Top 10 Titles Featuring the Mona Lisa

Feline felons and a hungry mouse threaten the Mona Lisa in the new children's animation, Cats in the Museum. But Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece has also been in the headlines because environmental activists threw soup at the painting, which is on display behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre in Paris. Film-makers have long been entranced by the picture, as Cinema Paradiso discovers.

The pumpkin soup incident on 28 January 2024 involved two female members of the environmental protest group, Riposte Alimentaire ('Food Counterattack'). It wasn't the first time that Leonardo's portrait of Lisa del Giocondo had been subjected to an edible assault, however, as a male eco campaigner posing as an elderly woman in a wheelchair had smeared cake across the protective glass shield on 30 May 2022.

Much more serious were the attempts made on the Mona Lisa in 1956. After an unnamed vandal had damaged the bottom of the painting by throwing sulphuric acid, a man claiming to be in love with the sitter took a razor blade to the fine-grained white poplar base in an effort to cut it free. Shortly afterwards, the portrait was placed behind protective glass. Nevertheless, in December, Bolivian Hugo Unjaga Villegas shattered the shield and chipped off a fleck of pigment near the left elbow by impulsively throwing a rock he had in his pocket.

The picture was repaired and was in fine fettle when it was shipped off to New York in 1963, although it got a soaking from a faulty fire sprinkler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its seven-week stay in Tokyo in 1974 also proved eventful. As there was no disabled access at the National Museum, Tomoko Yonezu took it upon herself to protest with red spray paint. Some 20-30 droplets hit the surface. but a fine of 3000 yen was the sole punishment.

As the plane returning to France had to fly over Soviet airspace, President Leonid Brezhnev persuaded the French authorities to let it spend time in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. On 11 August 2009, a Russian woman who had been denied French citizenship hurled a teacup at the Mona Lisa. But she continued to smile enigmatically, as the pieces were collected and the Salle des États was quickly re-opened. The Russian connection continues with Vasiliy Rovenskiy's Cats in the Museum (2022).

It takes a while for the story to reach St Petersburg, as a ginger and white cat named Vincent (Jordan Worsley) has to wash up on a desert island in order to meet Maurice (Stephen Krisel), a mouse whose appetite for great art becomes a problem when they fetch up at the Hermitage Museum. Keeping Maurice hidden, Vincent is recruited by Max (Nathan Ford), the leader of the cat force that has been on duty (in what was then the royal palace) since they saw off a plague of rats for Catherine the Great in 1789.

Encounters with a blue Scottish ghost, an Abyssinian cat named Cleopatra (Maria Smakhtina), and a disgraced ex-employee dubbed Meatloaf enliven the action, as the Mona Lisa is targeted by thieves during a much-heralded visit. For someone claiming to be an art expert, Maurice doesn't seem to know that Leonardo didn't paint the picture on canvas. But his efforts to nibble at the edible exhibits and the secret life of the galleries once the lights go out make this an entertaining adventure for younger viewers.

The Hermitage has its own copy of La Gioconda, as does the Prado in Madrid. Then, there's the Isleworth Mona Lisa. Art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon talks about the latter at length in the captivating documentary, The Secrets of the Mona Lisa (2015), which surely merits a release on disc, if only as part of a collection of his best bits, such as the prize-winning Every Picture Tells A Story. Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa (1992). Some of his titles are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso, however. Use the searchline and get clicking.

The Life and Times

This isn't the place to go into detail about the life of Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Suffice to say, only Vincent Van Gogh rivals him when it comes to film-maker fascination. For once, our old friend Georges Méliès, didn't make a film about the Renaissance polymath. But he did use the title, 'Ad Omnia Leonardo da Vinci' ('Everything to Leonardo da Vinci') in a witty self-portrait that shows the former magician's bearded head bursting through a canvas.

The earliest biopic was Mario Corsi and Giulia Cassini-Rizzotto's Leonardo da Vinci (1919), which includes a meeting between Leonardo (Alberto Pasquali) and Mona Lisa (Laura Darville) in its chronicle of his career from his apprenticeship in the workshop of Florentine master Andrea del Verrocchio to his final years at the Château du Clos-Lucé in Amboise. The hour-long picture was released in the same year that Marcel Duchamp scandalised the art world by putting a moustache on to a postcard of Mona Lisa to create his first readymade work, 'L.H.O.O.Q.'

A more imposing portrait of the artist was provided by Renato Castellani's The Life of Leonardo da Vinci (1971), a five-hour miniseries starring Philippe Leroy. In the 1940s, Castellani had been the pioneer of an artistic style of film-making known as 'calligraphism' and the sheer beauty of the imagery in this restrained tribute makes it a must for release on disc in the UK. Fortunately, Cinema Paradiso users can get to see Mark Rylance's fine performance in Tim Dunn's Leonardo (2003), a three-part Alan Yentob docudrama that is paired with the two-part The Divine Michelangelo (2004). Nick Roberts takes centre stage in the dramatic reconstructions in Michael Bouson's The Secret Life of Leonardo Da Vinci (2006), while Peter Capaldi does the honours in Julian Jones's feature documentary, Inside the Mind of Leonardo (2013).

