoke essentially. So what that's talking about is the effect of these almost imperceptible gradations of tone and light. So he uses it both in Mona Lisa’s face so that you can see the transition between, like, her neck to her chin to her cheekbones. It  just melts into each other at each different area.

You can also think of its use in the background where When we conceptually understand that a tree is further back in the distance, it's  grayed out. It's a little paler, right? That is also in part  a technique of sfumato. and Leonardo didn't invent this technique, but with a painting like the Mona Lisa, he has thought to have perfected it.

It looks almost like she's a living, breathing person. And that is  despite the fact that this painting, has, darkened, right?  Paintings are often covered with varnish, and I think this one is in this case.

And even without that, the surface tends to darken over as it ages. And because this painting, the Mona Lisa, has become such an icon, people are really hesitant to conserve it to maybe change and remove some of the effects of the age. 

Beth Bacon: Huh. That's interesting. So even though it has gotten darker over the years, so they know it's not exactly what it looks like. 

Sarah Lees: Correct. 

Beth Bacon: Conservators do not want to take away that darkening effect because they're worried about maybe changing it in other ways? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, exactly. If you know that a painting has deteriorated and you go in and try to fix it, at some point you're going to be, you're going to reach a state in which the painting does not look even as it currently does. You might find there's more loss than you expected. Altering an icon like the Mona Lisa, would be such a huge undertaking that I think people are reluctant to envision it. 

Beth Bacon: Interesting. Okay, so how did the Mona Lisa get from Italy to Paris? 

Sarah Lees: We talked about Italy being a whole bunch of different city states and duchies and stuff, and because Leonardo tended to work for the powerful people in those different regions. He also moved around to do so. So he worked on, supposedly worked on, the Mona Lisa for something like four years, which brings us to about 1507.

In 1508, he leaves Florence to go back to Milan, where he had spent a good number of years previously. And then Milan as a territory, was conquered by the French king, François I. Which meant that Leonardo was then living in a city that was under the rule of the French king. And that happened in 1515. So Leonardo was in Florence, he didn't finish the painting, um, he took it with him to Milan, presumably. And then from Milan, in 1516, Francois I, the French king, offered Leonardo a chateau in France to work in.  And at this point, Leonardo is getting fairly old, which may or may not be relevant. 

But certainly, if someone offers you a French chateau, why not go there? So that is what Leonardo did. He moved to Paris. to France, into the chateau, I think it's in, near Amboise, so not in Paris, but outside of it. The Mona Lisa actually traveled with him, and we know this because, a year or so later, an envoy of the French king, visits Leonardo, maybe to check in, see how he's doing.

And this guy describes three paintings that he saw. in the chateau where Leonardo was working, and one of them is described as an absolutely perfect portrait of a Florentine woman made by one of the most excellent painters of our time. So, naturally, this piques the king's interest, and when Leonardo died a couple of years later in 1519, the French king actually arranged to buy those three paintings that his envoy had described in Leonardo's possession.

And this may have been something that Leonardo intended all along, right? He agreed to work for the French king.  So we don't know precisely how that transaction worked, but basically from that moment on, right, 1519, Leonardo's death, the Mona Lisa entered the French either royal or imperial collection.

Now, initially, François I was actually living in the château of Fontainebleau, that was his preferred residence.  And he's actually the one who began to build the building that became the Louvre. So the Louvre didn't exist fully at that moment, but it was going to be like his Parisian residence for the King.

Ever since then, the painting has been in French Royal or  Imperial Collections. In fact, it's supposedly Napoleon, the first, displayed it in his bedroom in the Louvre. But then… so the Louvre was also established as a museum for the public in 1793. This is during and after the French Revolution.

Beth Bacon: So the Mona Lisa, as soon as the Louvre was built, It was built. 

Sarah Lees: Mm hmm.  

Beth Bacon: It actually was built to be a palace for the French leader. Correct. And the Mona Lisa went in there. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah. 

Beth Bacon: It's basically been in that building ever since. 

Sarah Lees: Right. I mean, you can't get a better provenance than that, in terms of why it is in that museum.

Beth Bacon: Yeah, so the reason why the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre is because the French king bought it and put it in there. Yeah. And that was his house. 

Sarah Lees: Exactly. 

Beth Bacon: It's and then after the French Revolution, when they were like, yeah, we don't really want kings anymore. They said, oh, the place where the kings live, the Louvre, we should turn that into a museum.

Sarah Lees: Yeah. And people have been proposing this idea for some time. But, of course, once you have at least nominally,  Republic, after 1793, the Grand Gallery was envisioned as a museum for the public. The rule of Napoleon I brings him back to a more imperial rule over a brief period of time, and then, actually the monarchy is re-established. Lots of stuff happens in French history. Yeah, very long. 

Beth Bacon: But throughout all that, the Mona Lisa just stays put in the Louvre. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, I mean, we could bring up the fact that it left briefly. 

Beth Bacon: When did it leave briefly? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, so, funny story. In 1911, the Mona Lisa was actually stolen. It was stolen by a guy called Vincenzo Perugia. He was an Italian, man working in Paris, as kind of a workman in the Louvre.  Some accounts say that he was a carpenter, some suggest that he actually helped to build the case that the Mona Lisa, even in 1911, was going to be displayed in.

The Mona Lisa wasn't super famous at that point in 1911. He felt that it nonetheless should be returned to Italy, as, an Italian painting. So he entered the Louvre during regular hours wearing like a workman's uniform. clothing. he apparently hid.

