Week 1: Mona Lisa's Smiles 

An abstruse portrait of a lady behind the artwork of Leonardo Da Vinci has caught everybody’s attention for generations, more commonly known as Mona Lisa. Looking at the painting, all I can see with my bare eyes was a portrait of a lady wearing those enigmatic smiles and those remarkable look in its viewer. I have heard about this painting a lot of times before, but, in spite of being familiarize with it and know the idea behind of Mona Lisa, it turns as an ordinary painting for me. With my curiosity, I look at it and try to figure out what’s so special about it that makes it a well-known piece of artwork.  Who is Mona Lisa? Is she a love interest of Da Vinci? Or just someone that comes from his imagination? Why Da Vinci painted her? These are some of the questions lingering in my mind which I tried to search for answers. With my passionate interest in revealing the mythology surrounding this world’s famous painting, I’ve searched and read a lot of articles about this painting.

Mona Lisa was painted in Florence between 1503 and 1506 and this was a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine cloth merchant named Francesco de Gioncondo. I also found in these article secrets of Mona Lisa. As stated in it, this image that reveals the painter’s preparatory drawings that shows that Renaissance man was also human. Taking a closer look at the painting, everyone can notice that Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Is it for real, that Mona Lisa has no eyebrows?  Was there a reason why did she doesn’t have eyebrows in the portrait? Furthermore, I have discovered that when a certain engineer and scientist zoomed in the image of Mona Liza’s left eye, they found out that it has a single brush stroke in the eyebrow region, which shows that Mona Lisa has real eyebrows in the portrait, it was painted finely and makes it unable to be seen with our naked eye. What about those enigmatic smiles? The famous Mona Lisa’s smile represents the idea of happiness suggested by the word “giocanda” in Italian. Leonardo created this smile as the focal point of this portrait, therefore the alternative title for it was La Giocanda. One more thing, someone told me that Da Vinci has many secrets hiding behind Mona Lisa’s portrait, that has been lately discovered by some scientist using microscope to observe Mona Lisa then they found out numbers written in her eyes. Interesting huh ? Yah ! I know, let me continue the story. After finding those numbers in her eyes they scan it more define and again they see numbers scattered in her face, which leads them to conclude that it might be something like a code that Da Vinci wanted to convey.

Like many artist, Leonardo made his masterpieces conspicuously, through his passion and exceptional style It took him four years to finish this painting, which shows his patience and perseverance that I belived that our generations should also posses. Mona Lisa, achieve its fame because of the mysteries it makes its viewers curious about. Every art has its own meaning and message to the viewer, if you don’t analyze the message of an art you cannot know what is the essence of that art.