Moving over to the lighter side for a moment, Ed Fenton and Maria Kassoff play Leonardo and Lisa in Troma duo Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Hertz's Stuck on You (1982), a Mel Brooks homage that riffs on love through the ages. Janitor Roberto Benigni and teacher Massimo Troisi fetch up in France in 1492 in the co-directed time-travelling farce, Nothing Left to Do But Cry (1984), and try to tell Leonardo (Paolo Bonicelli) about some future inventions, only for him already to know more than they do. A coda at the start of Michael Lehrman's Hudson Hawk (1991) also comes with a revelation, as Leonardo (Stefano Molinari) decides to paint Lisa (Giselda Volodi) with her mouth closed because she has such bad teeth. Bruce Willis gets to benefit from some of Leonardo's inventions in this undervalued caper. But it's the insights Leonardo (Patrick Godfrey) has into affairs of the heart that prove valuable during his time as artist in residence at the French court to Prince Henry (Dougray Scott) in Andy Tennant's Cinderella variation, Ever After (1998), after he's inspired to sketch 'La Scapigliata' by lowly subject Danielle de Barbarac (Drew Barrymore).

In Paul Tickell's Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (2000), Nick Moran plays an accountant who uses a book-keeping method based on that of Fra Luca Pacioli (Marcello Mazzarella), who is at the Milanese court of Duke Luduvico Sforza (Sergio Albelli) at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci (Mattia Sbragia), whose painting style incurs the wrath of the Catholic Church. The same year also saw the release of M.F. Husain's feature debut, Gaja Gamini (2000), which stars Madhuri Dixit as the embodiment of elusive female beauty through the ages. Naturally, she entices Leonardo (Naseeruddin Shah) in the form of Lisa and he simply has to paint her portrait.

Younger viewers might want to discover the world's most famous artist through Leonardo (2011-12), a BBC series starring Jonathan Bailey as the teenage genius, or through his appearances in the guise of Mathew Baynton or Tom Stourton in Horrible Histories (2009-21). In an inspired moment, the latter duets with Gemma Whelan as Lisa del Giocondo on the endlessly witty song, 'Hello, It's-a Me'.

Back to the more serious (if not always historically accurate) depictions, Tom Riley takes the title role in Da Vinci's Demons (2013-15), a fantasy quest for the Book of Leaves set against the feud between the Medici and Pazzi families. Less fanciful, but still prone to playing fast and loose with fact, Leonardo (2021) casts Aidan Turner as the provocative painter, whose insatiable passion for the arts and sciences is matched by his sexual curiosity and a readiness to commit murder.

What few of these films and shows mention is that Leonardo was reluctant to accept commissions for portraits and frequently left works unfinished. However, he appears to have agreed to paint the wife of Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo in 1503 because he was a neighbour and client of Leonardo's notary father, Piero. As a member of the important Gheradini family, Lisa was well known in the city and had just given birth to a second son. Hence, the nickname given to her portrait, 'La Gioconda', as it not only puns on her surname, but also means 'happy one'.

New research has suggested that Leonardo failed to deliver the picture to Francesco and took it with him to France in 1516 to continue work on it. In his landmark tome, The Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari noted the eyebrows on Lisa's picture and these are also evident in the copy that Raphael sketched in around 1505. But they are absent from the work we see today and it was only thanks to the groundbreaking colour-casting technique devised by Pierre Cotte that the mystery about the 'Mona Lisa' has been cleared up to the satisfaction of most, if not all.

As speculation grew that the image familiar today is actually Fioretta Gorini, the mistress of Giuliano de' Medici, scholars aware of Vasari's description began to suspect that Leonardo had created two portraits. A version in St Petersburg has been found to be a 17th-century facsimile, while the one in the Prado in Madrid is likely to be a studio copy by one of Leonardo's students. There was great excitement in 1913, when Hugh Blaker discovered the so-called 'Isleworth Mona Lisa', which had been in a private English collection since 1778. These conflicting claims have been assessed in a 2003 episode of the BBC series, The Private Life of a Masterpiece (2001-10), as well as in a couple of documentaries, Klaus Steindl's The Mona Lisa Mystery (2012), which was narrated by Jay O. Saunders for the Secrets of the Dead series (2000-), and Jean-Pierre Isbouts's The Mona Lisa Myth (2014), which has Morgan Freeman espousing the Isleworth theory.

