Mona Lisa, One of the greatest painting ever to be made

Mona Lisa is a mesmerizing painting created by the famous Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is considered to be the most famous, recognizable and copied art work in the world. It has been believed to be painted between 1503 to 1506 though the artist might have worked on it for many more years. The painting is believed to depict the Italian Noble Lisa del Giocondo. It has been painted in oil on a white Lombardy poplar panel. It was acquired by King Francis l of France and is now the property of the French Republic. It has been on permanent display at the Louvre in Paris since 1797. The Mona Lisa is believed to be worth more than $850 million, taking into account inflation. In 1962, it was insured for $100 million, holding the Guinness World Record for highest ever insurance value in the art market. Now the painting is present behind a bullet proof glass in Louvre which is visited by hundreds of people everyday.

The simplicity of the women rises up the painting into another extent. The woman doesn't wear any jewellery or rich costumes, She is dressed in a plain dark robe. The way she is observing the painter seems incredible in another perspective. The smile also seems naturally normal, the way Leonardo paints the smile and eyes in a natural way by his method of not drawing outlines(sfumato) but blending the smile and eyes with the face is a noticeable work. Mona Lisa's smile is seen different by different people, there is no specific explanation for this.

People of Arezzo in the Val di Chianna, a valley in Tuscany, have traditionally claimed the Mona Lisa landscape as theirs.

One long-standing mystery of the painting is why Mona Lisa features very faint eyebrows and apparently does not have any eyelashes. In October 2007, Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, says he discovered with a high-definition camera that Leonardo da Vinci originally did paint eyebrows and eyelashes. Creating an ultra-high resolution close-up that magnified Mona Lisa's face 24 times, Cotte says he found a single brushstroke of a single hair above the left eye. "One day I say, if I can find only one hair, only one hair of the eyebrow, I will have definitively the proof that originally Leonardo da Vinci had painted eyelash and eyebrow," said Cotte. The engineer claims that other eyebrow hairs that potentially could have appeared on the painting may have faded or been inadvertently erased by a poor attempt to clean the painting.

The artistic ability of Leonardo can't be doubted and should be appreciated.