Why These Famous Paintings Still Matter Today | World's Greatest Paintings - Season 1 Episode 1

These are the stories of ten of the greatest paintings in the world. I'm Andrew Marr. Art, not politics, is the great passion of my life. For me, it gets to the heart of what it is to be human. In galleries across the globe, there are great paintings, works made with almost supernatural skill, fierce passion and extraordinary brainpower. Now I want to tell stories behind some of the most iconic images in history. Pictures like Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Sunflowers and Turner's Fighting Temeraire. Paintings that represent the pinnacle of what people can do with paint and bristles. His watercolour is described as miraculous. People can't believe the effects that he manages to achieve. It was like you could touch these people. It was like the portrait could speak to you. Behind every picture, there is a story. I'm going to peel back the layers to find out more about the lives of their creators and the worlds they came from. There was something about this middle-class Florentine housewife that intrigued him. Why are these the paintings we all know and love? How were they created? And what makes them the greatest paintings in the world? The Louvre, the biggest and the most famous art gallery in the world. It's a colossal museum, covering an area larger than ten football pitches, holding an extraordinary collection of around 5,000 paintings and nearly 500,000 objects. Every year, it's visited by nearly 10 million people. If they all came on the same day, the queue here would stretch to Moscow. But although these buildings are stuffed with tip-top masterpieces, eight out of ten people queuing are here to see just one thing, the Louvre's most famous portrait, probably the world's most famous portrait, the Mona Lisa. It's an iconic work of art, once valued at $650 million, but truly, it's priceless. Well, here we are at last, just the two of us, Andrew and Mona, and that is a fantastic privilege, because most of the time, Mona Lisa is facing an endless, snaking queue of admirers, shuffling forward for their 15 seconds in front of her mobile phone in hand before they have to leave again. What can be seen, or selfied, is a plainly dressed, enigmatic young woman apparently sitting in front of a mountainous view, all of it demanding close inspection. But I can't get too close, of course, because Mona Lisa is protected by an enormously tough glass box. She is better protected than any celebrity or modern president, and quite right, too. She has her own temperature inside there to keep the painting as perfectly as it can be kept after all this time. Now, in a better-ordered world, there are other Leonadas which I think deserve to be just as famous. There is a fabulous drawing in the National Gallery in London, for instance, of the Virgin and Child with St Anne, which is endlessly mysterious and haunting and utterly, utterly ravishing. Then there's another portrait, Lady with an Ermine, which is brighter-coloured and much more instantly grabby than this one, and yet it is her smile, her gaze, which has held the entire world mesmerised for decades. So what is it about this picture which has won hearts all over the world? Because in the end, it's just a portrait. A young woman twists her head towards us, peering out of a smoky landscape through cracks and darkened varnish, and that's about it. And yet she is magnetic. In the flesh, she is captivating. So what's her secret? Or rather, what was Leonardo da Vinci's secret? Well, to unfold the tale of this painting and the astonishing man who created it, we must swap the centre of Western art in the 21st century for the most humming, fashionable and culturally swaggering city of the 15th, the birthplace of the biggest artistic revolution the West has ever seen, Renaissance Florence. A visitor to Florence in 1459 said Florence is paradise on earth. It was a very prosperous city, but it was also a city with intellectual and cultural life. People enthused about how the Florentines had created a new golden age through painting, through music, through architecture, and so Florence was really a kind of crucible of a new kind of modern life or a new approach to culture. Whether you were an artist or whether you were a scholar, whether you were interested in the sciences, it was all happening at the same time. It was like the centre of the universe. Renaissance simply means rebirth, a return to the glory days of ancient Greece and Rome. Multi-talented and brilliant minds were drawn here like bees to a flower garden, but in a city of 70,000 people, there was one person who really represents what we now mean by the term Renaissance man. Leonardo da Vinci, the man who painted the Mona Lisa, was born nearby in April 1452. He came from a two-horse town or maybe a one-horse town called Vinci, about 20 miles from Florence. His family were small-time landowners, not incredibly rich. His father was a notary, a lawyer, making his living