The Many Attacks on the Mona Lisa: What could be the deeper meaning of them?

Eva Burgers (G8)

Current Events

Published Issue 2 2022-2023

Around $850 million dollars is the value of the famous painting, the Mona Lisa. None other than Leonardo da Vinci painted, during the renaissance (1503), the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is a beautiful young woman, Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo. She was a 15th-century mother of 5, and a wealthy florentine. With the painting and all its beauty, there is no explanation why the artwork is so famous other than that it’s known as an artistic masterpiece. Many see the Mona Lisa as what it might be, which is a gorgeous masterpiece with much deeper meanings, while others could see the minor problems with the art and the artist himself. For example, Da Vinci had clumsy and repetitive handwriting, causing some misunderstandings with the church, and getting him into deeper trouble from there on out.

The people who had something against the Mona Lisa kept quiet most of the time, but there have been some occasions where a statement has to be made. While many know that the painting had high quality, no normal person would think to steal it, but in the end, there are people who are too full of themselves and let their ego take the lead. In 1913, Vincenzo Peruggia took a break from his job at the Louver museum in Paris and steal The Mona Lisa. Vincenzo claimed to want to ‘restore’ Italy by taking it. His plan was unsuccessful.

This was one of the first many famous attempts to steal or vandalize the painting, even though people stopped trying to steal the Mona Lisa because they learnt from Vincenzo’s cowardly mistake. In 1956, a man from Bulgaria threw a rock at the painting. It was behind some glass. The next destruction was in 2009 when a Russian woman smashed a teacup into da Vinci’s masterpiece because she said she was “Denied French citizenship.” The Louvre staff in an interview with The New York Times said she might have been “deranged.” And, the most dramatic one of them all (and the most recent), was in 2022 when a 36-year-old man dressed up as an elderly woman and threw a cake at the painting. Of course, they detained him in a psychiatric unit for his own good.

Now you as the reader may wonder why all these matters, many more paintings have been vandalized, like, why didn’t I talk about when two young students threw tomato soup at Van Goh’s Sunflowers painted and then glued themselves to a wall but then also yelled at tourists. Well, this is a good question, but the Mona Lisa has a history of more attacks, and it’s worth around $150 million dollars more than Van Goh’s Sunflowers. There’s a link between the recent attacks, people taking climate change out on this painting, and Van Goh’s Sunflowers. After watching many dramatic videos of people smearing cake and gluing themselves to walls, there was a connection made. This connection was that while the perpetrators were in the spotlight, they made it quick to say that they believed caring for the earth is much more important than caring for a painting.

In conclusion, the Mona Lisa has been the victim of many cruel attacks, but as the reader, I’ll leave you with a simple question, what could the deeper meanings of the attacks after 2001 be, and why do people go through priceless artifacts to prove that point?