Mona Lisa T-Shirt

The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (1505) is one of the most famous faces in the world. Her beauty & the romantic fantasy of her mysterious smile have held us spellbound for centuries. What was her secret? The Mona Lisa was not well known until the mid-19th century when artists of the emerging Symbolist movement began to appreciate it, and associated it with their ideas about feminine mystique. Critic Walter Pater, in his 1867 essay on Leonardo, expressed this view 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." According to Louvre Curator Jean-Pierre Cuzin, "The entire history of portraiture afterwards depends on the Mona Lisa. If you look at all the other portraits – not only of the Italian Renaissance, but also of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries – if you look at at everyone you want to name, all of them were inspired by this painting. Thus it is sort of the root, almost, of occidental portrait painting." "Today's art critics call attention to the painting's mystery and harmony," says Cuzin. "But the first art historians to describe it emphasised its striking realism, pointing out 'the lips that smile' and 'the eyes that shine.'" Giorgio Vasari, for example, wrote in his early biography of da Vinci, Lives of the Painters: "As art may imitate nature, she does not appear to be painted, but truly of flesh and blood. On looking closely at the pit of her throat, one could swear that the pulses were beating."