in Florence. He's listed in his grandfather's tax return, he's listed as a bocca, a mouth, which is rather a nice thing to call your kids their mouth, so they eat a lot of food. From a very early age, da Vinci was extremely intelligent and he went to a very good school and he showed a great love of anything visual and he would go out sketching. And apparently, he drew with his right hand and wrote with his left hand. You know, so you can imagine him being so inspired and not wanting to waste a moment that he would be sort of going like this. His family took note of this precocious ability. They saw that he had a talent for drawing and he produced a whole book of drawings and later on, his father took him to Florence to a great artist of the time, Verrocchio, and said, look at these drawings, my son did it, and apparently Verrocchio was just dumbfounded, said, I've never seen drawings like this, are you sure this is your son and how old is he? And sent him to me at once. For the teenage Leonardo, this apprenticeship with Verrocchio was like a child footballer being coached by Pep Guardiola, a huge opportunity to learn from the formidable Verrocchio. He's an interesting artist, a major sculptor. His studio produced paintings and he used senior assistants often to produce the paintings. Visitors to Florence may notice that on top of the cathedral dome, built by Brunelleschi, the great architect, there's a very big bronze ball and Verrocchio put that up there. During the nearly 11 years that Leonardo was his student, Verrocchio worked to polish the young man's obvious artistic skills and draw out his immense natural talent. This meant working together on a huge range of commissions from the church and important Florentine families. A major artist in his own right, Verrocchio must have guessed that his student would one day surpass him. But just how soon would that be? Verrocchio used all of the young painters very wisely in his workshop productions. And one of these paintings is the Baptism of Christ, now in the Uffizi in Florence. And he told Leonardo da Vinci to paint one of the angels in the work, an angel in the lower left-hand corner of the painting. You look at that angel, the draperies are amazing, the hair is absolutely fantastic. It's a very urgent kind of expression. It seems almost certain that Leonardo did all the fancy oil painting finish in this picture. And the story of one of his biographers is that from that point onwards, Verrocchio said, I'll never touch a brush again. From the very beginning, Leonardo was regarded as an unparalleled genius. At the remarkably tender age of 20, the man who would paint the Mona Lisa qualified as a master craftsman. And six years later, he received his first solo commission to paint an altarpiece for his local chapel. In gossipy Florence, his reputation was spreading. But this wasn't down to hard graft or even innate skill. When we talk of genius, in Leonardo's case, that meant a hungry appetite for all kinds of knowledge, mathematics, poetry, engineering, hydraulics, optics, measurements of all kinds. And it was his, frankly, gruesome experiments in anatomy that provide one of the clues to his painting of the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa might be familiar, but she can bring you to your knees. The pride and joy of the world's biggest art gallery, the Louvre. This is the most recognisable painting in the world, produced by history's most influential artist. In all of art history, there has never been anybody remotely like Leonardo da Vinci. Right from the first, when he was apprenticed as a teenager into a workshop, everyone around him thought he was something special. His services were in hot demand from bishops, rival rulers and the new rich. For the first 30 years of his career, Leonardo moved restlessly through the major cities of northern Italy, most notably Florence, Venice and Milan, travelling wherever commissions and his curiosity took him. He had such a short attention span that nowadays they would have said he had ADHD, which fits, really, because he was always looking for a new inspiration. This was an artist who really didn't think or paint like any of his contemporaries. Every time he learned something new, he applied it immediately to his latest work. Leonardo was restlessly experimental and one of the things that he very quickly became interested in was oil paint, which was a new technology, and he began experimenting with it. You could create highlights, you could create luster, you could create transparency, you could do veils, you could do atmosphere in the landscape. So he was a great pioneer of oil painting and, in fact, pushed the technique further than anyone had done to that point. Using this newly developed skill with oil paints, Leonardo created a whole series of works. In 1482, he made Adoration of the Magi, in 1483, The Virgin on the Rocks and in 1494, he was commissioned by the Duke of Milan to paint The Last Supper for the convent of Santa Maria della Grazi. What makes