Arts and Leisure. Mona Who ? Plan

Arts and Leisure. Mona Who ?

Plan

1. 
   The history of art
   
2. 
   Types of leisure activities
   
3. 
   Family leisure
   
4. 
   Why is the Mona Lisa so famous ?
   

The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both highly dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural and individual identities, while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life and experiences (including architecture, ceramics, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpting),literary arts (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose), performing arts (including dance, music, and theatre) and They can employ skill and imagination to produce objects, performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new environments and spaces. The arts can refer to common, popular or everyday practices as well as more sophisticated and systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-contained, or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as the combination of artwork with the written word in comics. They can also develop or contribute to some particular aspect of a more complex art form, as in cinematography. By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually re-defined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo. As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity, and as ends in themselves, the arts can simultaneously be a form of response to the world, and a way that our responses, and what we deem worthwhile goals or pursuits, are transformed. From prehistoric cave paintings, to ancient and contemporary forms of ritual, to modern-day films, art has served to register, embody and preserve our ever shifting relationships to each other and to the world. There are several possible meanings for the definitions of the terms Art and Arts. The first meaning of the word art is " way of doing ".The most basic present meaning defines the arts as specific activities that produce sensitivity in humans. The arts are also referred to as bringing together all creative and imaginative activities, without including science.^[4][5] In its most basic abstract definition, art is a documented expression of a sentient being through or on an accessible medium so that anyone can view, hear or experience it. The act itself of producing an expression can also be referred to as a certain art, or as art in general. Whether this solidified expression, or the act of producing it, is "good" or has value depends on those who access and rate it. Such public rating is dependent on various subjective factors. Merriam-Webster defines "the arts" as "painting, sculpture, music, theater, literature, etc., considered as a group of activities done by people with skill and imagination". Similarly, the United States Congress, in the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, defined "the arts" as follows: The term "the arts" includes, but is not limited to, music (instrumental and vocal), dance, drama, folk art, creative writing, architecture and allied fields, painting, sculpture, photography, graphic and craft arts, industrial design, costume and fashion design, motion pictures, television, radio, film, video, tape and sound recording, the arts related to the presentation, performance, execution, and exhibition of such major art forms, all those traditional arts practiced by the diverse peoples of this country. (sic) and the study and application of the arts to the human environment. Art is a global activity in which a large number of disciplines are included, such as: fine arts, liberal arts, visual arts, decorative arts, applied arts, design, crafts, performing arts, and so on.^[4] We are talking about "the arts" when several of them are mentioned: "As in all arts the enjoyment increases with the knowledge of the art".The arts can be divided into several areas, the fine arts which bring together, in the broad sense, all the arts whose aim is to produce true aesthetic pleasure, decorative arts and applied arts which relate to an aesthetic side in everyday life. In Ancient Greece, all art and craft was referred to by the same word, techne. Thus, there was no distinction among the arts. Ancient Greek art brought the veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (e.g. Zeus' thunderbolt). In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical truths. Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan. Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and instead expresses religious ideas through calligraphy and geometrical designs. In the Middle Ages, the Artes Liberales (liberal arts) were taught in European universities as part of the Trivium, an introductory curriculum involving grammar, rhetoric, and logic,^[11] and of the Quadrivium, a curriculum involving the "mathematical arts" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.^[12] The Artes Mechanicae (consisting of vestiaria tailoring and tailoring and weaving; agricultura – agriculture; architectura architecture and masonry; militia and venatoria – warfare, hunting, military education, and the martial arts; mercatura – trade; coquinaria – cooking; and metallaria – blacksmithing were practised and developed in guild environments. The modern distinction between "artistic" and "non-artistic" skills did not develop until the Renaissance. In modern academia, the arts are usually grouped with or as a subset of the humanities. Some subjects in the humanities are history, linguistics, are history, linguistics, literature, theology, philosophy, and logic.Therehavebeenseven: painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, music, performing and cinema. Some view literature, painting, sculpture, and music as the main four arts, of which the others are derivative; drama is literature with acting, dance is music expressed through motion, and song is music with literature and voice.^[14] Film is sometimes called the "eighth" and comics the "ninth art". Architecture is the art and science of designing buildings and structures. The word architecture comes from the Greek arkhitekton, "master builder, director of works," from αρχι- (arkhi) "chief" + τεκτων (tekton) "builder, carpenter".