Mona Lisa Mona Lisa The Mona Lisa (; or La Gioconda , ) is a half-length portrait painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci that has been described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world". The "Mona Lisa" is also one of the most valuable paintings in the world. It holds the Guinness World Record for the highest known insurance valuation in history at $100 million in 1962, which is worth nearly $800 million in 2017. The painting is thought to be a
Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood Leonardo da Vinci and A Memory of His Childhood () is a 1910 essay by Sigmund Freud about Leonardo da Vinci. It consists of a psychoanalytic study of Leonardo's life based on his paintings. In the Codex Atlanticus Leonardo recounts being attacked as an infant in his crib by a bird. Freud cite the passage as: According to Freud, this was a childhood fantasy based on the memory of sucking his mother's nipple. He backed up his claim with the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphs represent the mother as a vulture, because the