Mona Lisa Reflection Essay

To be honest I have never been much of an artsy kind of person. My major is history and I just never thought art as such a significant thing until now. The painting I find myself most interested in is the Mona Lisa. As it is probably the most valuable and most popular painting in today’s modern time, I find it very interesting that nobody really knows who the women is in the Mona Lisa and why paint it in the first place? I think the skeptics of the painting is what drives me to like it so much. I mean you have this painting of what is supposed to be a women in Italy around the 18th century and you see this nice glowing smile, but in the back ground it almost looks like Armageddon. I mean as far I know Leonardo Di Vinci wasn’t a very dark or Dominic man. I mean this guy painted the famous last supper. If you look at this painting you would almost think of it as a man with female qualities. There have been skeptics saying that Da Vinci made a self-portrait of him as a women, but nobody knows. That eerie feeling that nobody does know makes you think so much about it. It’s this painting along with a couple others that Da Vinci did that got me interested in taking art history especially around the time of the Renaissance. I figured since I am already a history major that maybe understanding why art has such an impact on today’s society will help me see a more rounded view of certain topics in history like the Renaissance. Which was the time that Mona Lisa was painted and the time where culture is just booming and you have all these other great artists at the time. You know my biggest question is who are these artists why are they painting such portraits and why does art have such an impact? By learning the reasoning behind this maybe it will help me get a better grasp on other things in history during this time.