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Comment by prox | Hacker News Reader

Since people really don’t know why it is famous, it is because of the sfumato technique employed. This is the painting that employs it most successfully (not sure if it was his first with sfumato, but surely the most prolific)

Leonardo is one of the first painters using the technique and who studied optics and wrote about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfumato

I think the Romans knew about sfumato as well, so it fits in the renaissance thinking of the time.

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I've always heard that it is famous because it was stolen, and had lots of drama and global news cycles surrounding its eventual return and display. This is the first time I've heard of Sfumato let alone seen someone suggest a niche technique is the reason people are aware of the painting.

Well I think the drama around it might have helped, but as someone who has done art history, I can’t remember the stolen part being mentioned.

Leonardo seems to be very famous in his time and after, and he died under the patronage of the king of France. I highly recommend reading his notebooks, it gives a glimps of the mind of this genius. His observational skills were impressive. In a way he was a hacker if you take the expanded meaning of the word: always thinking up new things and inventions.

And at the time it was stolen, image reproduction techniques capable of displaying artwork in at least recognisable fidelity within mass-market publications were just being introduced. (The distribution of such images probably also reduced the effective value of the work-as-stolen as it would be more readily recognised if displayed publicly.) Attention returned repeatedly to the Mona Lisa through numerous subsequent events, e.g., Duchamp's reproduction with a beard and mustache added, in 1919.

<https://www.britannica.com/story/why-is-the-mona-lisa-so-fam...>

<https://www.wikiart.org/en/marcel-duchamp/l-h-o-o-q-mona-lis...>

Google's Ngram viewer suggests a further increase of references in print following 1980, though that might reflect a disproportionate presence of academic works within the scanned corpus:

<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Mona+Lisa&year...>

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