The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity

The Renaissance began in the Italian city-state of Florence during the 14th century and is often perceived as initiating an important break with the culture and thought of the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was based on the rediscovery and wider promulgation of many classical texts from ancient Greece and Rome that had been lost or generally neglected during the preceding centuries. This celebration of the Greco-Roman past led to new developments in literature, art, and political thought.

During the Renaissance, Italy was composed of various city-states and kingdoms instead of operating as a unified country. Florence was one of the most famous city-states, with its ruling elite of bankers, the Medici family, overseeing a golden age in culture due to their active patronage of the arts. There were many important developments in the visual arts during this time. Giotto di Bondone created painting techniques that lent realism to the depiction of human figures. Filippo Brunelleschi developed linear perspective, enabling the illusion of depth on canvas. These changes set the stage for Leonardo da Vinci to refine his sfumato technique, which attempted to replicate how human eyes perceive the world around them. The increasing popularity of oil paint, in turn, made these artistic developments possible because it held pigment better, allowing for more vivid and gradient colors, and dried more slowly than traditional tempera paint.

These artistic developments interacted with medical, mathematical, scientific, and geographical explorations and discoveries. Significantly, Renaissance thinkers did not regard these as discrete fields of knowledge. Rather, they sought to unify scientific and artistic ideals. Renaissance naturalism and realism emerged from a desire to study and replicate nature, especially in art. Hence Leonardo’s preoccupation with proportion and perspective, his fascination with geometric principles, and his interest in dissecting and measuring human corpses, as Nicholas Day explores in The Mona Lisa Vanishes.