^[16] A wider definition would include the design of the built environment, from the macrolevel of town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture to the microlevel of creating furniture. Architectural design usually must address both feasibility and cost for the builder, as well as function and aesthetics for the user. In modern usage, architecture is the art and discipline of creating, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of, a complex object or system. The term can be used to connote the implied architecture of abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers, enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the case of abstract or physical artefacts) to the elements or components of some kind of structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components. Planned architecture manipulates space, volume, texture, light, shadow, or abstract elements in order to achieve pleasing aesthetics. This distinguishes it from applied science or engineering, which usually concentrate more on the functional and feasibility aspects of the design of constructions or structures. In the field of building architecture, the skills demanded of an architect range from the more complex, such as for a hospital or a stadium, to the apparently simpler, such as planning residential houses. Many architectural works may be seen also as cultural and political symbols, or works of art. The role of the architect, though changing, has been central to the successful (and sometimes less than successful) design and implementation of pleasingly built environments in which people live. Ceramic art is art made from ceramic materials (including clay), which may take forms such as pottery, tile, figurines, sculpture, and tableware. While some ceramic products are considered fine art, some are considered to be decorative, industrial, or applied art objects. Ceramics may also be considered artefacts in archaeology. Ceramic art can be made by one person or by a group of people. In a pottery or ceramic factory, a group of people design, manufacture, and decorate the pottery. Products from a pottery are sometimes referred to as "art pottery." In a one-person pottery studio, ceramists or potters produce studio pottery. In modern ceramic engineering usage, "ceramics" is the art and science of making objects from inorganic, non-metallic materials by the action of heat. It excludes glass and mosaic made from glass tesserae. Conceptual art is art wherein the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text. Through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s,^[18] its popular usage, particularly in the United Kingdom, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practise the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphite pencils, pen and ink, inked brushes, wax colour pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which can simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a drafter, draftswoman, or draughtsman.^[19] Drawing can be used to create art used in cultural industries such as illustrations, comics and animation. Comics are often called the "ninth art" (le neuvième art) in Francophone scholarship, adding to the traditional "Seven Arts". Painting is a mode of creative expression, and can be done in numerous forms. Drawing, gesture (as in gestural painting), composition, narration (as in narrative art), or abstraction (as in abstract art), among other aesthetic modes, may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner.^[21] Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, narrative, symbolistic (as in Symbolist art), emotive (as in Expressionism), or political in nature (as in Artivism). Modern painters have extended the practice considerably to include, for example, collage. Collage is not painting in the strict sense since it includes other materials. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw, wood or strands of hair for their artwork texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet or Anselm Kiefer. Photography as an art form refers to photographs that are created in accordance with the creative vision of the photographer. Art photography stands in contrast to photojournalism, which provides a visual account for news events, and commercial photography, the primary focus of which is to advertise products or services. Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials; but since modernism, shifts in sculptural process led to an almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or moulded, or cast. Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The noun "literature" comes from the Latin word littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)." The term has generally come to identify a collection mainly prose (both fiction and non-fiction), drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, the artistic linguistic expression can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and as folktale. Comics, the combination of drawings or other visual arts with narrating literature, are often called the "ninth art" (le neuvième art) in Francophone scholarship. Performing arts comprise dance, music, theatre, opera, mime, and other art forms in which a human performance is the principal product. Performing arts are distinguished by this performance element in contrast with disciplines such as visual and literary arts where the product is an object that does not require a performance to be observed and experienced. Each discipline in the performing arts is temporal in nature, meaning the product is performed over a period of time. Products are broadly categorized as being either repeatable (for example, by script or score) or improvised for each performance. Artists who participate in these arts frontofanaudiencearecalled perforincluding actors, magicians, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by the services of other artists or essential workers, such as songwriting and stagecraft. Performers often adapt their appearance with tools such as costume and stage makeup. Leisure has often been defined as a quality of experience or as free time. Free time is time spent away from business, work, job hunting, domestic chores, and education, as well as necessary activities such as eating and sleeping. Leisure as an experience