The naming of
Lisa Gherardini, "La Gioconda" (the
jocund i.e. smiling), as the
sitter is due to
Giorgio Vasari in his
Lives of the Painters, though he apparently had not personally seen it. She is known in other languages as some variation of
La Gioconda.
The word Mona is an English alteration of the Italian Monna, which is short for Madonna: Madonna Lisa = My Lady Lisa. In Venice and the north-east of Italy, mona means "cunt", so do try to remember: La Gioconda.
The smoky or smudgy effect that makes her mouth so mysterious is known as sfumato.
Leonardo took the painting with him when he was appointed court painter to King François I of France in 1516. It remained there after his death, and after the French Revolution the Palace of the Louvre was turned into a public gallery, and the Mona Lisa started to become very very famous indeed.
The most famous description of the Mona Lisa is by the 19th-century aesthete and art critic Walter Pater:
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 the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself all modes of thought and life.
It was stolen in 1911 and returned in 1913. Its movements during the
Second World War are not wholly accounted for. (There are many similar paintings, near-copies of it, in existence, and you naturally get the occasionally theory that the one in the Louvre is a
changeling.) In 1961 it toured America and in 1974 Japan. These days it is behind so much
bulletproof glass and so many tourists that there's no point trying to see it, if indeed there ever was.