LEONARDO DA VINCI

The Original Renaissance Man

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) occupies an almost unique place in the history of Western culture. Painter, draftsman, engineer, anatomist, inventor and relentless observer of the natural world, he has become the embodiment of the “Renaissance man”: someone whose curiosity refuses to remain confined to a single discipline.

Born in Vinci, near Florence, Leonardo worked in some of the great artistic and political centers of Renaissance Italy, including Florence and Milan, before spending the final years of his life in France. His surviving notebooks reveal an extraordinary range of interests. He studied the human body through anatomical dissection, investigated the movement of water, designed machines and military devices, examined plants and geological formations, and filled thousands of pages with drawings and observations written in his famous mirror script.

Yet Leonardo's reputation ultimately rests upon a remarkably small number of surviving paintings. Among them are two images that have become part of global visual culture: The Last Supper, painted in Milan in the 1490s, and the Mona Lisa, begun around 1503 and today housed in the Louvre.

Leonardo's importance lies not simply in technical virtuosity. He was fascinated by how we see and understand the world. His subtle use of sfumato—the almost imperceptible blending of tones and contours—allowed faces and landscapes to emerge without hard outlines. Painting, for Leonardo, was closely connected to observation, science and psychology.

Five centuries later, one particular face would give Banksy an irresistible target.

Salvator Mundi: The $450 Million Leonardo

Another painting associated with Leonardo has achieved a very different kind of fame. Salvator Mundi - Latin for “Savior of the World” - depicts Christ facing the viewer, raising his right hand in blessing while holding a transparent crystal orb in his left.

The painting has an extraordinary history. Long believed to be lost and subsequently attributed to followers of Leonardo, it was rediscovered, restored and eventually presented as an autograph work by Leonardo, although its attribution has continued to generate considerable scholarly debate. On 15 November 2017, Salvator Mundi was offered at Christie’s New York. Estimated at around $100 million, it sold after an extraordinary bidding battle for $450.3 million including fees. It remains the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction. The record provides a remarkable modern epilogue to Leonardo’s story. An artist who died in 1519, leaving behind only a small number of generally accepted paintings, continues to occupy the very summit not only of art history but of the global art market.

The Most Famous Face in Art

Few paintings require less introduction than the Mona Lisa. The portrait's fame has become so immense that the painting exists simultaneously as a Renaissance masterpiece and as an object of popular culture.

Her identity, landscape, gaze and famously ambiguous smile have generated centuries of scholarship and speculation. But something else happened to the Mona Lisa in the modern era: she became endlessly reproducible.

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.

Postcards, advertisements, books, T-shirts, mugs, cartoons and internet memes have detached Leonardo's sitter from the wooden panel on which she was painted. The Mona Lisa has become an image almost everyone recognizes, including millions who have never stood in front of the original.

And that makes her perfect material for Banksy.

Banksy Arms the Mona Lisa

Banksy's relationship with Leonardo is overwhelmingly a relationship with the Mona Lisa. He has returned to her repeatedly, altering one of the most protected images in art history through the irreverent visual vocabulary of graffiti, weapons, censorship and popular culture.

In one of his earliest interpretations, Banksy transforms Leonardo's serene sitter into an armed figure. Rendered through the graphic language of the stencil, the familiar Renaissance portrait is confronted by the visual vocabulary of contemporary warfare.

The joke works because Leonardo has already done most of the work. We recognize the face immediately. Banksy needs only to introduce a single disruptive element for the meaning of the image to change.

The mysterious woman who has calmly observed viewers for five centuries suddenly inhabits Banksy's world of soldiers, bombs, helicopters and weapons. Her composure makes the transformation more unsettling. She does not cease to be the Mona Lisa. She simply appears remarkably comfortable with her new circumstances.

Banksy would revisit this collision between Leonardo and modern weaponry in subsequent versions, including the celebrated London mural commonly known as Mona Lisa Bazooka. The strategy belongs naturally beside works such as Bomb Hugger and Happy Choppers, in which instruments of warfare are placed into deliberately unexpected visual relationships.

Censoring the World's Most Famous Gaze

In 2003, Banksy approached the painting differently.