usually emphasizes dimensions of perceived freedom and choice. It is done for "its own sake", for the quality of experience and involvement. Other classic definitions include Thorsten Veblen's (1899) of "nonproductive consumption of time." Free time is not easy to define due to the multiplicity of approaches used to determine its essence. Different disciplines have definitions reflecting their common issues: for example, sociology on social forces and contexts and psychology as mental and emotional states and conditions. From a research perspective, these approaches have an advantage of being quantifiable and comparable over time and place. Leisure studies and sociology of leisure are the academic disciplines concerned with the study and analysis of leisure. Recreation differs from leisure in that it is a purposeful activity that includes the experience of leisure in activity contexts. Economists consider that leisure times are valuable to a person like wages that they could earn for the same time spend towards the activity. If it were not, people would have worked instead of taking leisure. However, the distinction between leisure and unavoidable activities is not a rigidly defined one, e.g. people sometimes do work-oriented tasks for pleasure as well as for long-term utility. A related concept is social leisure, which involves leisurely activities in social settings, such as extracurricular activities, e.g. sports, clubs. Another related concept is that of family leisure. Relationships with others is usually a major factor in both satisfaction and choice. The concept of leisure as a human right was realised in article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Leisure has historically been the privilege of the upper class.^[7] Opportunities for leisure came with more money, or organization, and less working time, rising dramatically in the mid-to-late 19th century, starting in Great Britain and spreading to other rich nations in Europe. It spread as well to the United States, although that country had a reputation in Europe for providing much less leisure despite its wealth. Immigrants to the United States discovered they had to work harder than they did in Europe. Economists continue to investigate why Americans work longer hours. In a recent book, Laurent Turcot argues that leisure was not created in the 19th century but is imbricated in the occidental world since the beginning of history. In Canada, leisure in the country is related to the decline in work hours and is shaped by moral values, and the ethnic-religious and gender communities. In a cold country with winter's long nights, and summer's extended daylight, favorite leisure activities include horse racing, team sports such as hockey, singalongs, roller skating and board games. The churches tried to steer leisure activities, by preaching against drinking and scheduling annual revivals and weekly club activities. By 1930 radio played a major role in uniting Canadians behind their local or regional hockey teams. Play-by-play sports coverage, especially of ice hockey, absorbed fans far more intensely than newspaper accounts the next day. Rural areas were especially influenced by sports coverage. Leisure by the mid-19th century was no longer an individualistic activity. It was increasingly organized. In the French industrial city of Lille, with a population of 80,000 in 1858, the cabarets or taverns for the working class numbered 1300, or one for every three houses. Lille counted 63 drinking and singing clubs, 37 clubs for card players, 23 for bowling, 13 for skittles, and 18 for archery. The churches likewise have their social organizations. Each club had a long roster of officers, and a busy schedule of banquets, festivals and competitions.^[ As literacy, wealth, ease of travel, and a broadened sense of community grew in Britain from the mid-19th century onward, there was more time and interest in leisure activities of all sorts, on the part of all classes. Opportunities for leisure activities increased because real wages continued to grow and hours of work continued to decline. In urban Britain, the nine-hour day was increasingly the norm; the 1874 Factory Act limited the workweek to 56.5 hours. The movement toward an eight-hour day. Furthermore, system of routine annual vacations came into play, starting with white-collar workers and moving into the working-class. Some 200 seaside resorts emerged thanks to cheap hotels and inexpensive railway fares, widespread banking holidays and the fading of many religious prohibitions against secular activities on Sundays. By the late Victorian era, the leisure industry had emerged in all British cities, and the pattern was copied across Western Europe and North America. It provided scheduled entertainment of suitable length and convenient locales at inexpensive prices. These include sporting events, music halls, and popular theater. By 1880 football was no longer the preserve of the social elite, as it attracted large working-class audiences. Average gate was 5,000 in 1905, rising to 23,000 in 1913. That amounted to 6 million paying customers with a weekly turnover of £400,000. Sports by 1900 generated some three percent of the total gross national product in Britain. Professionalization of sports was the norm, although some new activities reached an upscale amateur audience, such as lawn tennis and golf. Women were now allowed in some sports, such as archery, tennis, badminton and gymnastics. Leisure was primarily a male activity, with middle-class women allowed in at the margins. There were class differences with upper-class clubs, and working-class and middle-class pubs. Heavy drinking declined; there was more betting on outcomes. Participation in sports and all sorts of leisure activities increased for average English people, and their interest in spectator sports increased dramatically. By the 1920s the cinema and radio attracted all classes, ages, and genders in very large numbers. Giant palaces were built for the huge audiences that wanted to see Hollywood films. In Liverpool 40 percent of the population attended one of the 69 cinemas once a week; 25 percent went twice. Traditionalists grumbled about the American cultural invasion, but the permanent impact was minor. The British