The matter appeared solved when Pierre Cotte's high-resolution camera revealed an earlier version beneath the familiar image and this not only has eyebrows, but also once had a headdress that was held in place by a series of ornate pins. Experts have claimed that this is the historical Lisa, with the sitter we now see being a composite figure who combines elements of Lisa, Fioretta, and perhaps even Gian Giacomo Caprotti, the assistant Leonardo dubbed 'Salaì' or 'Little Devil'. He may well have been the painter's lover and the creator of the nude parody of his masterwork, known as the 'Monna Vanna' ('the Vain Woman'). Andrew Graham-Dixon has suggested that Leonardo revisited the Mona Lisa in a bid to encapsulate all he had learnt about anatomy and human nature. Whatever the truth, the painting was bequeathed to Andrea Salaì, who sold it to Francis I for 4000 gold ducats before his death in a fight in 1524.

This purchase is recreated in Sacha Guitry's Si Paris nous était conté (1956), a playfully skittish history of the French capital that leaps from Francis (Jean Marais) acquiring the painting to it being stolen from the Louvre in 1911. We shall return to this incident presently. But we need to affirm that, from 1550, the Mona Lisa was kept at the Palace of Fontainebleau before Louis XIV took it to Versailles in 1695. Here it remained until 1706, when it was rehung in the Louvre. Following the French Revolution, it went on public exhibition in 1797, although it spent some time in Napoleon Bonaparte's bedroom at the Tuileries Palace.

Despite being favoured by kings and emperors, the Mona Lisa was still not particularly well known when it was moved to the Brest Arsenal for safe keeping during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). After its safe return following a two-year absence, it seemingly remained in the Louvre for the duration of the Great War. But its whereabouts during the 1939-45 conflict are more difficult to pin down. Aleksandr Sokurov reveals in Francofonia (2015) how French civil servant Jacques Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) conspired with German officer Franz von Wolff-Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) to keep the Louvre's treasures out of the clutches of avaricious Nazis. But, while these were secreted in such locations as the Château de Chambord, the Château de Sourches, and Château de Saint-Blancard, there are claims that the Mona Lisa spent part of the Second World War in the Altaussee salt mine in the Austrian Alps. Another spin on the tale can be found in George Clooney's underrated drama, The Monuments Men (2014), about the unit detailed to restore stolen artefacts to their rightful owners.

As we have already seen, La Gioconda has had an eventful time since 1945. And it remains as divisive as it is adored. In Mandy Chang's The Mona Lisa Curse (2008), critic Robert Hughes blamed it for changing the way in which the art establishment operates, while Leonardo's impact on the art market was analysed in Andreas Koefoed's The Lost Leonardo (2021), which traces the discovery of the Salvator Mundi and its record sale for $450 million in 2017. But the turning point for both Leonardo and Lisa came 106 earlier, with an event that made headlines worldwide.

The Crime of the Century

On Monday 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a former employee at the Louvre, walked into the museum and disguised himself as a white-smocked worker. He made for the Salle Carré. While no one was watching, he lifted the Mona Lisa off the four iron hooks that held it in place and rushed it into a service staircase. Wrapping the smock around the picture, Peruggia calmly exited through the same door he had entered and returned to his apartment.

He kept the painting in a trunk for two years before he decided to return to Florence. Crossing the border without arousing suspicion, he hid the Mona Lisa for several months before contacting gallery owner, Mario Fratelli, in December 1913. Astonished by what he had seen, he confided in Giovanni Poggi, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, who went along with Peruggia's request for a reward for bringing Leonardo's masterpiece back to its native soil. Having authenticated the panel, however, Pozzi called the police and asked for permission to exhibit the Mona Lisa before sending it back to Paris.

Despite claiming patriotism as a motive, Peruggia was jailed for 380 days. But he was released after seven months and survived being wounded in the Great War. In 1932, Saturday Evening Post journalist Karl Decker suggested he had been a stooge for con man Eduardo de Valfierno and art forger Yves Chaudron. In 2012, Joe Mederos interviewed Peruggia's 84 year-old daughter, Celestina, who is convinced that her father was biting back for his homeland after Napoleon had stolen so many Italian artworks in the 1790s. However, after a 30-year search, Mederos comes up with an unexpected motivation in The Missing Piece: Mona Lisa, Her Thief, the True Story (aka Mona Lisa Is Missing, 2012).

Within days of the robbery, Paul Garbagni had churned out Nick Winter and the Theft of the Mona Lisa (1911) in order to cash in on the painting's new notoriety. Given that the crime had not been reported immediately because museum guards had presumed that someone had been authorisied to remove the picture, this silent short puts a slapstick spin on the efforts of an ace detective (Georges Vinter) to crack the case. Franz Kafka and Max Brod went to see the empty space in the Louvre and this amusing lampoon at the expense of humiliated museum director Théophile Homolle on 10 September. It was to be the first of many films inspired by the crime, although the claim that Peruggia had hidden overnight in a cupboard has since been discarded, despite it influencing Peter O'Toole and Audrey Hepburn's modus operandi in William Wyler's How to Steal a Million (1966).

