The World’s Most Famous Painting
An art historian by training, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is currently Assistant Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. She holds a BA from Harvard, three master’s Degrees, and a PhD from Columbia, and has taught classes on art at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, where she was one of the top-ranked instructors of the introduction to art history, “Art Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Art.” A regular critic for Artforum, her writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Art in America and Art Journal, and in catalogs published by museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Overview
Around 1503, Leonardo da Vinci began painting a portrait of a Florentine noblewoman named Lisa Gherardini. The work became so important to him that it remained in his possession until he died in 1519. Half a millennia later, the “Mona Lisa” is considered not only a masterpiece of Renaissance portraiture, but also the most famous painting in all of Western art. In this lecture, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan explains the work’s enduring appeal by looking closely at its remarkable details, and its equally remarkable history.