LEONARDO DA VINCI

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1529) was an Italian polymath who is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on various scientific ideas and inventions; these involve a variety of subjects including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology.

Leonardo da Vinci is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualized flying machines, a type of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering did not exist at that time, and were only able to be realized years after his passing.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time, despite the fact that very few of his paintings have survived the passage of time. Of course, Mona Lisa is considered the most famous portrait ever made, and we are fortunate to have it. The Last Supper is likely the most reproduced religious painting of all time. In 2017, Salvator Mundi sold at auction for $450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

Mona Lisa has called the Louvre Museum her home since 1797, and has approximately 6 million visitors per year. As such, most visitors only get to see her in quite a crowded room.

Bold and irreverent, Banksy's Mona Lisa is wrestled from her original context, blasted in monochrome spray paint and endowed with an AK 47.

Recalling famous appropriations of the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, Banksy's satirical, subversive and darkly humorous appropriation is in line with some of his recurring themes – most notably anti-war and anti-violence.

At the same time, its subject retains some of the original painting's enigmatic qualities: Mona Lisa is both attacker and target, her smile betraying nothing.

Banksy would return to the Mona Lisa over the years, painting her in a variety of profane guises. In 2004, as part of a stunt, he hung one of his own versions of the painting in the Louvre Museum (home to the original work) replacing the subject's face with a yellow smiley emoticon.

Marcel Duchamp has created one of the most famous irreverent appropriations of Mona Lisa with his L.H.O.O.Q artwork. First conceived in 1919, the work is one of what Duchamp referred to as “readymades” or, more specifically, a rectified ready-made. The readymade involves taking mundane, often utilitarian objects not generally considered to be art and transforming them, by adding to them, changing them, or (as in the case of his most famous work, Fountain) simply renaming and reorienting them and placing them in a different setting. In L.H.O.O.Q., Marcel Duchamp used a cheap postcard reproduction of Mona Lisa, onto which the artist drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

The name of the piece, L.H.O.O.Q., is a pun, like Banksy is known to create, as the letters pronounced in French sound like “Elle a chaud au cul,” translating literally “She has a hot ass.” “Avoir chaud au cul” is a well-known and used popular expression in France, implying that a woman has sexual restlessness. In a late interview, Duchamp gives a loose translation of L.H.O.O.Q. as “there is fire down below.”

For more than 500 years, Mona Lisa has been one of the most recognizable paintings in the world. Since her creation in 1503, she has become the ultimate Pop icon, so it is unsurprising that in 1963, while on a wildly successful tour of the United States, Mona Lisa caught the attention of Andy Warhol – the ultimate chronicler of popular culture. Inspired as much by the ubiquitous nature of the image as its historical importance, Warhol produced a series of canvases using Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting as his inspiration. One of the largest works in this group, Colored Mona Lisa, is also regarded as one of the most striking and significant paintings of the artist's early career.

By assembling this progression of multicolored images of the Mona Lisa, Warhol not only commented on the ubiquitous nature of one of the most reproduced painting images in modern society, but also on the means of production. Within the surface of this large-scale canvas we can see evidence of the artist's exceptional ability to capture the zeitgeist of a particular moment in time and provide an early example of his prescient ability to identify the emergence of a nascent age in which high art and consumer culture would become inextricably linked.