When Monica Lewinsky appeared as Mona Lisa on the cover of The New Yorker in February 1999, we witnessed a deployment of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting for social satire. It is just one memorable example of the many ways that the Mona Lisa has been appropriated over the years by advertisers, merchandisers and artists. In Becoming Mona Lisa: The Making of a Global Icon (Harcourt, 2001), historian Donald Sassoon traces the Mona Lisa’s rise to stardom—from its creation in 1503 to its stature in the twentieth century as a global icon of popular culture.

In da Vinci’s lifetime, the Mona Lisa was considered a masterpiece, receiving praise from Vasari and inspiring Raphael. Subsequent generations of European artists and writers were also impressed by the painting. But it wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century—when the new art critics began to shape public opinion and mass media became possible—that the Mona Lisa became famous. With the proliferation of this famous portrait on t-shirts, coffee mugs, mouse pads and other trinkets in the late twentieth century, Mona Lisa has indeed become ubiquitous.

Becoming Mona Lisa is a fascinating account of how the Mona Lisa became what it is today. Based on extensive research, Sassoon reveals how the painting was created, who the subject was, why it achieved unrivaled status in the art world and the role that museums, art critics, mass media and commerce played in the painting’s ascending cultural importance. However, Mona Lisa took some twists and turns on her way to becoming a pop icon, as the following excerpt from Becoming Mona Lisa shows:

Iconoclastic attacks on the Mona Lisa have been ‘one of the surest (if most perverse) tributes that other artists have paid the painting.’ The same can be said of less metaphorical forms of iconoclasm, such as vanDalism.

On 30 December 1956 Hugo Unzaga Villegas, a forty-two-year-old Bolivian, threw a stone at the Mona Lisa, slightly damaging its elbow. The following day, the story was covered by almost every newspaper in the world, from the East Anglian Daily Times to the Royal Gazette of Bermuda and the Polish Zycie Warszawy. The newspaper cuttings fill three large boxes carefully preserved in the Louvre documentation centre. A psychiatric report on Villegas by Dr. Gouriou (14 January 1957) found that the man was insane, heard strange voices, and had intended to murder the Argentinean dictator Juan Perón, but went instead for the less well protected Mona Lisa. Though the event was certainly newsworthy, it could not produce on its own more than one or two paragraphs of copy, at least on the first day. But newspapers fill the available space with relevant items from their file of clippings and with quotes obtained from accessible and serviceable experts.

Anyone could come up with a view of the attack, even years later. In 1963 Salvador Dali provided his own ‘Freudian’ interpretation: imagine, he wrote, a naïve Bolivian visiting the Louvre. He perceives the museum as a whorehouse full of naked, shameless statues—these Rubenses, this naked flesh. He notices, hanging on a wall, the portrait of his own mother. What is she doing in a place like this? She too must be a whore. What’s more, she is smiling ambiguously at him. He has two options: the first is to run away with the portrait and hide it, piously, where it cannot be found; the second is to assault it. Dali has a point. It is difficult to imagine an attack on Raphael’s Baldissare Castiglione (though he could look like someone’s father). Usually, men who attack pictures attack those representing women.

Unzaga Villegas’s stone ensured that selected aspects of the Mona Lisa story would be told all over again; in particular, the story of the theft, along with a couple of lines from some well-known cultural sources—usually Freud, since by the 1950s Gautier and Pater were no longer household names. Then one could dwell on any of the three canonical mysteries: Why is the smile enigmatic? Who was the model? Is the Louvre Mona Lisa authentic?

Nothing could be simpler than to get a few experts to come up with apparently controversial comments on any of the above. Mona Lisa stories are among the easiest for the press to cover. Name recognition is very high among readers. The few who had not heard of it could be authoritatively informed that it was the best-known picture in the world, painted by a universal genius. The controversies surrounding it were of importance only to specialists, yet were of interest even to those who, quite rightly, did not really care who was the model. Stories about the Mona Lisa could be classed as ‘cultural’ while being of interest to both ends of the market.

