Mona Lisa - Known as the La Gioconda or La Joconde

Mona Lisa is known as the La Gioconda or La Joconde which means in Italian joyful one it was created on the 16th-century portrait painted in oil on a poplar panel by Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci during the Renaissance in Florence, Italy. The work is currently owned by the Government of France and is on display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris under the title, Portrait of Portrait of Lisa Gherardini wife of Francesco del Giocondo.The painting is a half-length portrait and depicts a seated woman whose facial expression is frequently described as enigmatic

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 François I invited the painter to work at the Clos Lucé 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 écus and kept it at Château 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-Prussian War (1870-1871) it was moved from the Louvre to the Brest Arsenal.

Mona Lisa was not well known until the mid-19th century when artists of the emerging Symbolist which was a late nineteenth-century style of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts movement began to appreciate it, and associated it with their ideas about feminine mystique.

...