The first Hollywood film to use the Mona Lisa in a crime scenario was Sam Wood's Paid (1930), a reworking of the much-filmed stage play, Within the Law. Eager for revenge on the man who had falsely accused her of theft, Joan Crawford targets his son (Douglass Montgomery), who just happens to have the original Leonardo on his wall after a forgery had been returned to the Louvre. Mocked up in a Berlin studio, the museum provides the setting for Géza von Bolváry's The Theft of the Mona Lisa (1931), which stars Willi Forst as Vincenzo Peruggia, a painter in the gallery who decides to steal La Giaconda in order to impress Mathilde (Trude von Molo), a hotel maid who bears a striking resemblance to its subject.

Maurice Leblanc's famous gentleman thief takes his turn at the Louvre in Jack Conway's Arsène Lupin (1932), as the Duke of Charmerace (John Barrymore) audaciously lifts the Mona Lisa from under the nose of Detective Guerchard (Lionel Barrymore) in order to keep him off the trail of fellow thief, Sonia (Karen Morley). In an ideal world, this would make a splendid double bill with George Blair's Scotland Yard Investigator (1945), which pits National Gallery director C. Aubrey Smith against 'the Raffles of the art world', Erich von Stroheim, who knows that the Mona Lisa has spent the Second World War in a hollowed mountain somewhere in England.

Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy Michel Deville's wonderfully colourful caper, On a volé la Joconde (1966), however. George Chakiris plays Vincent, a picture framer who falls for Nicole (Marina Vlady), a chambermaid at a Mona Lisa theme hotel. When she decides he is too poor to make a good husband, she becomes an assistant to a touring magician (Alberto Bonucci). But she realises she's made a mistake when Vincent steals the priceless painting and flees with two crooks and a pair of equally hopeless detectives on his heels.

Robert T. Ironside (Raymond Burr) was harder to shake off, as he demonstrates in 'The Prophecy', a Season Two episode of Ironside (1967-75), in which 'The Seraglio', a fictional Leonardo painting of a Black woman, is stolen from a San Francisco museum. A later TV detective, William Murdoch (Johnathan Sousa), discovers that the body he finds aboard a ship is connected to an 1890s art theft and the trail leads to the studio of Emily Carr (Kristen Thomson) in 'Murdoch and the Mona Lisa', a Season 17 episode of Murdoch Mysteries (2008).

Staying on the small screen, 'Requiem For Methuselah' (1969) - Episode 19 of the Third Season of Star Trek (1966-69) - has Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Mr Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and Dr McCoy (DeForest Kelley) descend to planet Holberg 917-G. Here, they meet Flint (James Daly) and his ward, Rayna Kapec (Louise Sorel). During their stay, the Enterprise trio discover their host cannot die and has lived as Methuselah, Alexander the Great, Solomon, Lazarus, Leonardo da Vinci, and Johannes Brahms, among many others, since being born in 3834 BC.

In 'The Raven', a Season Four episode of Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001), Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) has a vision of a raven in Leonardo's workshop and sees both the Mona Lisa and Virgin and Child With St Anne. In Episode 11, 'Concerning Flight', Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), discovers that her Leonardo holodeck has been stolen and acquired an independent existence (in the form of John Rhys Davies) at a trading post.

Over in Blighty, Douglas Adams found himself among the writers of 'City of Death', a fascinating Season 17 episode of Doctor Who (1963-). While in Paris, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana (Lalla Ward) become suspicious of Count Scalioni (Juluan Glover) during a visit to the Louvre. They discover he is really an alien named Scaroth, who is plotting to steal the Mona Lisa. Travelling back to 1505 Florence, the Doctor encounters Scalioni posing as Captain Tancredi. But he still has time to leave a note for his old friend: 'Dear Leo, sorry to have missed you. Hope you're well. Sorry about the mess on the panels, just paint over them, there's a good chap. See you earlier, love the Doctor.'

Three decades later, Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) would come face to face with La Giaconda (Suranne Jones) in 'Mona Lisa's Revenge', a Series Three episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-11). With Sarah Jane trapped inside a painting, the alien who has assumed the shape of Leonardo's sitter tries to gain access a box in the Louvre basement containing 'The Abomination'.

