/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

>>1763593
I've wondered this myself a few times. There is the matter of the conspiracy as far as who the painting is really of, and it apparently wasn't as popular until the 20th century, so it could be attributed to the modern love of gossip and speculation. I took the rest of my concern to wikipedia and I found a couple noteworthy details;
Mona Lisa "...was an open text into which one could read what one wanted; probably because she was not a religious image; and, probably, because the literary gazers were mainly men who subjected her to an endless stream of male fantasies."
It was painted with apparent influence from some other works, especially paintings of Madonna (pictured), and the more connections you can make with something, the more it sticks in your head and the more you like it. Like how fanart usually gets more views.
"The painting was among the first portraits to depict the sitter before an imaginary landscape and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective."
"The woman appears alive to an unusual measure, which Leonardo achieved by his new method not to draw the outlines, "mainly in two features: the corners of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes"" I googled 16th century art to see what it was standing up against. The Mona Lisa looks outstandingly human in comparison, and if you look at it thinking about the subject rather than the skill involved, you can really imagine sitting across from her at a party or something, and you can't say that for a lot of paintings of the time period.
So maybe the painting's fame has less to do with the painter's general skill level and more to do with the level of humanity it conveys. Or maybe I'm sentimental. Either way, what happened was probably that enough people were entranced by it that the people around them started parroting their praise until eventually everyone knew the Mona Lisa was 'the best' without really looking at anything else. That's just my opinion, though.
Sorry for length.