this so revolutionary is not the paint he used, but da Vinci's first brilliant use of perspective, making a two-dimensional image look three-dimensional. In the history of art, his use of perspective was a radical jump, a different way of thinking that would shape also how he approached the Mona Lisa. Leonardo was extremely ambitious as a young painter and one of the things he was very interested in was the application of geometry and mathematics to painting, specifically to create perspective. And so he worked at making his works look more realistic than any painters had done before by creating a kind of three-dimensional image on the two-dimensional plane. Leonardo's interpretation of the evening before Christ was betrayed by one of his disciples was a monumental undertaking for an ambitious young artist. His experiments with paint mean it hasn't aged well, but his use of perspective made him famous. The status of an artist in the Renaissance period changed very sharply. Artists acquired pretensions, they acquired a theory of perspective and proportions, and they then claimed to be a liberal art, that is to say, one of the higher intellectual arts. And this raises the profile of artists and gives them a kind of prominence that they did not have in previous decades or centuries. And what we have then happening is artists become like rock stars. This was a time that propelled the artist to great stature and celebrity status. If we would have had I'm a Celebrity, they would have been there. It's a time when artists were seen as sort of like mini-gods, you know, they had a God-given talent. Leonardo was a household name elsewhere in Italy, but he'd been away from Florence for 30 years. So when he returned to his hometown in 1500, he needed to establish a reputation here. But first, Leonardo needed somewhere to base himself. Maria Wellington-Gattan is a Doctor of Renaissance Studies. We're here at the Santissima Nunciata Square, with the church sanctuary of Santissima Nunciata behind us. This is thought to be the place where Leonardo first was housed when he came to Florence in 1500. Leonardo's father was a notary for the friars. One could easily imagine that with his connections that he helped Leonardo arrange this housing, because, of course, Leonardo hadn't been in Florence for the past couple of decades. When Leonardo came to Florence, he came without commissions. So he was looking for work. He certainly would have been interested in painting portraits of the Florentine upper and middle classes. With a host of potential clients, Leonardo would begin work on the portrait that would define his entire career. But the mystery for many centuries was who exactly it was that he'd painted. The commission for the Mona Lisa has various stories, and each of them are fascinating. I suppose the most fashionable in the last 20 years of the Daft ideas is that this is Leonardo's pupil, Salai, this rascally but rather handsome pupil with curly hair. It's a portrait of Salai in drag. Some people said she was his mother. Some people said she was the Virgin Mary or the Duchess of Milan. Some people say it's a self-portrait of him. Whilst he's dealing with his homosexual tendencies, and at that time, being homosexual was against the law. It seems that this extraordinary picture must have an extraordinary explanation. In fact, this extraordinary picture has a sober explanation. And the sober answer to the mystery is found in where Leonardo was living and in his father's business relationships. Also connected with the Santissimo Theatre is Francesco del Giocondo. He was a silk merchant in Florence, and we know that he and Leonardo's father knew each other and that they had had business dealings with each other. And so one could very easily imagine Leonardo's father suggesting, perhaps, that Francesco commissioned a portrait of his wife, Lisa, from Leonardo. That this was the case was proved beyond doubt in 2005, when a German librarian found a note written by one of Leonardo's contemporaries, wondering if he would leave the portrait of Francesco del Giocondo's wife, Lisa Gerardini, unfinished. So what do we know about her? She was only 24. She was the wife of a fairly wealthy trader in silks and fabrics and possibly also in slaves, who was himself a client of Leonardo's father, a notary or lawyer. So they knew the family. It's said that Leonardo used acrobats and musicians and clowns to keep Mona smiling, because it's difficult when you're painting somebody to avoid their face becoming rather frozen with concentration. But if you look closely at her smile, I don't think it's an amused smile particularly. I think it's a sardonic, knowing smile. This is somebody who is staring at us just as hard as we are all staring at her. Perhaps she'd guessed just how long it would take Leonardo to finish his painting of her. After starting in 1503, he never stopped working on this modestly-sized rectangle. His magpie mind was far too restless. He was what I would call a helicopter painter. He hovered