By the way, 'City of Death' was the first episode of Doctor Who to shoot on location. The gallery scene also contains cameos by Eleanor Bron and John Cleese, who had asked to be credited as Helen Swanetsky and Kim Bread. Speaking of things Python, Mona Lisa crops up a few times in Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74). Most notably, in the 'Art Gallery Strike' sketch in 'Spam', the picture is one of many artworks to withdrew from public view ('I'm off'), while in 'It's the Arts', the painting helps pronounce the name of the German composer Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern-schplenden-schlitter-crasscrenbon-fried-digger-dingle-dangle-dongle-dungle-burstein-von-knacker-thrasher-apple-banger-horowitz-ticolensic-grander-knotty-spelltinkle-grandlich-grumblemeyer-spelterwasser-kurstlich-himbleeisen-bahnwagen-gutenabend-bitte-ein-nürnburger-bratwustle-gerspurten-mitzweimache-luber-hundsfut-gumberaber-shönendanker-kalbsfleisch-mittler-aucher von Hautkopft of Ulm.

The world's most famous painting brings the police to the door of art dealer Bernard Bottle (Alan Cumming) after he's granted wishes by a genie (Lenny Henry) in Paul Weiland's Richard Curtis-scripted comedy, Bernard and the Genie (1991). Sadly, this is no more available than the wonderful Juliusz Machulski's Vinci (2004), which follows the efforts of art thief Robert Wieckiewicz to steal Leonardo's Lady With an Ermine from the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków. Also out of reach are Fabrizio Costa's The Mona Lisa Mystery (2006), a three-hour teleplay that returns to the scene of the 1911 crime (with Alessandro Preziosi as Vincenzo Peruggia), and Fernando Colomo's The Picasso Gang (2012), in which Pablo Picasso (Ignacio Mateos), Guillaume Apollinaire (Pierre Benezit), Max Jacob (Lionel Abelanski), and Manolo Hugue (Jordi Vilches) come under suspicion when their pal, Gery 'The Baron' Pieret (Alexis Michalik) steals the Mona Lisa in 1911.

In Lupin the 3rd Part IV (2015), a cloned Leonardo becomes a super-villain in 'The Italian Adventure', as he seeks to control the minds of everyone on the peninsula in order to make 'The Italian Dream' a reality. Kazuhiko Inoue and Jamieson K. Price voice the artist in the Japanese and English versions, which add the complication in Episode 14 of Lupin (Kanichi Kurita/Tony Oliver) needing to get past Inspector Koichi Zenigata (Köichi Yamadera/Doug Erholtz) in order to break into the Louvre and steal, guess what?

Episode Four of Raiders of the Lost Art (2014) covers the 1911 theft. The previous year, Larry A. Thompson had optioned a Mark J. Hudelson screenplay about Peruggia. But Missing Mona Lisa has yet to be made and it's been a while since we heard any news of The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa (2020), which Jodie Foster had planned to direct from Seymour Reit's 1981 tome about the crime and the ensuing global spread of the painting's fame. Thankfully, criminal masterminds are still trying to nab themselves a masterpiece. Take Gru (Steve Carell) and Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin), the ex-leader of the Vicious 6, in Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson, and Jonathan del Val's Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022). And if you watch Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin's Despicable Me (2010) carefully enough, you would know that their heist succeeded, as a familiar face can be spied hanging on the wall.

Codes and Conspiracies

If the 1911 robbery boosted Mona Lisa's profile, a bestselling novel from 2003 did much the same for Leonardo. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code became a cultural phenomenon and Hollywood duly came calling. Tom Hanks was cast as Robert Langdon in Ron Howard's 2006 film adaptation, with the Harvard Professor of Religious Iconography discovering the words 'So Dark the Con of Man' on the painting. After a tense encounter with The Madonna of the Rocks, he explains to assistant Sophie Neveu (Audrey Tautou) that the words relate to a campaign by the Catholic Church to eradicate all religions with a female deity. The cast and crew recorded a special short on their impressions of the picture in The Da Vinci Code: Close-Up on the Mona Lisa, which forms part of the DVD extras.

Ripe for parody, the movie was quickly lampooned in Paul Mervis's The Da Vinci Treasure (2006), in which Leonardo's paintings provide forensic anthropologist C. Thomas Howell with clues to the secret of enlightenment. But it was a series of mystery novels by Keisuke Matsuoka that led to

Shinsuke Sato's All-Round - Appraiser Q: The Eyes of Mona Lisa (2014) becoming the first Japanese film to shoot at the Louvre. At its heart is Riko Rinda (Haruka Ayase), who is hired by the museum to monitor the Mona Lisa's trip to Japan. However, she and magazine editor Yuto Ogasawara (Tori Matsuzaka) find themselves in peril when they realise the painting contains a hidden puzzle.

