the oldest curiosity was whether the lady is smilin or sad or what feeling is she goin thru... the meaning of the smile is enigmatic...
sfumato. There is a flickering quality - with smile present and smile gone - which occurs as people move their eyes around Mona Lisa's face. You'll never be able to catch her smile by looking at her mouth!
In 1852, Luc Maspero, a French artist, jumped four floors to his death from a hotel room in Paris. His suicide note explained that he preferred death after years of struggling to understand the mystery behind Mona Lisa's smile.
It was said to b due to DaVinci's style of drawing the pic in layers... as suggested by some tests.
Also.. the lady has no eyebrows... enhancing it's curiosity. Talk's that the eyebrow hairlines were so fine that they have either faded away over the centuries, or were possibly washed away during a poor restoration job.
Other than the most prolific assumption that this portrait was of Madam Lisa Gherardini, the third wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo.
Talk also goes that the Mona Lisa is not a portrait of one woman, but an artful composite of many, Leonardo's idealization of all womanhood. Others suggest it may have been one of Da Vinci's young male models in drag.
Another talk is of the portrait being that of his mother Caterina. Leonardo was an illegitimate child & Leonardo carried this painting with him always not only does the painting remind him of his mother but also reminds him of some of his favorite places shown in the background.
There is also speculation that the portrait is of DaVinci himself; his facial characteristics and those of the
Mona Lisa perfectly aligns with one another!
Vasari, an Italian painter and architect, famous for his biographies of Italian artists, expressed the opinion that DaVinci's manner of painting would make even "
the most confident master ... despair and lose heart".
And to prove it, no painter has copied the Mona Lisa atleast close to perfection! To make a good counterfeit Mona Lisa, one would have to paint the mouth by looking away from it.