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
Medusa (Leonardo da Vinci painting) 1600. Medusa (Leonardo da Vinci painting) Medusa is either of two paintings described in Giorgio Vasari's "Life" of Leonardo da Vinci as being among Leonardo's earliest works. Neither painting survived. In his "Vita di Leonardo" (1568), Vasari reports that, as a very young man, Leonardo represented the head of Medusa on a wooden shield: Although art historians have doubted the veracity of this anecdote, Leonardo's shield (long since lost) has been said to inspire several early 17th-century painters who may have seen it in the collection of Ferdinand I de Medici. Rubens and Caravaggio are known to have painted their