Despite being a little far-fetched, these conspiracy capers are undeniably entertaining. They also leave the painting in one piece, which isn't always the case. As emotion has been outlawed in the post-World War III state of Libria in Kurt Wimmer's Equilibrium (2002), the source of anything providing pleasure is to be eradicated and all Sense Offenders are to be executed. Preston (Christian Bale) takes his job seriously and has no hesitation in ordering his henchmen to burn the Mona Lisa when it's found in a cache of hidden art under some floorboards. Much is made of the device that authenticates the picture, although the film-makers clearly didn't take the trouble to find out that Leonardo didn't paint it on canvas!

Slightly more care is taken over the Mona Lisa in Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009). With global catastrophe in the offing, Louvre director Roland Picard (Patrick Bauchau) colludes with art expert and US First Daughter Laura Wilson (Thandiwe Newton) to put replicas in the world's great museums and store the real treasures close to the arks being built to save the best of humanity in the Himalayas. When the Apocalypse strikes, a megatsunami washes away Parisian landmarks like the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. Dare we presume that the bunker does its stuff?

According to the movies, the French government seems prepared to trust anyone with one of its most precious assets. In need of funds during the Covid pandemic, it sells the Mona Lisa to multi-millionaire Miles Bron (Edward Norton) in Rian Johnson's Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022). Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is amongst the select few who get to hear Bron waxing lyrical. 'You know da Vinci invented a technique for brushstrokes that leaves no lines?' he enthuses. 'That's how you can look straight at her and her expression changes every time. Her smile's there, then it disappears. Is she happy? Is she sad? Is it something else? This simple thing that you thought you were looking at, it suddenly takes on layers and depth so complex, it gives you vertigo.' Listening on at the Greek island retreat is Helen Brand (Janelle Monáe), the twin sister of Bron's murdered ex-partner. We won't tell you what she does with La Gioconda, but is that a hint of a smile on her lips afterwards?

Avant-garde and Animation

Iconic images inevitably attract detractors and debunkers and the Mona Lisa has been a favourite target for avant-gardists and cartoonists alike. In his first film, Paris qui dort (aka The Crazy Ray, 1924), René Clair has Albert (Henri Rollan) and Hesta (Madeleine Rodrigue) pick up the painting during a looting spree after the French capital is put on pause by a mad scientist with a laser gun. The following year, in The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925), Clair set Julien Boissel (Georges Vaultier) on a rampage across the capital that included a detour to the Louvre to deface Leonardo's painting.

Three decades later, the famous American photographer, Weegee, used mirrors and distorting lenses to transform the image into a work of modern art in Animation Mona Lisa (1955). Henri Gruel played on the notion of the ubiquity of the image in Mona Lisa: The Story of an Obsession (1958), as a man keeps seeing La Gioconda wherever he goes. Even Muppet creator Jim Henson joined the avant-garde circus in Time Piece (1965), a nine-minute experimental offering in which he plays a seemingly ordinary man who winds up being wanted for shooting the Mona Lisa.

While we're in the presence of a small-screen deity, let's sidetrack to recommend the 'Samantha's Da Vinci Dilemma' (1967) episode from Season Four of the ever-enchanting Bewitched (1964-72). Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) needs a house painter and entrusts the task of finding one to Aunt Clara (Marion Lorne). Naturally, she accidentally summons Leonardo da Vinci (John Abbott), who not only attacks some modern sculpture in a local museum, but also takes exception to the fact that Darrin (Dick York) has been asked by a client to use the Mona Lisa in a toothpaste advert.

The picture undergoes a surrealist makeover in Toshio Matsumoto's Mona Lisa (1973), while Bruce Posner plays with the notion of the enigmatic expression in Mona Lisa Smiles ( (Again and Again) ) (1975-2015), a three-screen collage that features Maggie Cheung, Charles Recher, Avram Goldstein, and Clara Estelle. In the Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (1992), Joan C. Gratz employs a range of animation techniques to create an offbeat history of 20th-century art.

Malcolm Le Grice revisits a childhood memory and his own 1973 film, Mona Lisa, in the installation, Eighteen Fragments From Malcolm Le Grice's After Leonardo (2016). But there's nothing to quite match Antonio Mercero's The Mona Lisa is Sad (1977), which considers what happens when La Gioconda loses her smile. It's not just the painting in the Louvre that's affected, however. Every souvenir is stricken, too, with the result that the entire planet falls into a state of ennui that could prove disastrous unless Mona Lisa can be made to smile again. The final lachrymose shot is deeply moving.

You'll need some spare time on your hands to get through Jennifer Anderson and Vernon Lott's #monalisa (2020), which runs for 11 hours (making it the 19th longest film of all time) to show how people visiting the Louvre actually connect with the Mona Lisa, when not taking selfies. And staying up to date, Doug Dillaman ruminates on the pleasure of walking through the Louvre during the pandemic lockdown in his five-minute essay, You Could Have Seen the Mona Lisa (2021).

