Sarajevo's Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa is Leonardo's most famous painting, which is famous for Mona Lisa's mysterious smile. This work is a unique example of the union of the two painting techniques of sfumato and chiaroscuro, which Leonardo brought to perfection. Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa for almost three years, from 1503 to 1506. The Mona Lisa is one of the few paintings by Leonardo that has survived to this day. The Mona Lisa is kept in the Louvre in Paris. This portrait represents a combination of Florentine and Flemish styles.

Mona Lisa was the wife of merchant Francesco del Diaconda whom he married in 1495. It was his third marriage. In marriage, they had one daughter who died in 1499, after which sadness and despair reigned in their lives. Mona Lisa's real name was Liza Gerardini. Leonardo offered to paint the beautiful face of this young woman who was then between 28 and 30 years old. Since the Mona Lisa was so beautiful, during the portrait Leonardo brought someone who played and sang, as well as lacrdiases, to cheer her up and break her sadness. Leonardo didn't just want to make a portrait, he wanted to paint "a living thing": no one before him had set himself such a high goal, to challenge nature itself, to imitate it in order to surpass it, because he wanted to "preserve the idea of divine beauty which time or death will soon destroy". Mona Lisa's portrait is also an expression of Leonardo's technical knowledge. Vazari describes him very eloquently: "The eyes had such a shine and moisture as if they were alive... the eyelashes, since he painted them as if they were growing out of the skin, in some places thicker, in some places sparser, could not have been more natural. He used a technique called sfumato. Mona Lisa Djaconda: a real woman, a portrait or just an occasion to plunge into the depths, but not into the depths of the mirror, but of oneself; or is it the image of perfection? It is the answer of the genius addressed to the new painters who observed the subject of the painting more and more superficially».

Sarajevo's Mona Lisa, 2009, acrylic and oil on canvas, is made in the original dimensions like Leonardo's (76.8x53cm). I tried to make the basic drawing a literal copy without any changes or additions.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa has been an inspiration to many artists. In the painting "Taste" (1911), the French painter Jean Metzinger presented her naked, as a woman drinking tea. That painting is often called the "Mona Lisa of Cubism". Salvador Dali created "Self-portrait as Mona Lisa" (1954), and while the painting was touring in America, Andy Warhol made a series of prints in the form of multiple reproductions, which he called "Thirty is better than one". Fernando Botero painted her as a bull, and Karen Savel made the largest reproduction in the world, the "Mega Mona". Aldous Huxley wrote the short story "Gioconda's Smile", and Amilkare Pakielli composed an opera about Gioconda. Net King Cole sang about the Mona Lisa in a big hit from 1950, and Marcel Duchamp drew her mustache and goatee. It is interesting that our experts also dealt with the secrets of the Mona Lisa. This return to the past came to life in various ways, ironic, romantic, surreal or conceptual, the forms of representation in different ways of seeing are also different.

Why Mona Lisa my way?

In the desire to present it as contemporary, as the Mona Lisa of the 21st century, and as a picture that is always in my memory from the first studies of art history, I came up with the idea of realizing this wonderful creation by Leonardo in my own special way, respecting the drawing in which he presented the greatest genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci.

Through a mosaic of colors in geometric planes, I wanted to convey the mood I feel in this work. I tried to realize the smile itself by placing a red cube near the lower lip, which should evoke some emotion and the current state of the Mona Lisa, reminding us of the famous smile. I presented the hands mostly as cold, using a blue tone with a combination of other colors, primarily red. On the left side of the chest, I placed as a symbol a green heart-shaped area above which stands an abstract shape of a figure. The background is literal, there is a road, a bridge, and the peaks of the mountains can be seen. I didn't want to place the sky itself in one color or in one area, but in a composition that should abstractly resemble the sky with atmospherics, clouds, fog, sun rays, etc., and there is also a reflection on the lake seen from a distance and combined in various effects colors.