The *Mona Lisa* is the most-visited painting in the world. It's also one of the smallest — 77 cm × 53 cm of poplar wood. Who painted it, and when?
Leonardo started the *Mona Lisa* around 1503 in Florence, kept working on it for sixteen years, and was still adding small refinements when he died in France in 1519. The sitter is probably Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant. Michelangelo's main work of that decade was the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Raphael painted the Vatican Stanze for Pope Julius II. Botticelli had been dead since 1510 and painted in the previous generation.
Read the full facts →The Renaissance was a cultural and intellectual movement in Europe between approximately 1400 and 1600 that revived classical Greek and Roman learning, produced new art and science, and laid the groundwork for the modern world. It began in northern Italy and spread north and west across the continent.
Related questions
- Which banking family dominated Renaissance Florence for most of the 15th and 16th centuries?
- Where is the Italian Renaissance conventionally said to have begun?
- Who painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — the 1,100-square-metre fresco that has *The Creation of Adam* in the middle?
- On the morning of 14 July 1789 a Paris mob stormed the medieval fortress that has given France its national holiday ever since. They were expecting to free hundreds of political prisoners. They actually found seven. Who were the seven?