If some of these titles feel a little obscure, let's move on to how the Mona Lisa has fared in the realm of animation. First up, we head to Pleasure Island in the 1940 Walt Disney version of Pinocchio, which was directed by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske. Just look at one of the naughty boys doodling on the painting with white chalk. La Gioconda is subjected to more inconvenience in Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble's Louvre Come Back to Me! (1962), as skunk Pepe Le Pew follows a black-and-white cat into the museum and wafts his scent through the air-conditioning, prompting Mona Lisa to curse, 'I can tell you chaps one thing. It's not always easy to hold this smile.'

Leonardo's original conception of the picture is revealed in Robert McKimmon's Pink Da Vinci (1975), as he gives Lisa a pouting mouth, which is repeatedly replaced with the more customary smile by the Pink Panther. Despite his victory in this paintbrush challenge, he didn't go down in history. No one should need reminding, therefore, of the names of the characters in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1988). Such was the popularity of Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo that the first two animated series spun off from the comic-books of Keith Eastman and Peter Laird spawned numerous film and TV spin-offs. Type the name of the crime-fighting quartet into the Cinema Paradiso searchline for more details.

As one might expect, La Gioconda has cropped up regularly over the 34 seasons of The Simpsons (1989-). In the Season Five episode, 'Treehouse of Horror IV', Eddie throws the painting on to a bonfire, while Mona Lisa, Vitruvian Man, and The Last Supper are caricatured in the Season 30 show, 'Girl's in the Band'. When Mr Burns learns to play Quidditch in the Season 20 title, 'The Burns and the Bees', he uses the Mona Lisa for target practice, along with Edvard Munch's The Scream and James McNeill Whistler's Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (aka 'Whistler's Mother'). Also, in 'Now Museum, Now You Don't' from Season 32, Lisa's studies of Western art take her back to 1462, when the talents of the 10 year-old Lisanardo da Vinci are noticed by Homer and Chief Wiggum.

In 'The Duh-Vinci Code' from Season Five of Futurama (1999-2013), Professor Farnsworth and Fry discover that Leonardo is an alien who left Planet Vinci because he grew tired of the super-intelligent beings mocking him for being dim. On Earth, however, he has been feted as a genius. Stewie Griffin discovers he's descended from the peerless polymath in 'The Big Bang Theory', a Season Eleven episode of Family Guy (1999-), as he and Brian travel back to the 16th-century workshop to prevent Bertram from killing Leonardo and, thus, preventing Stewie's birth. In Season 21's 'The Stewaway', Stewie and Quagmire visit the Louvre and the infant discovers the truth about the Mona Lisa's insistent gaze, when it follows him to the bathroom and he learns the vulgar secret behind her fabled expression.

The eyes also have it, as Peter Cook and Dudley Moore failed to see the funny side of the Leonardo cartoon in the National Gallery in a famous 'In the Gallery' sketch, which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on either The Best of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore: Not Only But Also and Legends of British Comedy: The Very Best of Pete and Dud (both 2007). The Louvre is the setting for a bit of knockabout nonsense in Joe Dante and Eric Goldberg's Looney Tunes Back in Action (2003), as a card bearing the likeness of the Mona Lisa brings Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Paris. On inspecting the painting, they discover a secret map of Africa, but have to make their exit through several famous canvases when they are chased by Elmer Fudd.

Hailing from the Animated Hero Classics series, Richard Rich's Leonardo da Vinci (1996) begins with the young Leonardo in Florence in 1473, as he learns the basics of his trade from Andrea del Verrocchio. In the second half of the short, he is shown in the service of the Duke of Milan in 1498. As the Mayor shows his son Jojo a collection of ancestral portraits in Jimmy Hayward's Horton Hears a Who! (2008), we see his great-grandmother depicted as the Mona Lisa.

The secret of the relationship between Leonardo (Stanley Tucci) and Lisa (Lake Bell) is revealed in Rob Minkoff's Mr Peabody & Sherman (2014), as the painter can't get his sitter to stick with the same expression. Fortunately, they are visited by Hector J. Peabody (Ty Burrell) and Sherman (Max Charles) and Leonardo is delighted by Lisa's smile when she sees Mr Peabody get his head stuck in a painting. Sherman and Penny (Ariel Winter) later take a trip over Florence in Leonardo's flying machine before we see Lisa tagging her name on a wall.

There's more fanciful history in Sergio Manfio's Leo Da Vinci: Mission Mona Lisa (2018), in which the teenage Leonardo (Johnny Yong Bosch) falls for Lisa (Cherami Leigh), who joins him in a fight against some pirates. Meanwhile in the 3-D CGI short, Le Secret de Mona Lisa (2021) - which was directed by Anaïs Blancquart and eight others - two women who have been prevented from taking a party of girls into the Louvre break in to steal the Mona Lisa. However, they succeed only in letting her loose from her frame.