showed a more profound interest in sports, and in greater variety, that any rival. They gave pride of place to such moral issues as sportsmanship and fair play. Cricket became symbolic of the Imperial spirit throughout the Empire. Soccer proved highly attractive to the urban working classes, which introduced the rowdy spectator to the sports world. In some sports, there was significant controversy in the fight for amateur purity especially in rugby and rowing. New games became popular almost overnight, including golf, lawn tennis, cycling and hockey. Women were much more likely to enter these sports than the old established ones. The aristocracy and landed gentry, with their ironclad control over land rights, dominated hunting, shooting, fishing and horse racing. Cricket had become well-established among the English upper class in the 18th century, and was a major factor in sports competition among the public schools. Army units around the Empire had time on their hands, and encouraged the locals to learn cricket so they could have some entertaining competition. Most of the Empire embraced cricket, with the exception of Canada. Cricket test matches (international) began by the 1870s; the most famous is that between Australia and Britain for "The Ashes". The range of leisure activities extends from the very informal and casual to highly organised and long-lasting activities. A significant subset of leisure activities are hobbies which are undertaken for personal satisfaction, usually on a regular basis, and often result in satisfaction through skill development or recognised achievement, sometimes in the form of a product. The list of hobbies is ever changing as society changes. Substantial and fulfilling hobbies and pursuits are described by Sociologist Robert Stebbins as serious leisure. The serious leisure perspective is a way of viewing the wide range of leisure pursuits in three main categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and project-based leisure. "Serious leisure is the systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer ... that is highly substantial, interesting, and fulfilling and where ... participants find a [leisure] career...". For example, collecting stamps or maintaining a public wetland area. People undertaking serious leisure can be categorised as amateurs, volunteers or hobbyists. Their engagement is distinguished from casual leisure by a high level of perseverance, effort, knowledge and training required and durable benefits and the sense that one can create in effect a leisure career through such activity. The range of serious leisure activities is growing rapidly in modern times  with developed societies having greater leisure time, longevity and prosperity. The Internet is providing increased support for amateurs and hobbyists to communicate, display and share products. As literacy and leisure time expanded after 1900, reading became a popular pastime. New additions to adult fiction doubled during the 1920s, reaching 2800 new books a year by 1935. Libraries tripled their stocks, and saw heavy demand for new fiction. A dramatic innovation was the inexpensive paperback, pioneered by Allen Lane (1902–70) at Penguin Books in 1935. The first titles included novels by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. They were sold cheap (usually sixpence) in a wide variety of inexpensive stores such as Woolworth's. Penguin aimed at an educated middle class "middlebrow" audience. It avoided the downscale image of American paperbacks. The line signaled cultural self-improvement and political education. The more polemical Penguin Specials, typically with a leftist orientation for Labour readers, were widely distributed during World War II. However the war years caused a shortage of staff for publishers and book stores, and a severe shortage of rationed paper, worsened by the air raid on Paternoster Square in 1940 that burned 5 million books in warehouses. Romantic fiction was especially popular, with Mills and Boon the leading publisher. Romantic encounters were embodied in a principle of sexual purity that demonstrated not only social conservatism, but also how heroines could control their personal autonomy. Adventure magazines became quite popular, especially those published by DC Thomson; the publisher sent observers around the country to talk to boys and learn what they wanted to read about. The story line in magazines and cinema that most appealed to boys was the glamorous heroism of British soldiers fighting wars that were perceived as exciting and just. Family leisure is defined as time that parents, children and siblings spend together in free time or recreational activities, and it can be expanded to address intergenerational family leisure as time that grandparents, parents, and grandchildren spend together in free time or recreational activities. Leisure can become a central place for the development of emotional closeness and strong family bonds. Contexts such as urban/rural shape the perspectives, meanings, and experiences of family leisure. For example, leisure moments are part of work in rural areas, and the rural idyll is enacted by urban families on weekends, but both urban and rural families somehow romanticize rural contexts as ideal spaces for family making (connection to nature, slower and more intimate space, notion of a caring social fabric, tranquillity, etc.). Also, much "family leisure" requires tasks that are most often assigned to women. Family leisure also includes playing together with family members on the weekend day. The Mona Lisa is a painting that needs no introduction. Painted during the Italian Renaissance by Leonardo da Vinci, the Mona Lisa is widely considered to be the most written and talked about portrait of all time. Every year, the painting draws flocks of museum goers to the Louvre to witness the elusive expression of the painting’s female sitter that they’ve seen captured in movies or plastered on everything from coffee mugs to fridge magnets. Why is the Mona Lisa so famous? The Mona Lisa is famous because it is widely praised as evidence of the Leonardo Da Vinci’s mastery of human anatomy and natural realism. The Mona Lisa is also famous because of its exhibition at the Louvre, as well as its widespread