Donald Sassoon
Becoming Mona Lisa: the Making of a Global Icon

Sackler Museum
485 Broadway, Cambridge
Tickets are required and available for free at bookstore.

This richly historic and lavishly illustrated book tells how a single painting became the greatest masterpiece in the history of art and an icon of popular culture. Perhaps better than any other art object, the Mona Lisa demonstrates that something can be high art and pop, classic and cool. Donald Sassoon provides a fascinating account of how Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece became what it is today. He examines how the Renaissance genius created the picture, who the subject was, why it gained its unrivalled position in the art world, and how it has come to be used and abused by other artists and the international advertising industry.

Tracing the reception of da Vinci's paintings as well as the development of the museums, essential to bringing art to a broad public audience, Sassoon's account is as much the story of serious art's popularization as it is of one painting's ascendance to the status of global icon.