What do critics say about the Mona Lisa?

Answer 1

(Of The Mona Lisa) She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave. Walter Pater - Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

Curiosity and the desire for beauty - These are the two elementary forces in Leonardo's genius; curiosity of ten in conflict with the desire for beauty, but generating, in union with it a type of subtle and curious grace. Walter Pater - Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873)

(Of Leonardo's Mona Lisa) What voluptuousness…so like the seduction by the violins in the overture to Tannhauser.

Maurice Denis - "Definition of Neotraditionism (1890)

The smile of La Gioconda was for too long, perhaps, the Sun of Art. The adoration of her is like a decadent Christianity - peculiarly depressing, utterly demoralizing. One might say to paraphrase, Arthur Rimbaud, that La Gioconda, the eternal Gioconda has been a thief of the energies. André Salmon, La jeune peinture francaise (1912).

(Of the Mona Lisa) Her hesitating smile which held my youth in a little tether has come to seem to me but a grimace and the pale mountains no more mysterious that a globe or map seen at a distance, a sort of riddle, an acrostic, a poetical decoction, a ballade, a rondel, a villanelle or ballade with double burden, a sestina or chant royal. The Mona Lisa (is) literature in intention rather than painting - George Moore, Wale, (1914).

Answer 2

Some questions: Who was she?

Why was she painted?

When was she painted?

Where is the painting?

What are the materials?

Why did Leonardo keep the painting?

Etc, etc.

Answer 3

The most common is "Who is she?"