The robbery in Pierre Perifel's The Bad Guys (2022) sees Mr Shark (Craig Robinson) disguise himself as Mona Lisa in order to lift the painting from its hanging. But the focus in Jim Capobianco and Pierre-Luc Granjon's

The Inventor (2023) is Leonardo (Stephen Fry) in his old age, as he quits Rome for Amboise and starts to ponder the meaning of life. With Marion Cotillard, Matt Berry, and Daisy Ridley among the voice artists, this is an expansion of Leonardo, a 2009 short directed by Capobianco, who had shared an Oscar nomination for co-writing Brad Bird's Ratatouille (2007).

What's in a Name?

We conclude our survey of Mona Lisa movies with a rattlebag section. It kicks off with the saloon scene in Marlon Brando's One-Eyed Jacks (1961), as the painting can be seen behind the bar as Rio (Brando) chats to Sheriff Dad Longworth (Karl Malden). But watch what happens next, as the Method man looks to the side and smiles quietly in the unmistakable Gioconda style. Another Mona Lisa pose can be seen as some female office workers have their pictures taken in the opening credit sequence of Luciano B. Carlos's comedy of sexual manners, Portrait of My Love (1965). Filipino director Poap Manansala used the same title for his 2019 comedy about an art student named MonayLisa (Kiray Celis). who uses a wacky medium to expose the men who had murdered her.

Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, 'Mona Lisa' won the Academy Award for Best Song in Mitchell Leisen's Captain Carey, U.S.A. (1949). Sung by Nat King Cole, it plays at the end of Neil Jordan's Mona Lisa (1986), which saw Bob Hoskins win Best Actor at Cannes and take a Golden Globe and a BAFTA before missing out on an Oscar for playing George, a small-time hood who is asked by former boss Denny Mortwell (Michael Caine) to keep an eye on a high-class prostitute named Simone (Cathy Tyson).

Seal covered the same song for Mike Newell's Mona Lisa Smile (2003), for which Julia Roberts landed a record $25 million payday. Echoes of Leontine Sagan's Mädchen in Uniform (1931), William Wyler's The Children's Hour (1961), and Ronald Neame's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) abound, as Katherine Ann Watson comes to Wellesley College in 1953 and incurs the wrath of traditionalist student Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) when she tries to teach her class about modern art. Doubtless, Miss Watson would have come to approve of Andy Warhol, who is played by Guy Pearce in George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl (2006), a biopic of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) that is one of many films with a fleeting Mona Lisa moment. Among the others are George B. Seitz's Judge Hardy's Children (1938), Jerry Paris's How Sweet It Is! (1968), Michel Audiard's She Does Not Drink, Smoke or Flirt But...She Talks! (1970), Eddie Nicert's The Impossible Kid (1982), Jay Kamen's Transformations (1988), and Aleksei Balabanov's Brother (1997)

The connection is a musical one in the Wachowskis' The Matrix Reloaded (2003), as the highway chase scene is accompanied by 'Mona Lisa Overdrive', which takes its title from a William Gibson cyberpunk novel. One of the singles released by Conner4Real (Andy Samberg) in Akiva Schaffer's Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) is called 'Mona Lisa' and he promotes it by claiming that Leonardo's painting is overrated and that its subject looks 'like a Garbage Pail Kid'.

Anne Wiazemsky plays a character named Mona Lisa in Le grand départ (1972), the only feature directed by French artist Martial Raysse. In Sergei Solovyov's One Hundred Days After Childhood (1975), the painting is projected on to a blue blanket on an outdoor stage at a summer camp for creative Soviet kids. This fascinating film is well worth a release on disc, but more likely candidates are two softcore offerings directed by Cybil Richards. In The Virgins of Sherwood Forest, film director Roberta (Gabriella Hall) is knocked out and meets Robin Hood (Brian Heldik) and Leonardo (Thomas Vozza) in her dazed daydreams, while The Exotic Time Machine II: Forbidden Encounters (both 2000) has Chuck (Jason Schnuit) and Melissa (Holly Sampson) running into Leonardo (Kurt Sinclair) while tracing the timeline in order to plant beacons in a bid to protect their time-travelling technology.

A strange variation on the Mona Lisa movie comes courtesy of François Lunel's L'Apparition de la Joconde (2011), in which Serge Riaboukine plays a divorced screenwriter who is visited in his Parisian apartment by Lisa (Vanessa Glodjo), who insists that she lives in the painting at the Louvre. And strange powers also hold the key in Ana Lily Amirpour's Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon (2021), as the telepathic Mona Lisa Lee (Jeon Jong-seo) escapes from an institution outside New Orleans and heads for the city where she is befriended by pugnacious stripper Bonnie Belle Hunt (Kate Hudson) and her young son,