endlessly over works of art. He said, art is never finished, only abandoned. You really had to prise a work of art out of his hands. He was always on the go, always looking for different things. Shall I invent this? Shall I paint that? And that would have been part of his restlessness and also part of his inquiring mind and also his needing and his desire to think outside of the box. Leonardo's thirst for knowledge was never just confined to painting. He made himself expert in chemistry, botany, mathematics, engineering, music, astronomy and map-making. But it was another of his obsessions, knowing how things worked, that's the key to the enigma of the Mona Lisa. Leonardo was one of history's greatest anatomical illustrators and probably the best, in fact. That was how you would make your reputation in art, by creating very realistic-looking figures that had tremendous anatomical accuracy. And so Leonardo embraced that innovation in painting and, like so many things that he did, took it to the next level. And, in fact, he said that anatomy is for a painter what grammar is for a writer. This is the structure on which you build. The study of anatomy is as old as medicine itself. It was revered in ancient Greece. But in Leonardo's Italy, it seemed new and vaguely sinister. Artists were just starting to see the value of knowing how the human body works by observing the dissection of corpses. Leonardo inevitably went further. He wanted to cut the bodies up with his own hands. In this hospital, the Santa Maria Nuova, even while painting the Mona Lisa, he was likely to be found alongside the working doctors. Maria Antonio Rinaldi is a lecturer in art history. Leonardo wrote generically that, here in the hospital, he did 30 dissections. He wrote about the dissection of an old man. Actually, the old man told Leonardo that he was more than 100 years old. And Leonardo said he passed away in such a serene way that I wanted to understand the reason of such a dolce morte, a sweet death. But Leonardo was also interested in trying to understand how the man functioned. The man is a machine to understand the movement, but then also to understand, really, how the human being functioned. Leonardo thought that only by knowing exactly what was under Lisa's skin could he begin to capture her essence in paint. He wanted to see how the muscles were connected to the sinews, to the cartilage, to the bones. He would not see the dissection as influencing art or art as influencing dissection. He saw them as the same thing, in a way. It's a much deeper aspiration for understanding the body than most artists. This wasn't CSI Florence taking place in a spotlessly hygienic pathologist's lab. To create the Mona Lisa, Leonardo needed to withstand an assault on all the senses. Leonardo talked about the difficulties in dissecting the body and he talked about how fast the body decomposed. There are no preservatives, and this is really gory. You start with the intestines and the abdomen, because it decays very quickly. And you go to the chest and the brain, and the brain decays pretty quickly. And the muscles you can leave for a bit later, and the skeleton even later than that. So, yeah, Leonardo writes passionately saying, you know, you've got to have great patience and so on, but you've also got to put up with the sheer unpleasantness of it. It was a gooey unpleasantness that Leonardo was happy to endure in pursuit of understanding and perfecting his portrait. He talks about how awful it is to spend the night with these dead men who've been flayed of their skins. And so there are these horrible specters peering out at Leonardo, we have to imagine. But clearly, he was committed to this kind of anatomical study. He saw painting as remaking nature. So, to remake nature, you've got to understand nature, not just what something looks like on the surface, but you had to understand what was going on inside. His curiosity, his appetite of understanding, learning, with such an attention to the detail, that his anatomical studies are quite perfect. Leonardo made reams of notes and drawings about his discoveries, obsessed by the inner workings of the human body. That smile, where exactly were the muscles that moved the mouth and the lips? And how did they combine? For Leonardo, his scientific experiments and his artistic endeavours were inseparable. He was the great connector. There was no reason to keep science and art separate in this life. And so, instead, Leonardo combined the two disciplines. He applied everything he was learning about human anatomy to his art. In this case, the face of the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa is the most iconic and most recognisable portrait in the world. The work of an artist of undisputed genius, Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo was much more than an artist. His insatiable appetite for knowledge of all available kinds spread far beyond the canvas. He was fascinated by things as diverse as mathematics, optics, anatomy, and, in particular, human