Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa?
Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art?

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been the mascot of Featured Users since we first showed up on Twitter, and for good reason. She is the icon of recognizability, the ultimate avatar, gracing generations of onlookers with her sly, secret smile. She’s been reproduced, mashed up, played with, and spoofed in thousands of ways over the centuries, but despite all of this, her legendary beauty and mystery remain intact.

Plus, we like her.

Still, she doesn’t really belong to us, and her image might not make much sense to our followers, or Twitter at large. So, it is with a pang of regret that we are retiring the lovely lady.

In tribute, we’ll leave you with Five Fun Facts, a video, and a true story:

1. The painting is thought to be of Lisa Gherardini, wife of a merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. The Italians and French refer to this painting not as the Mona Lisa, but as La Gioconda or La Joconde, which means “the merry one.” This refers to her smile, and is probably also a play on her name, Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo.

2. The “Mona” in Mona Lisa comes from the Italian “Monna,” which is a contraction of Madonna, or Mia Donna (my lady). Mona is simply a misspelling that stuck.

3. Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1506. He carried the painting with him for several years to show to other artists as a demonstration of his abilities.

4. In the early 1800s, the painting hung in Napoleon’s bedroom in Tuileries.

5. La Joconde a le sourire, or “the Mona Lisa is still smiling,” served as a coded message during World War II to indicate the works of art in storage were safe.

True story: my bus driver in 2nd grade somehow got it into his head that my name was Lisa, not Sarah. Every single morning when I got on the bus for school, he would sing the opening verse of “Mona Lisa.”

I got such a kick out of this that I never corrected him.