Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is one of the greatest masterpieces one of the greatest riddles and one of the most extraordinary public suc- cesses in the history of art. Millions have viewed it in its special humidity-and-temperature-con- trolled case in the Louvre and on its rare excur- sions abroad. And yet surprisingly there has been until now no full account of the painting and its unlikely history for a general audience. Roy McMullen’s generously illustrated study at last makes up for that lack. It discusses the life of Leonardo in relation to his best-known work presents the serious theories about the painting (as well as some of the spectacularly woolly ones) assesses the way in which critical attitudes to- ward it have changed over the centuries and offers a striking new interpretation. The book places the enigmatically smiling lady in such un- expected places as the bathroom of Francis I of France (where she may have acquired her famous golden brown varnish as a protection against the heat and moisture) the bedroom of Napoleon and the pitiful furnished room of the Italian laborer who stole her from the Louvre in 1911 in the most sensational art theft of all time. McMullen also probes some of the tantalizing mysteries of the Mona Lisa. Who was its real subject? Was she a “certain lady”? Was she a man? A character out of the artist’s imagination? (MP)