Lot 85
After Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Additional Images
Provenance:
With Staff's Gallery, Toronto, ON in 1997;
Private Collection, Ontario
Note:
It has been suggested by scholars and historians that the sitter depicted in the “Mona Lisa” is Lisa del Giocondo (née Gherardini), the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo, hence the alternative Italian title “La Gioconda” or “La Joconde” in French.
Left in his studio when he died, this captivating masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci is an oil painting on a wood panel painted sometime between 1503 and 1519 by adding multiple layers of thin oil glazes at different times. The original hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. Considered an archetypal masterpiece of the Italian Renaissance, it has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about and the most parodied work of art in the world.”