On January 8, 1963, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., beginning the painting's unprecedented United States exhibition. The loan was negotiated through Jacqueline Kennedy and French culture minister Andre Malraux and treated as both a cultural event and a Cold War diplomatic gesture. President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, Malraux, Lyndon B. Johnson, and about 2,000 guests attended the first showing. The picture then drew hundreds of thousands of visitors in Washington before moving to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For a work already famous through theft, reproduction, and Louvre display, the U.S. tour intensified its status as an object of mass public pilgrimage.
The tour helped turn the Mona Lisa into an American pop-cultural icon as well as a European masterpiece.
![Ginevra de' Benci [obverse], by Leonardo da Vinci](https://artifactworldgallery.com/img/ginevra-de-benci-obverse--afb6ec3a3e65f392-w320.webp)
![Wreath of Laurel, Palm, and Juniper with a Scroll inscribed Virtutem Forma Decorat [reverse], by Leonardo da Vinci](https://artifactworldgallery.com/img/wreath-of-laurel-palm-and-juniper-with-a-scroll-inscribed-vi--4cdfe8467ad2438a-w320.webp)
