Arena — Season 1, Episode 167: Have You Seen the Mona Lisa...?
Documentary • 90 min • 3 seasons, 689 episodes • ★ 7.2/10
Episode synopsis
She is two-and-a-half feet tall and nearly 500 years old. She hangs in The Louvre behind plate-glass - an unsigned, undated portrait of a smiling woman, the most idolised and abused woman in the history of art. She can be found in The Louvre, on the pavement in Buckingham Palace Road, on Doctor Who and on biscuit tins ... There's only one Mona Lisa but she's everywhere. Tonight Arena looks behind the Gioconda smile...
About Arena
Arena is a British television documentary series, made and broadcast by the BBC. Voted by leading TV executives in Broadcast as one of the top 50 most influential programmes of all time, it has run since 1 October 1975 with over five hundred episodes made, directed by the likes of Martin Scorsese, Alan Yentob, Roly Keating, Frederick Baker, Volker Schlondorff and Vikram Jayanti. Arena's subjects are a roll-call of the world's best known cultural figures from the 20th and 21st centuries, from singers Bob Dylan and Amy Winehouse to academics Edward Said and Eric Hobsbawm, from writers Jean Genet and V S Naipaul to artists Francis Bacon and Louise Bourgeois. The current series editor is Anthony Wall.