dissection. And, quite rightly, he could never separate the science from the art, so that everything he learned in the morgue turned up, eventually, on the canvas. There aren't many paintings that more or less everyone in the Western world can describe, and analysing it is a joy because Leonardo's extraordinary talent shines through. But once you know that his love of dissection helped to create that famous face, it's hard to see it in quite the same way again. One of the great things about Leonardo is that his drawings and his notebooks show us his mind actually working. And so, when we say, oh, he learned from optics in the painting, what exactly do we mean? Well, take the very famous case of the way that Mona Lisa's eyes appear to follow you around the room. That is because the pupil in one eye is looking directly at the viewer, and the pupil in the other eye is slightly off kilter, and that gives the illusion. It became very, very famous. So famous, it's known as the Mona Lisa effect, but it's pure optics. Really close attention to detail produces mystery. Take the case of Mona Lisa's famous smile. Now, if you look directly at her, she doesn't seem to be smiling at all, but if you glance to one side, she does seem to be smiling, and that is because of sfumato, this famous smokey technique that Leonardo uses right at the corner of her lips. After cutting up eyes and studying optical theory, Leonardo recognized that vision is only sharp when we look at things straight on. The eyes can be fooled. By painting extraordinarily fine downward lines at the corners of her lips, he creates the effect. She isn't smiling. Let your gaze widen and the lips blur. The corners appear to lift. Her lips change shape. She is smiling. It's almost invisible, and yet it produces the illusion of a mobile, smiling mouth. There's no hard outlines in the Mona Lisa's face. They're all blurred, so it gives the sense that she's moving, and also, she's not painted directly onto you. She's at an angle, and because she's at an angle, she's showing that she's moving, and also showing that she's occupying a three-dimensional space. I think he was rather pleased when people picked up what he was doing, this very daring recipe of the slightly sideways pose, the direct look. In most cases with female portraits, it was not polite for a woman to engage in eye contact with a man, so you had downcast eyes, you were in profile if you did a portrait. Leonardo breaks that convention. Leonardo's painting was the closest thing to naturalism that portraiture had yet seen. This was a picture soaked in understanding. Every part of this canvas, from the corkscrew shine of her hair to the details on Mona Lisa's robe, all of those things were achieved by a minute attention to detail. This is, of course, a still image, but she is alive. After spending more than four years toiling on this masterpiece, constantly reworking it, changing and tweaking wherever he saw fit, technically, Leonardo was finished, but he would not let it go. It was very typical of da Vinci not to finish a work of art. He never felt that he'd made it good enough. He always felt there was more to do. Just change this bit and that bit. A lot of artists have this problem, especially if you're a perfectionist, as he was. The family who commissioned the Mona Lisa never got the painting, but they never paid the money either. As Leonardo kept it with him, few people ever had the chance to see the Mona Lisa, certainly until it went on display in the 19th century. But a small number of Leonardo's contemporaries did get to see her up close and personal, and the impact on them was seismic. Immediately, the Mona Lisa influenced the way the artists were working at the time. The artist who probably had the most profound reaction to Leonardo was young Raphael. Raphael painted these two aristocrats, Angelo and Maddalena Doni, and she is absolutely in the pose of Mona Lisa, but doesn't smile. He clearly had seen the Mona Lisa and could not have painted Maddalena without having seen this work of art. And likewise, his Lady with the Unicorn is almost a complete copy of the Mona Lisa. And so this becomes transformative in portraiture as painters now begin doing their versions of the Mona Lisa. It may have changed the history of portraiture, but Leonardo was failing to leave his masterpiece alone. Over the next decade, he continued to tweak and finesse it. An indication of the importance of the Mona Lisa to Leonardo is the fact that he kept it with him throughout the rest of his life. It was something that he really believed was one of the finest expressions of his brush, and he could not let it go. It was something he still wanted to perfect. Consequently, the image we know and see today is quite different to the original portrait and may indeed be unrecognisable as Lisa del Giocondo. It's clear from the technical analysis we can now see a lot of the underdrawing. She started off with an orthodox Tuscan dress, and it gradually matured into something which was