Her name was Lisa, but she was a Lady so they called her My Lady Lisa, and in Italian that would have been Ma Donna Lisa or, for short, Mona Lisa. In 1568, art historian Giorgio Vasari looked at Da Vinci's painting of Mona Lisa and declared that "anyone who wanted to know how far nature can be imitated by art would understand immediately that the execution of this painting is enough to make the strongest artist tremble with fear." But it took more than Leonardo's fine brush to transform Mona Lisa into the unrivalled rock star model of the masters.
It's a five century long saga of writers and thieves, royals and charlatans, artists and adventurers striving to own, to imitate and to understand. It's not the Nile or the Tower of Pisa. It's the smile.
