Why did the Mona Lisa become famous and what is the secret of its mystery?

What is the Mona Lisa painting? The Mona Lisa is one of the works of the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, in which he used a unique style, which is to depict the woman drawn from both the side and the front, which gave the painting a slightly three-dimensional character, and contributed to showing its details more clearly, so it was considered one of the most beautiful paintings throughout the ages until today. . Da Vinci began painting the painting in 1503 and finished painting it completely in 1510. It is about 77 cm high and 53 cm wide, but it is considered relatively small compared to the rest of the paintings at this time. Its current location is in the Louvre Museum in the French capital, Paris.

The Mona Lisa is one of the most enigmatic and iconic pieces of Western art. It has inspired countless copies, but one replica at the Madrid's Museo del Prado is generating its own buzz: Conservators say that it was painted at the same time as the original — and possibly by one of the master's pupils, perhaps even a lover.

Juxtaposing the two paintings — and using infrared technology, which works like an X-ray, allowing one to see beneath the paint to see previous, obscured versions — conservators say that Leonardo and the painter of the replica made exactly the same changes at the same time.

"The changes mirrored the changes which Leonardo made on the original," Martin Bailey, correspondent with The Art Newspaper in London, tells NPR's Melissa Block. "[Conservators] concluded that the two pictures had been done side by side in the studio, and it was probably on easels which were two or three yards away from each other.