very decorative with the twisted shawl and so on. And she's put in front of this very remarkable landscape, so it's clear that the portrait becomes what I call a universal picture. Leonardo is pouring knowledge into it about light, about anatomy, about psychology, about geology. Nobody much was interested in Lisa del Giocondo outside the family, so it ceases to become a mugshot and becomes something much more universal. In 1517, with the Mona Lisa nearly always at hand, the 65-year-old Leonardo became an eminent figure in the King of France's court. He went to work for Francis I. Now, for Francis, it was trying to buy into the Italian Renaissance. It was the latest thing, and he got the top striker, as it were. Leonardo was expected to do things, but he was a kind of ordnance of the court. He had a huge salary, a big, big salary, much bigger than even most courtiers and most civil servants would have had. But Leonardo would only serve the king for two short years. He died in Amboise, in the Loire Valley, in 1519. It's said that he passed away in the arms of the king himself, who was devastated by his death. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest painters in Europe at this point, and so his death was widely mourned. We can say, yes, he finished not many paintings, but he finished the world's most famous painting, the world's second most famous painting, The Last Supper, and the world's most famous drawing, The Man in the Square and the Circle, based upon the writings of the Roman architect Retuvius. When people say to me, he didn't finish much, I said, well, he finished these three most famous things, and that's not bad. When Leonardo died, the Mona Lisa was bought by the French royal family, and for the next 278 years was moved around among their numerous palaces. It was only ever seen by France's rulers and their most valued courtiers. Finally, in 1797, Leonardo's painting made its way here to the Louvre, where it was displayed with the rest of the former royal collection. And for 114 years, that's where it stayed. To most of its visitors, it was just one more portrait hanging in a crowded gallery. Its place in the world's cultural landscape was, frankly, about as big as the space it took up on the wall of the Louvre. That is, until the 21st of August, 1911, when the painting simply disappeared. Nowadays, people all over the world can identify the Mona Lisa at a glance. It is unquestionably the most famous portrait ever created, endlessly reproduced and hugely influential all over the globe. But the Mona Lisa's worldwide fame only really began in the 20th century, in 1911, when she made headlines around the globe after she disappeared overnight, upped and offed, from her home here in the Louvre. It's a hard-to-believe tale, and it begins on the evening of the 21st of August. With no security measures but locked doors, the Louvre's 400 rooms were guarded by just a handful of men, and none of them saw Leonardo's masterpiece vanish into thin air. No one noticed for 28 hours that the Mona Lisa was not on the wall. Paintings were often being removed to be photographed, so that's what staff assumed was happening to the Mona Lisa. When they discovered it was missing, of course it became enormous news. Journalists couldn't get enough of the story. Karine Friedberg, a specialist in the history of art, is at the French National Library. This newspaper is called Le Petit Parisien, and the title says this famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, La Joconde, Mona Lisa, has disappeared from the Louvre Museum. How? Since when? We don't know. We only have the frame left. And then it takes us through the shock of the personnel in the Louvre Museum, finding this empty space and wondering who could have had access. Now, for the first time, anyone who bought a newspaper knew about the Mona Lisa. The Louvre was closed for nine days, and when it reopened, something rather extraordinary happened. The public reaction was just astonishing. People would queue for hours and hours to go into the Louvre, but they couldn't see the Mona Lisa because it had been stolen, but they just wanted to see the wall space where the Mona Lisa was once hanging. More people came to see the missing Mona Lisa than actually had been coming to see the Mona Lisa herself in the years before that. They left offerings and notes. People wept when they saw that it wasn't there. It became a bit hysterical. No one was arrested and charged, and there were no clues to follow. The Paris police force's reputation plummeted. But, by contrast, her disappearance turbocharged the Mona Lisa's fame. One of the things that happened in the aftermath of the theft is that the Paris police put the Mona Lisa's image, thousands of them, on every street corner in the city, and it gave an incredibly wide exposure to the painting. This very quickly became a worldwide story, and it so happens that the postcard sellers outside the Louvre made quite a lot of money selling those postcards to visitors who were