Mona Lisa as an Advertising Face

Some masterpieces, especially Renaissance ones, are so famous, so well known that they have become absolutely familiar. Botticelli’s Venus, Michelangelo’s David, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa are icons of our time, real mass-media cult objects.

This was well understood by the great master of Pop Art, Andy Warhol, who adopted the Venus and the Mona Lisa as subjects for his works.

Pop Art had brought the art-advertising relationship to a level of contamination never reached before, creating “works of art” that looked like advertising posters, because they used the same language as advertising. It was fatal that the process also took place in the opposite direction.

After Warhol’s pop operation had come to desecrate, but without polemic or iconoclastic intentions, the mythicized images of famous Renaissance subjects, depriving them of their divine allure, the advertising graphics broke all delay: and it was thus that David and Mona Lisa they found, despite themselves, to be advertising testimonials for household appliances, foodstuffs, major clothing brands, mobile phones, airlines.