It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic. It has been on permanent display at the Louvre in Paris since 1797.
Truly priceless, the painting cannot be bought or sold according to French heritage law. As part of the Louvre collection, "Mona Lisa" belongs to the public, and by popular agreement, their hearts belong to her.
The Mona Lisa is priceless. Any speculative price (some say over a billion dollars!) would probably be so high that not one person would be able or willing to purchase and maintain the painting. Moreover, the Louvre Museum would probably never sell it.
The original Mona Lisa is on permanent display at the the Musee du Louvre in Paris.
In 1517, da Vinci went to France at the King's invitation and took the painting with him. He continued to work on the painting while in France. Upon his death on May 2, 1519, in Amboise, France, the artist's assistant Salaì inherited the work and sold it to France's King Francis I for 4,000 gold coins.
All three are in the Louvre Paris. Mussolini wanted them returned to Italy. The Italian government still wants them. The truth is they never did belong to Italy.
The Mona Lisa has been stolen once but has been vandalized many times. It was stolen on 21 August 1911 by an Italian Louvre employee who was driven to act by his Italian patriotism.
The most expensive painting ever sold is the Salvator Mundi, the Saviour of the World in English, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. It was painted in the 1500s and sold for $450.3 million in 2017. The painting was acquired by Mohamed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
** Mona Lisa is in the public domain and free to be exploited, explaining its reproduction on everything from postcards to coffee mugs, with no legal repercussions. Artistic replicas and reinterpretations as a whole – demonstrating adequate modification – are considered new works eligible for copyright protection.
In 1911, it was swiped from the museum by one Vincenzo Perugia, an Italian worker at the Louvre who wanted to bring the painting back to Italy. The enigmatic work surfaced in Florence two years later. Later, the work went on loan abroad in Washington, D.C., and New York in 1963.
Leonardo begins painting the Mona Lisa, which he will work on for four years (according to Leonardo da Vinci's biographer, Giorgio Vasari.) Raphael arrives in Florence and visits Leonardo's studio.
The Mona Lisa is valued at $850,000,000 because it is arguably the most famous painting in the world.
Indeed, the Mona Lisa is a very realistic portrait. The subject's softly sculptural face shows Leonardo's skillful handling of sfumato, an artistic technique that uses subtle gradations of light and shadow to model form, and shows his understanding of the skull beneath the skin.
The Mona Lisa hangs behind bulletproof glass in a gallery of the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it has been a part of the museum's collection since 1804. It was part of the royal collection before becoming the property of the French people during the Revolution (1787–99).
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is the Louvre's most popular attraction. The Louvre is owned by the French government. Since the 1990s, its management and governance have been made more independent.
The world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, needs a space big enough to welcome its many admirers. It is therefore housed in the Louvre's largest room, the Salle des États, which is also home to other remarkable Venetian paintings such as The Wedding Feast at Cana by Veronese.
The 17th century copy, best known as Hekking's Mona Lisa, exceeded estimates by some margin today Christie's auction house in Paris. A faithful copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa dating from more than 400 years ago has sold for €210,000.
“An artist may make a work of art that includes a recognizable likeness of a person without her or his written consent and sell at least a limited number of copies thereof without violating” his or her right of publicity, the court found. So if you're not Tiger Woods or Elvis or a supermodel, should you care?
Vincenzo Peruggia (8 October 1881 – 8 October 1925) was an Italian museum worker, artist and thief, most famous for stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris on 21 August 1911.
Guinness World Records lists Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa as having the highest ever insurance value for a painting. On permanent display at the Louvre in Paris, the Mona Lisa was assessed at US$100 million on 14 December 1962. Taking inflation into account, the 1962 value would be around US$970 million in 2022.
It holds the Guinness World Record for the highest known painting insurance valuation in history at US$100 million in 1962, equivalent to $1 billion as of 2023.
Salvator Mundi, translated to “Savior of the World,” is not only the world's most expensive painting—it's possibly the most controversial painting, as well.
In 1956, the Mona Lisa was vandalized not once but twice. First, a vandal attempted to take a razor blade to the painting, though no damage ended up being inflicted. Then, a Bolivian man named Hugo Unjaga Villegas tossed a rock at the painting.
Two years after it was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece The Mona Lisa is recovered inside Italian waiter Vincenzo Peruggia's hotel room in Florence.