An Ordinary Life Leads to the World's Most Famous Painting

In the late 1970s my parents had an opportunity to visit Europe a couple of times.  During one trip they toured the Louvre in Paris, France mainly to see what everyone else goes there to see – Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous painting.

When I asked my mother what she thought of it she said, “It wasn’t as big as I thought it should be since everyone makes such a big deal about it.”

Compared to other famous paintings and based on today’s standards it might be small.  Basing it on the standard of the day when someone commissioned a painting it WAS pretty big.

There has always been an aura of mystery surrounding the painting with the prime question being who in the world was Mona Lisa?

The mysteries just seemed to add to its popularity.

Today, art historians have identified the woman immortalized on canvas as Lisa del Giocondo, the third and much younger wife of a wealthy silk merchant.

Supposedly, Da Vinci was commissioned to paint Giocondo’s wife to celebrate the birth of a second son or moving to a new home.

Though the Giocondo family was wealthy the accounts I’ve read don’t paint them as fabulously wealthy.  Most accounts state Lisa Giocondo’s life was very ordinary – which is so ironic since the painting is so famous. 

Lisa Giocondo was finally indentified when a researcher noticed a margin note in some documents written in 1503 by Agostino Vespucci.  He made the margin note in a 1477 edition of Cicero’s Epostulae ad Familiares held at the Heidelberg University.  Vespucci was a chancellery official, clerk, and assistant to Machiavelli.

Da Vinci took a few years to finish the painting and didn’t do so until he had moved to France in 1519.  The king of France, Francois I, bought the painting and upon his death it belonged to the French Royal Family until the French Revolution.

Why wasn’t the painting delivered to the Giocondo family?  Was it because the painting was never finished?   Were they unhappy with it?  Did they refuse to pay?


In April, 2011 a group attempted to locate Lisa Giocondo’s remains at the convent where she is supposedly is buried.  By May, a skull and some bone fragments were found

This site advises that a battery of tests such as carbon-14 dating and a comparison of DNA with two of Giocondo’s children buried in Florence’s Santissma Annunziata church will be required to prove the skeleton belonged to Mona Lisa’s real-life model.

It would seem the more we discover the more we still have a mystery.