coming to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and since it wasn't there, they were actually buying the postcards. And while no end of reproductions were being made, the enigmatic original remained lost. Two years passed, and hope for her return was fading. Then, out of the blue, in 1913, a letter found its way to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, signed Leonardo, and offering to sell the Mona Lisa. The Uffizi's director agreed to meet Leonardo, and in a sting operation, the police swooped and arrested him. The seller's real name was Vincenzo Perugia. Perugia, an Italian worker who was working at the time in the Louvre, hated the fact that the French had one of Italy's greatest paintings, and it was his prime desire to return it back to Italy. So, he went in one night after work, dressed as a workman, and while nobody was about, he took it off the wall and he took it home. His argument was that he was an Italian patriot and he was returning this painting to the land of its birth because of the fact that he said Napoleon had stolen it from the Italians, which, of course, did not happen. It travelled to France in the baggage of Leonardo da Vinci himself. Perugia pleaded guilty to theft, and he served eight months in prison. With the thief imprisoned and the now world-famous Mona Lisa on her way home, all of Paris was jubilant. Once it was found and it was brought back, there was like a huge city party, huge carnival. It's been said that in bars across Paris, can-can girls performed, dressed as the Mona Lisa. People dusted their faces with yellow paint, people shaved their eyebrows and made their hairline bigger to look like the Mona Lisa. Back in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa's place in the history of art had been secured forever. And she became a celebrity, even so much so that even now the Mona Lisa has her own postbox, allegedly. She gets mail. And that new global fame made the Mona Lisa into the Marilyn of the early 20th century. A new cultural icon had been born. Everyone wanted to see the small, famous painting in the flesh, and her travels on loan abroad were treated like a royal tour, prompting a semi-hysteria wherever she went. Now, as befits a lady more renowned than any queen, Mona Lisa leaves the Louvre on a heavy guard for a trip to the United States. Whenever the French government needed a little hand with some foreign relations, the Mona Lisa could be lent out to help oil the wheels. No VIP has been surrounded by more security. The Secret Service has been ordered to stand guard over the lady with the enigmatic smile 24 hours a day. While she was on display in New York, nearly two million people queued to get a 22nd or so glimpse of her. Similar numbers flocked to see her wherever she went in the world before officially retiring, exhausted, to the Louvre in 1974, where she's remained its biggest attraction ever since. Mona Lisa is the best-known image in the world. There really is no rival. I've seen her twice out of the frame, and it has a kind of living presence. It has a sort of breathing presence. This sounds very pretentious, but there's no other way to describe it. It's quite incredible that she remains up there, bigger than any other work of art. Nothing has usurped her. She's remained the greatest celebrity portrait that we know. That's the extraordinary draw of the Mona Lisa. She's a global phenomenon, seems to smile at everyone, wherever they are, all over the world. The Mona Lisa just does not belong to the Louvre and the French state or to Leonardo da Vinci. The Mona Lisa belongs to the world. This is part of the cultural heritage of all of us because it's such a wonderful work of art. The story of the Mona Lisa and Leonardo da Vinci, the genius who painted her, has blockbuster, best-seller dimensions. The autopsy, the optics, the explosion of new thinking in Renaissance Italy, a gay artist's decade-long obsession with a 24-year-old girl, her journey across the Alps to France, the theft, the return, the global fame. It is all a great story, but frankly, it means nothing compared to this, the fact that the hairs on the back of your neck stand up in her presence, that gaze, that smile. Fundamentally, this is not a portrait of a particular person. This is a picture of humanity by one of art's great geniuses, clothed in beauty and brimming with inner mystery. It may be dark, it may be old, it may be quite small, and it may be over-familiar, but it is, without doubt, one of the world's great paintings. Next time on The World's Greatest Paintings, a canvas so blindingly famous it sets the National Gallery ablaze. This is one of the brightest pictures you will ever see. This is a story of heroic optimism. Nobody had ever done anything quite that wild. Loneliness. His family, I think, started to realise the madness had begun. And heartbreak. He thought it was going to be a whole new beginning for him, and, of course, it wasn't to be. Behind Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers.