The Mona Lisa has moved to a new, €4.81 million spot in the Louvre. But is she smiling about it, asks Lara Marlowe in Paris
Crowds, thieves and an unbalanced, rock-throwing tourist have come and gone. Six million people - 90 per cent of all visitors to the Louvre - reverently filed past it last year. Hundreds of journalists clamoured to see the Mona Lisa in its new apartments this week, but the 500-year-old lady sits placidly as ever, hands folded across her stomach, leaving visitors to decide whether her gaze conveys seduction or humour, melancholy or amusement.
To the Italians she is La Gioconda, the spouse of Francesco del Giocondo, the Florentine merchant who asked Leonardo to paint her portrait in 1503. To the French she is La Joconde, a distortion of the Italian name. The rest of the world knows her as Mona Lisa, a contraction of the old Italian title, Ma Donna (my lady) Lisa.
For decades, the popularity of the Mona Lisa has been a problem. With more than 20,000 people queuing to see it daily, museum gridlock is chronic. The success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, in which the curator of the Louvre leaves a clue to his murder in invisible ink on the glass screen in front of the Mona Lisa, has worsened the congestion. Brown's novel has sold 20 million copies in two years, and his readers are piling into tour buses to visit the Louvre.
Nippon Television Network came to the rescue, offering €4.81 million to refurbish the Salle des États in the Louvre. After four years' work, under the direction of the architect Lorenzo Piqueras, the Mona Lisa made the short journey from the cramped Salle Rosa.
Traffic should move more smoothly through her new, 840sq m room. Piqueras finished the walls in beige earth tones, re-opened two windows looking on to the Louvre's courtyards, restored the skylight and improved air conditioning and acoustics.
Critics complain that it was inappropriate to place the Mona Lisa in a room devoted to 16th-century Venetian masters (the right century and country, but a different school of painting). The pragmatic suggestion of placing the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory and the Venus De Milo in a "best of" gallery for hurried tourists was a non-starter in France's staid museum milieu.
The mysteries of the Mona Lisa have strengthened its legend. The woman's thin black veil indicated she was in mourning, said one theory. Hands folded over her stomach showed she was pregnant, said another. Some speculated she was actually a self-portrait of Leonardo, or a male model in drag. A few years ago, an art magazine created controversy by suggesting that a coat of yellowing varnish should be removed from the thin poplar wood panel.
The greatest mystery, Libération newspaper noted this week, "remains how the not so beautiful spouse of a bourgeois Florentine of the early 16th century can be the most famous woman in the world in the 21st century". The Mona Lisa marked a sharp departure from earlier portraiture, because the subject looks at the viewer and smiles, and because of Leonardo's sfumato (shading) technique. There are no visible brushstrokes on the canvas. A barrage of laboratory tests last October revealed that Leonardo used the thinist possible layer of paint, probably applying it with a fingertip.
Libération suggested the lady's modernity stems from her ordinariness. Leonardo made her "the icon of the emotion born of contemplation of the ephemeral nature of happiness and beauty", the newspaper said. Le Monde found another explanation for the painting's success: "The serenity of the model's face has become a highly sought after virtue in the modern world." In his Lives of the Artists, first published in 1568, Italian art historian Vasari wrote that Leonardo "employed singers and musicians or jestors to keep [ Mona Lisa] full of merriment and so chase away the melancholy that painters usually give to portraits". The result, Vasari concluded, was "a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original".
It was apparently out of national pride that Vincenzo Perrugia, a window cleaner at the Louvre, stole the painting in August 1911, because he believed France had stolen her from his native Italy. Louvre employees were fingerprinted by Alphonse Bertillon, the father of forensic science. But Perrugia had fled to Florence, where he tried to sell the painting two years later. A few months before the theft, the poet and art critic Guillaume Apollinaire said the Mona Lisa should be burned. He was trying to strike a blow for modern artists, but the remark sent him briefly to La Santé prison.
The theft also drew unprecedented attention to the painting, with constant newspaper coverage, postcards, posters and even street demonstrations. In the run-up to the first World War, some accused the German intelligence services.
This popular hysteria was mocked by the Dada-ist artist Marcel Duchamp in 1920. He published a picture of the Mona Lisa with a thin moustache and the letters "LHOOQ" which, when said aloud, sound like the French for "She has a hot ass". Other 20th-century artists, among them Fernand Léger and Andy Warhol, continued the de-mythification of the Mona Lisa.
Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou used the Mona Lisa as a tool of diplomacy. When it travelled to New York in 1963, it was accompanied by André Malraux and occupied a first-class cabin on the ocean liner France. President John F Kennedy, his wife Jackie and vice president Lyndon Johnson met it. It made its last journey, to Moscow and Tokyo, in 1973. The Louvre says it will never again be allowed to travel.
For the Mona Lisa is truly priceless. As the French art historian André Chastel writes: "This painting is not a painting but a fable, a poetic fiction, a dreamlike fixation, an offering of the subconscience."
Is the code a cod? W13
Portrait: the life of Lisa
1503 Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, commissions Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of his wife, Lisa Gherardini. Leonardo keeps the unfinished painting for the rest of his life.
1518 King Francis I of France buys the Mona Lisa from one of the art students whom Leonardo made his heirs.
1800-1804 Napoleon Bonaparte hangs the Mona Lisa in his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace, after which the painting moves to the Louvre.
1911 A worker in the Louvre steals the Mona Lisa. It is recovered two years later
1956 A mentally ill Bolivian tourist throws a rock at the Mona Lisa. The painting is put behind a glass screen.
April 2005 The Mona Lisa moves to its new, purpose-built home in the Louvre, refurbished at a cost of 4.81 million