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Serba sedikit tentang Mona Lisa yang saya ambil dari Wikipedia.Leonardo Da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa in 1503 or 1504 in Italy. According to Da Vinci's contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, "...after he had lingered over it four years, left it unfinished...." It is known that such behavior is common in most paintings of Leonardo who, dissatisfied, would have regretted later in his life that he never completed a single work.
He is thought to have continued to work on Mona Lisa for three years after he moved to France and to have finished it shortly before he died in 1519. Leonardo took the painting from Italy to France in 1516 when King Francois I invited the painter to work at the Clos Luce near the king's castle in Amboise. Most likely through the heirs of Leonardo's assistant Salai, the king bought the painting for 4,000 ecus and kept it at Chateau Fontainebleau, where it remained until given to Louis XIV. Louis XIV moved the painting to the Palace of Versailles. After the French Revolution, it was moved to the Louvre. Napoleon I had it moved to his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace; later it was returned to the Louvre. During the Franco-Prussion War (1870–1871) it was moved from the Louvre to the Brest Arsenal.
There are many speculations about the painting's model and landscape. For example, that Leonardo probably painted his model faithfully since her beauty is not seen as being among the best, "even when measured by late quattrocento (15th century) or even twenty-first century standards." Some specialists in Chinese Art, such as Yukio Yashiro, also argue that the landscape in the background of the picture was influenced by Chinese Paintings, however this thesis has been contested for lack of clear evidence. Despite these arguments, it is known that Leonardo made some sketches before starting the picture (at right).
Mona Lisa was not well known until the mid-19th century when artists of the emerging Symbolist movement began to appreciate it, and associated it with their ideas about feminine mystique. Critic Walter Pater, in his 1867 essay on Leonardo, expressed this view by describing the figure in the painting as a kind of mythic embodiment of eternal femininity, who is "older than the rocks among which she sits" and who "has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave."[13]