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Get the feeling someone's eyes are following you? No, you're not paranoid; it's the Mona Lisa.
The world's most famous painting turns 500 this year, and it's more ubiquitous than ever, thanks to The Da Vinci Code, which featured the eyes of the Italian housewife known as La Gioconda on 40 million book covers.
Now the movie has opened and Mona Lisa gazes from a zillion ads, even though the enigmatic portrait by Leonardo da Vinci plays only a minor role in Code's convoluted plot.
"It is the kind of painting that people who are not interested in art and never go to museums know immediately," says Donald Sassoon, a University of London history professor and author of Becoming Mona Lisa.
The book explains how in less than 100 years an icon of high culture became an icon of pop culture and the world's most parodied work of art.
Sassoon sums up how it happened: It's a very good painting by a genius painter; it's a secular, not a religious image; and it's in a world-class art museum, making it highly visible. Then, it was stolen (which made it world-famous), it became something to make fun of (which made it notorious), it came to the USA (which sent its fame into the stratosphere).
"The Da Vinci Code is going to make it even more famous, but it's already reached such a saturation point that the real question is how well will it be known in another 100 years," says Sassoon.
"While (Code author) Dan Brown may be forgotten in 100 years, the long-term effect (of his book) will be to further enshrine, solidify and entrench the Mona Lisa over all its rivals.
"So eat your heart out, Michelangelo."
From high art to queen of kitsch
*1503-06: Leonardo paints a small (30-by-21-inch) oil portrait on wood of a woman; it is unsigned, undated, untitled, unidentified.
*1519: Leonardo dies in France with the painting in his possession; it is sold to the French king.
*1550: Biographer Giorgio Vasari publishes a book identifying the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The painting is admired by artists but not widely known; few mention her mysterious smile.
*1800: Napoleon hangs Mona Lisa in his bedroom.
*1804: The painting is installed in the Louvre in Paris.
*1870s: Critics in the popular press begin writing about smiling Mona Lisa as an icon of feminine mystique.
*1911-13: An Italian Louvre staffer swipes the painting; it's recovered two years later when he tries to sell it back to Italy.
*1919: French Dada/Surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp draws a mustache on a postcard of Mona Lisa to make fun of high art. She becomes fair game, eventually leading to Mona Lisa scowling, smoking a joint, naked and pregnant, as Elvis, Groucho, Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
*1950: Mona Lisa, recorded by Nat King Cole, spends eight weeks on the charts; wins Academy Award for best song from the film Captain Carey, U.S.A.
*1950s: As culture tourism develops, seeing the Mona Lisa becomes a ritual.
*1963: At the instigation of then-first lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Mona Lisa tours Washington and New York; 1.6 million wait hours to see her.
*1970s: Start of huge expansion of use of Mona Lisa in advertising and promotion. People begin collecting "Monalisiana."
*1980s-2000s: On average, one new commercial use found for the Mona Lisa every week, says author Donald Sassoon, including hotels, restaurants, rum, wigs, blood-testing kits, dental prostheses and even an IUD. Sassoon says the Louvre charges about 100 euros (about $128) to use her image.
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