The controversial appropriation of the Mona Lisa by King Francis I and its consequences with regard to the potential claim of ownership of the painting by the descendants of Leonardo da Vinci

When Leonardo da Vinci had finished the portrait of the Mona Lisa, he was certainly far from imagining that when he died King Francis I would monopolize it by using the right of windfall and that his disciple Francisco Melzi would get his hands on his other paintings, after having probably forged a forgery of letters and an apocryphal will. He was even further from suspecting that his portrait would become the most expensive and famous in the world, protected under armored glass in a museum visited every year by millions of people from all over the world. He could not have imagined that five centuries later the story of this portrait would resurface before the highest French administrative court in order to restore not only what is right in the face of the monarch's arbitrariness with regard to the legality of the Louvre Museum's collections, but also in the face of the inheritance rights of his descendants.