reproduction in popular art and culture.The Mona Lisa is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, making it one of the most valuable pieces of art in the world. But why is the Mona Lisa so famous, hundreds of years beyond its original conception? There are several reasons why the Mona Lisa is so famous, relating to both the artistic achievement it represents and several note-worthy events characterizing the painting’s history. This article will take you through the main reasons why the painting continues to garner such widespread fame and acclaim today. To truly understand why the painting is so famous, we need to dive a little deeper into the history of the painting and how it has been publicly received and represented. The following subsections will more precisely cover the various factors that have made the Mona Lisa so remarkable. Part of the Mona Lisa’s fame can be attributed to the painting’s distinction from other portraits of women from the Renaissance. While most women from this era were painted in placid profile, the woman posing in the Mona Lisa is rendered in a three-quarter angle that made her presence significantly more available to the viewer. What also makes her stand out is the fact that she appears before the viewer in fairly simple dress in comparison to the highly ornamented clothes and appearances usually preferred in paintings of the social elite during the Renaissance. Instead of drawing attention to decorative symbols of wealth and social status, the focus of the painting is the woman’s face as she returns the gaze of the audience. Her gaze invites us to ponder the expression hinted at in the corners of her subtle smile. The implication of emotion painted into the woman’s face was also uncommon for the time. It was traditional for upper class sitters to be represented with stoic, tempered expressions to suggest their priority of calmness and humility over outbursts of strong emotion. This made the Mona Lisa’s smile all the more striking, leaving the viewer to wonder about her identity and experience. As a result, the Mona Lisa became a focal point for the contemplation of human nature and emotion. Another reason explaining the intrigue surrounding the Mona Lisa is the mysterious nature of the woman’s identity. The question has been raised about whether or not the Mona Lisa was a real person. While many art historians attribute her identity to Lisa Gherardini, wife of wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, other scholars have disputed this claim due to the lack of conclusive evidence for this alleged commission. Because the Mona Lisa has never really been identified with definitive clarity, admirers of the painting have projected their own versions of her identity onto her. For example, writers from the French Romantic period of the late 18th century came to idealize the woman of the Mona Lisa as a romantic femme fatal figure. As a result, the woman of the Mona Lisahas developed an air of timeless allure, frequently represented and understood as a universal object of elusive female desire and mystery. Despite the lack of total consensus about who the Mona Lisa is, art historians tend to agree about how long it took to paint the Mona Lisa and what the painting’s dimensions are. Leonardo da Vinco painted his famous portrait from 1503 to 1506, and gave it the dimensions of 77cm by 53cm. The Mona Lisa has also been so highly celebrated because of the location in which the painting is displayed. The painting is exhibited in its own private room in the famous Louvre museum in Paris, France. The allocation of such a privileged position in one of the most respected and visited museums in the world has made the Mona Lisa a popular French tourist destination. But how exactly did the Mona Lisa end up in France? After having been initially painted in Italy, the Mona Lisaeventually wound up in the hands of the French king Frances I when he invited Leonardo da Vinci into his court in the final years of the painter’s life. The Mona Lisa remained a possession of the French monarchy for centuries until ownership was taken over by the French public during the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Briefly claimed as the personal possession of Napoleon, the Mona Lisa was finally set up at the Louvre by the 19th century, where it continues to bring in impressive crowds today. One particular event in the Mona Lisa’s history also contributed to the painting’s notoriety. In 1911, the painting disappeared from the Louvre in a heist that attracted widespread attention and scandal. After two years of public shock and false accusations, the true culprit was determined to be Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia had been commissioned by the Louvre to place a glass encasing around the Mona Lisa, and stole the painting under the cover of night with the help of two fellow workers. Peruggia was caught in Italy after several failed attempts to resell the painting, and was convicted of theft and subsequently jailed. The theft of the Mona Lisa provoked so much media attention and public outcry that, upon its safe return, the painting became viewed as a highly valued national cultural artefact. A big reason explaining why the Mona Lisa is so well known today is the widespread dissemination of her image in modern art and popular culture throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. The first notable instance of the Mona Lisa’s reproduction was orchestrated by modern French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who appropriated the image of the portrait for his own artwork in 1919. Duchamp defaced the portrait by adding in facial hair on the woman, communicating his mockery of the elevation and over-celebration of what was considered to be high art. Duchamp’s infamous transformation of the Mona Lisa inspired other later artists to do the same, consequently turning the painting into a popular, identifiable symbol in modern art and pop culture. The Mona Lisa has also undergone widespread reproductions in the form of advertising and mass media, and the painting has been widely portrayed in works of literature and film. Its mass mediated reproduction has rendered the Mona Lisa one of the most recognizable paintings of all times.