Rather than arming the sitter, he obscured her eyes with a broad white band. The intervention is minimal, but it attacks one of the portrait's most celebrated characteristics: the sensation that the Mona Lisa is looking back at us.

Banksy leaves enough of Leonardo's composition intact for recognition to be instantaneous, yet removes the psychological connection traditionally created by the sitter's gaze. The work demonstrates an important principle running throughout Banksy's appropriations: an existing masterpiece does not need to be comprehensively transformed. Sometimes one alteration is enough to force us to look at a familiar image again.

Banksy Takes the Mona Lisa Back to the Louvre

Then Banksy took the joke directly to Leonardo.

In 2004, disguised as an ordinary visitor, Banksy entered the Louvre and secretly installed his own version of the Mona Lisa on a museum wall. In his interpretation, Leonardo's enigmatic face had been replaced by a bright yellow smiley.

The intervention was particularly effective because of where it occurred. Banksy was no longer simply reproducing and altering a masterpiece: he was inserting his altered version into the institution housing the original.

The Louvre—the temple of the Mona Lisa—became part of the artwork.

The stunt also belongs to Banksy's wider campaign of unauthorized museum interventions during the early 2000s. By placing his own works inside major museums without permission, he inverted the normal relationship between artist and institution. Instead of waiting for the museum to decide whether his work belonged inside, Banksy made the decision himself.

Banksy Was Not the First to Give Mona Lisa a Makeover. If vandalizing the Mona Lisa sounds outrageous, Banksy was following an extremely distinguished precedent.

Marcel Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q.

In 1919, Marcel Duchamp took an inexpensive postcard reproduction of Leonardo's masterpiece and drew a moustache and goatee on her face. He called the resulting work L.H.O.O.Q.

The title itself was another joke. When the letters are pronounced rapidly in French, they produce a risqué phrase roughly suggesting that the sitter is sexually aroused.

Duchamp's gesture was deliberately provocative. By scribbling facial hair over perhaps the most revered portrait in Western art, he challenged ideas about artistic genius, originality and the almost religious reverence accorded to masterpieces.

More importantly for Banksy, Duchamp demonstrated something fundamental about appropriation: you do not have to destroy an icon to challenge it. You can borrow it, alter it and make it say something entirely new.

Banksy's smiley-faced Mona Lisa belongs naturally to this lineage. The tools have changed—from pencil and postcard to stencil, spray paint and museum infiltration—but the irreverence is remarkably familiar.

Warhol Turns Mona Lisa into a Celebrity

Andy Warhol approached Leonardo from another direction.

When the Mona Lisa travelled to the United States in 1963, it became a genuine media phenomenon. Huge crowds came to see it. Warhol responded by transforming Leonardo's masterpiece through the same process of repetition he applied to Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and consumer products.

In works such as Colored Mona Lisa, Leonardo's unique Renaissance portrait becomes multiple Mona Lisas.

That repetition was perfectly suited to Warhol's fascination with celebrity, reproduction and mass culture. By the twentieth century, the Mona Lisa was no longer simply a painting. She was a celebrity image—and perhaps one of the most reproduced faces in history.

Duchamp had mocked her sanctity. Warhol exposed her reproducibility. Banksy would inherit something from both.

Why Banksy Keeps Returning to Leonardo

Banksy's appropriations of the Mona Lisa are not really attacks on Leonardo. If anything, their effectiveness depends upon Leonardo's extraordinary success.

Banksy chooses images that already carry enormous cultural weight. The more recognizable the original, the less he needs to change. A weapon, a white band or a yellow smiley can transform the Mona Lisa precisely because five centuries of art history have already taught us what the image is supposed to look like.

There is also something wonderfully circular about the relationship. Leonardo was fascinated by invention, experimentation and ways of seeing. Duchamp took Leonardo's masterpiece and challenged the conventions of art. Warhol turned it into mass media. Banksy then brought it into the language of the street.

The Mona Lisa survives every intervention.

Perhaps that is ultimately the most interesting lesson. Great images do not remain alive because nobody touches them. They remain alive because successive generations continue to look at them, argue with them, reproduce them—and occasionally give them a moustache, a machine gun or a yellow smiley face.