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50 free Mona Lisa trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Mona Lisa trivia quiz covers the most famous painting in the world, from the Florentine silk merchant's wife who probably sat for it to the cake and soup thrown at its bulletproof glass in the 2020s. The easier questions handle the essentials: who painted it, where it hangs, the country that owns it and the name of the woman who was Leonardo's likely subject. The harder end is for people who have queued in the Salle des États: the wood the panel is painted on, the marginal note in a Cicero that dated the work to 1503, the king who bought it after Leonardo's death, the emperor who hung it in his bedroom, the glazier who walked out of the Louvre with it in 1911 and the poet and painter arrested in his place, the rock attack of 1956, the 1963 American tour and the record insurance figure, the Duchamp parody with a rude French pun, Nat King Cole's Oscar-winning song, and the workshop copies in Madrid and Isleworth. There are also questions on sfumato, the missing eyebrows and the science of the smile. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the painting, its sitter, its thief, its copies and the museum that holds it before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, our Leonardo da Vinci, art history, Renaissance and Paris quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci
It is the only one of his portraits whose authenticity has never been seriously questioned.
Q 02The Mona Lisa is painted in oil on a panel of which wood?
Poplar
The unrestrained panel warped with humidity, causing a crack that runs down to the sitter's hairline.
Q 03The woman generally identified as the sitter, Lisa del Giocondo, was married to a merchant in what trade?
Silk
Vasari wrote that Leonardo painted the portrait for her husband, Francesco del Giocondo; the couple had six children.
Q 04The Italian title La Gioconda is a pun on the sitter's married name and means what?
The jocund, or happy, one
The French title La Joconde carries the same meaning; 'Mona' itself is a contraction of ma donna, meaning my lady.
Q 05Which Renaissance biographer wrote in 1550 that Leonardo painted 'Mona Lisa' for Francesco del Giocondo?
Giorgio Vasari
His account came 31 years after Leonardo's death and also claims the artist lingered over it four years and left it unfinished.
Q 06What 2005 find at Heidelberg University dated Leonardo's work on the portrait to October 1503?
A marginal note in a printed Cicero
The note by Agostino Vespucci compares Leonardo to the Greek painter Apelles and says he was then painting Lisa del Giocondo.
Q 07The soft, smoky blending of tones behind the face's ambiguous expression is called what?
Sfumato
Leonardo described it as 'without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke'.
Q 08What facial feature does the Mona Lisa famously appear to lack?
Eyebrows and eyelashes
Vasari described the eyebrows in detail; engineer Pascal Cotte's 2007 scans suggest they were painted but vanished, perhaps through overcleaning.
Q 09Margaret Livingstone found in 2003 that the smile does what when you look at the mouth?
It seems to disappear
She argues the smile is drawn in low spatial frequencies best seen with peripheral vision, so it is more striking when you look at the eyes.
Q 10Leonardo placed the horizon of the background landscape where, unusually linking figure and scenery?
Level with the eyes
In his earlier portrait of Ginevra de' Benci he had set it at the neck; the landscape includes icy mountains and a distant bridge.
Q 11Which French king acquired the Mona Lisa after Leonardo's death?
Francis I
He had invited Leonardo to live at the Clos Lucé near Amboise in 1516; the artist probably brought the unfinished panel with him.
Q 12Which physical problem around 1517 may explain why Leonardo left the painting unfinished?
A paralysed right hand
Some scholars think he kept refining the work until 1516 or 1517, more than a decade after starting it.
Q 13Louis XIV moved the painting from Fontainebleau to which palace, its home until the Revolution?
Versailles
It went on permanent display at the Louvre in 1797, and later spent a brief spell in an emperor's bedroom.
Q 21What was thrown at the protective glass in May 2022 by a man disguised as a woman in a wheelchair?
Cake
He said he wanted to raise awareness of climate change; environmental activists threw soup at the glass in January 2024.
Q 22The Mona Lisa was sprayed with red paint at the Tokyo National Museum in 1974 in protest at what?
Lack of disabled access
The same year it also travelled to Moscow; the glass case kept it undamaged.
Q 23From December 1962 to March 1963 the painting was lent to which country?
United States
About 1.7 million New Yorkers queued for a 20-second glimpse; a faulty sprinkler at the Met nearly drenched it.
Q 14The Mona Lisa spent a brief period in whose bedroom in the Tuileries Palace?
Napoleon
The Italian thief who took it a century later claimed, wrongly, that Napoleon had stolen it from Italy.
Q 15In which year was the Mona Lisa stolen from the Louvre?
1911
The museum closed for a week and the theft turned a painting known mainly to connoisseurs into a global celebrity.
Q 16Which poet was arrested and jailed on suspicion of the theft, and implicated a famous painter friend?
Guillaume Apollinaire
He named Pablo Picasso, who was brought in for questioning; both were innocent.
Q 17The real thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, had done what job at the Louvre?
Helped build the painting's glass case
He walked in wearing a workman's white smock on a Monday when the museum was closed and simply removed it.
Q 18How was Peruggia finally caught, after keeping the painting in his apartment for two years?
Trying to sell it to the Uffizi's director
He contacted a Tuscan dealer under the name Leonardo V.; the Uffizi's Giovanni Poggi authenticated the panel and called the police.
Q 19How long did Peruggia serve in prison for the theft?
Six months
Many Italians hailed him as a patriot; the painting was exhibited at the Uffizi for over two weeks before returning to Paris in January 1914.
Q 20What did a Bolivian visitor throw at the painting in December 1956, dislodging a speck of pigment?
A rock
The painting has been behind bulletproof glass ever since; a man had slashed it with a razor blade a few years earlier.
Q 24The Mona Lisa's 1962 insurance valuation, a Guinness record, was how much?
$100 million
That is roughly $1 billion in today's money and makes it, in practice, the most valuable painting in the world.
Q 25Where was the painting hidden in 1939 to keep it from the Nazis?
A series of French châteaux and abbeys
It went to Amboise, then Loc-Dieu Abbey and Chambord, ending up at the Musée Ingres in Montauban.
Q 26In which room of the Louvre is the Mona Lisa displayed?
Salle des États
About 10.2 million people a year came to see it as of 2019, and in 2024 the museum decided to give it a room of its own.
Q 27A former Louvre director estimated what share of visitors come only to see the Mona Lisa?
80 percent
Henri Loyrette's remark came as the museum was drawing more than 9 million visitors a year.
Q 28Marcel Duchamp's 1919 parody L.H.O.O.Q. added what to a cheap reproduction?
A moustache and goatee
Read aloud in French the letters form a vulgar pun meaning roughly 'she has a hot backside'.
Q 29Andy Warhol's multiple-image print of the painting, made after its 1963 US visit, was titled what?
Thirty Are Better than One
Salvador Dalí had painted a Self portrait as Mona Lisa in 1954 and later wrote an essay on why people attack the picture.
Q 30Nat King Cole's 1950 hit 'Mona Lisa' won which prize for the film Captain Carey, U.S.A.?
Academy Award for Best Original Song
Written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston, Cole's version spent five weeks at number one on Billboard.