Beth Bacon: He was a workman, right? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, he was a workman. He  hid apparently in a closet or a stairwell until the museum closed. And then he took the painting off the wall. It was just hung on four hooks.Apparently, I think the case that maybe he had helped to build was hung on the wall, took it off the wall , took it out of the case and he either stuck it under his coat. Or he maybe just wrapped it in his coat, stuck the painting under his arm, and he walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa.

He then hid it in his Parisian apartment for roughly two years. There was, of course, an investigation at the time the police apparently questioned him. He managed to evade their arrest. The painting might have been under the floorboards in his apartment.  He must have been somewhat skilled at this kind of subterfuge.

He actually managed to get it out of the country back to Italy. So it was in Florence that he tried to contact a gallery to sell the Mona Lisa to them. Of course, that tipped off the authorities. He was found out.  The next thing that happened, actually, was that the painting, the Mona Lisa, was displayed in Italy, as like, oh, this, triumphant return.

And even though, um, Vincenzo Perugia was jailed for the robbery, he was also kind of thought of as a patriot, an Italian patriot.  

Beth Bacon: Huh. Interesting. So people in Italy were kind of glad to have it back. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah.  This raised the profile of the Mona Lisa, you know, because it was in all the newspapers, obviously, this was a major, a major thing. Um, and in fact,  when they couldn't find the painting, they accused other people, including Pablo Picasso, I believe, of being responsible for the theft, so, I mean, super high profile. 

Beth Bacon: Oh my goodness, can you imagine Pablo Picasso stealing the Mona Lisa? 

Sarah Lees: You know, well, you know, he was a foreigner basically living in France, so. Not, I'm just putting that out there that, you know, they were, they were trying to think of everything and they didn't suspect the workman, although they did question him. In any case, the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre  in 1913. Um, so it did briefly leave and I think it was actually lent a couple of times for very special purposes. I think it once went to the U. S. and once maybe to Japan. But otherwise, yes, it has been ensconced in that space. And now I don't know if you know, they're talking about because the crowds have gotten so insane. And as anyone who has tried to see the Mona Lisa recently, which I think you did, right, Beth, with your sons?

Beth Bacon: It was packed. Absolutely.  We went so we could be like the first people in the museum when it opened. 

Sarah Lees: I don't even remember the last time I tried to see it, maybe 20 years ago, and it was still, impossible because the crowds were so thick you can't get up there. And again, not a big painting. So they are talking about building a special room to manage the crowds better. Because of course it also blocks all the other things in the room.  It's always been an icon essentially. 

Beth Bacon: Ever since it was painted.

Sarah Lees: Yes. Interesting. 

Beth Bacon: So, the Mona Lisa is in the museum because the place where its owner, King Francois I, lived, turned into a museum. 

Sarah Lees: Yes, essentially. 

Beth Bacon: Are there any other paintings of his like that, that are, that are still in the Louvre? The other two that he acquired from Leonardo at the time, are they still in the Louvre? 

Sarah Lees: They are, yes. Yeah.  

Beth BaconI wonder why they're not so famous, you know? 

Sarah Lees: Well, they kind of are. They are famous. One of them is, the Virgin and Saint Anne, I mean, there are not so very many paintings by Leonardo, that virtually, you know, all the ones that are in museums are quite famous, and of course, we haven't even talked about Leonardo himself and his reputation, right?

I mean, he was sort of a self taught genius. He was an inventor. He had these notebooks filled with sketches for flying machines and earthworks and siphons and all kinds of things. That also kind of helps to explain why his work is valued. But yeah, whoever owns a Leonardo, it tends to be among their most treasured masterpieces, I would say.

Beth Bacon: Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk for a sec about like how often we see the Mona Lisa all over the place. I just recently saw this old movie called Time Bandits and, and It's about this kid that goes back in time and there he finds the Mona Lisa. It's just a popular culture everywhere. It's on T-shirts and umbrellas and fabric and… I don't know like it's amazing how famous things get more and more famous.

Sarah Lees: Yeah, it's true. It does kind of build on itself. Even early 20th century, um, somebody like the artist Marcel Duchamp, kind of made a joke about the Mona Lisa. There's probably a Warhol, right, that reproduces that image. You're right, once something is famous, it almost builds on its own fame.

Beth Bacon: So, okay, let's, let's close up and just summarize. So, Sarah, why would you say the Mona Lisa is in a museum? 

Sarah Lees: It is a beautiful painting for starters, made by a remarkable artist and its provenance, its pedigree, has placed it there from its earliest moments, roughly. So, fully justified that that painting should be in a museum.

Beth Bacon: Yeah. where it lived turned into a museum. 

Sarah Lees: The museum was built around it almost. Not quite, but yeah. 

Beth Bacon: Yeah. Yeah. Alright, well that is such an interesting background on a painting that we all know and love, or at least we all know and talk about.  Really, really interesting.

And that's our show. Thanks for joining us on this episode of why they put that in a museum.

We hope we've given you some fresh perspectives. Sometimes the more you know about an object that's on display, its whole meaning can change. 

Sarah Lees: And if you enjoyed this episode, please don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave us a review. 

Beth Bacon: Tell your friends about “Why'd they put that in a museum?” We love getting feedback and if you send us a question, you might inspire us to feature that on a future episode.

Sarah Lees: Yep, definitely, if you're ever in a museum and find yourself asking these questions, just, uh, drop us a note and maybe we can discuss that very object. 

Beth Bacon: Thanks for being here and please join us for our next episode of Why'd They Put That in a Museum. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah. Thanks, Beth. It was fun. Yeah, see you then. Bye.