Though the Mona Lisa is undoubtedly a very fine painting, its unparalleled celebrity demands an explanation. The picture's fame seems to rest not on its qualities but on the mysteries and controversies that have long surrounded it, as well as its apparently seductive attraction to male admirers – Napoleon had the picture removed from the Louvre and hung in his bedroom in the Tuileries palace."Mona Lisa" is, in fact, an English corruption of Monna Lisa – the historian Giorgio Vasari's polite way of referring to madonna (my lady) Lisa Gherardini, whose portrait he describes in his sixteenth-century Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors. She was married to one Francesco del Giocondo, from whose surname the Italians get their name for the painting, la Gioconda, and the French their la Joconde. However, it's not certain that the Mona Lisa depicts Monna Lisa. The portrait Vasari described, having never seen it himself, had eyebrows where the hair "grows thickly in one place" (the Mona Lisa has none) and "parting lips" (she smiles, but her mouth is closed). The only other contemporary description is by the secretary to Cardinal Louis of Aragon, who visited Leonardo at Amboise, where the painter was living out his last years at the court of François I. Leonardo apparently showed the cardinal three pictures that he had brought with him to France, including "one of a certain Florentine lady, done from life". And that's about it for identification, which has left the field wide open to conspiracy theorists, amateur speculators and owners of questionable copies or rival Leonardo works. What is certain is that the Mona Lisa turned up in the bathroom of Fontainebleau, which Henri IV decided to restore in the 1590s. It remained largely neglected by public and art historians alike until, after it had been hanging in the Louvre for almost seventy years, the poet and novelist Théophile Gautier turned his hand to a guidebook to the Louvre. He singled out the "adorable Joconde" for praise: "She is always there smiling with sensuality, mocking her numerous lovers. She has the serene countenance of a woman sure that she will remain beautiful forever". A few years later, Gautier's erotic obsession seemed to have deepened, and the myth of the smile was given its finest articulation: "the sinuous, serpentine mouth, turned up at the corners in a violet penumbra, mocks the viewer with such sweetness, grace and superiority that we feel timid, like schoolboys in the presence of a duchess." In England, the Mona Lisa was made famous by the prose stylist, Walter Pater, in 1869. According to him: "The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire… She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and hands." So when the picture was stolen by an Italian security guard on 21 August 1911, and only recovered in December 1913, the stage was set for the prima donna of the Renaissance.
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