As a marketing instrument working on behalf of the Mona Lisa, Hugo Unzaga Villegas’s blow had an effect comparable to Marcel Duchamp’s moustaches, and produced even greater coverage. Besides, Lisa’s ‘high culture’ association with Leonardo continued to bear fruit. Throughout the twentieth century the reputation of Leonardo had grown exponentially—largely because of its scientific connection. He was the kind of scientist everyone felt familiar with, even without knowing what it was he had discovered or invented. The four hundredth anniversary of his death (1919) had been a relatively muted affair, but the five hundredth anniversary of his birth (1952) was widely celebrated. By then Leonardo had ‘won’ the popularity contest against his traditional rivals Raphael and Michelangelo. The evidence is all around us, in the imperceptible but systematic, and often unwitting, promotion of Leonardo’s image. Neither Raphael nor Michelangelo, for instance, benefits from a pre-installed screen-saver on Microsoft Windows 98 software. ‘Leonardo’, ‘Raphael’ and ‘Michaelangelo’ (sic) as well as ‘Donatello’ were the names given in 1984 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Lairdin (both had studied art history at university) to their enormously successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a comic-book strip which led to toys, games and a television animation series. The leader of the Turtles was, of course, Leonardo.

Raphael in particular has suffered from his failure to produce a strikingly popular piece of work such as Michelangelo’s David. Raphael’s life has never been turned into a best-selling book, as Michelangelo’s was in Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), later adapted into a successful film starring Charlton Heston (1963).

In the nineteenth century Lisa travelled on the back of the better-known Leonardo, but in the twentieth she became bigger than her creator, particularly in the mass market, where, as all advertisers know, the real money is made. In 1934 Cole Porter wrote the song ‘You’re the Top’ for his famous show Anything Goes, in which the Mona Lisa smile was—inevitably—included in the list of items that are ‘the top’:

… You’re the Nile;
You’re the Tower of Pisa;
You’re the smile
on the Mona Lisa…

Ella Fitzgerald has sung it (beautifully), and so have Fats Waller, Dionne Warwick, Barbra Streisand and many others. The idea that Mona Lisa was ‘the top’ became a matter of course, even in chess: The grand master Eduard Gufeld called his greatest triumph his ‘Gioconda game.’

An even greater hit than ‘You’re the Top’ (in which Lisa shared the honours with other ‘tops’) was the song ‘Mona Lisa,’ by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans. Nat ‘King’ Cole made it famous, singing it in the film Captain Carey USA (1950), for which it gained the Academy Award for best song. Cole’s wife Maria had objected to his recording the song, feeling than an ‘offbeat thing about an old painting wouldn’t go.’ Nat insisted, and was proved right: ‘Mona Lisa’ resolved, at a stroke, his financial problems. It hit the number one spot on the US charts in July 1950, and became the biggest-selling record of the year. Five other singers, less well-known than Cole, also made it into 1950’s top three hundred by singing ‘Mona Lisa’: Don Cherry (No. 53), Charlie Spivak (198), Harry James (192), Ralph Flanagan (243) and Dennis Day (249). The song has since been recorded by Pat Boone, Bing Crosby, Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley, Paul Anka, Conway Twitty, Donny Osmond, Tom Jones, Julio Iglesias, Elglebert Humperdinck and many others. Jazz versions have included those by Sonny Rollins and, in Japan, Masabumi Kibuchi. It has been included in a French compilation of songs about women called ‘de l’eternal féminin,’ sung by Tino Rossi, whose distinctive rolling ‘r’, Mediterranean intonation and Italianate tenor voice were still fashionable in France in the 1950s. But Nat King Cole’s remained the classic version. Almost forty years after his untimely death in 1965, anyone tuning to an ‘easy listening’ radio station is still highly likely to hear it.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named you.
You’re so like the lady with the mystic smile.
Is it only ‘cause you’re lonely they have blamed you?
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile?
Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa?
Or is this your way to hide a broken heart?
Many dreams have been brought to your doorstep
They just lie there and they die there.
Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?

*Donald Sassoon is professor of history at Queen Mary College of the University of London. He is the author of Contemporary Italy: Economy, Society and Politics Since 1945 and One Hundred Years of Socialism and is a frequent contributor to major British and European publications.