Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the most looked at, most reproduced, and probably most exhausted face in the history of art. Banksy’s intervention in this painting targets exactly that exhaustion.

The composition keeps Mona Lisa’s famous pose and expression fully intact: the same calm, the same ambiguous smile. The only thing that changes is what she is holding. Instead of hands folded in her lap, there is a rocket launcher, and in her ear is a military radio earpiece. So the woman is not just armed, she is also part of an operation, taking orders from someone or reporting to someone.

This second detail is what sets the piece apart from a simple shock effect. If the weapon had been added on its own, it would have been a familiar joke about defacing a classic painting. The earpiece adds a chain of command to the scene, a sense of institution. The violence here is not personal anger, it is an organised system.

The piece was made on a wall in Soho, London, using a black and white stencil technique. Application took around fifteen minutes, the pace forced on the artist by working on the street.

Its life was extremely short. About two days after it appeared, someone else intervened and altered the figure to resemble Osama bin Laden, and the piece disappeared entirely soon after.

This piece sums up Banksy’s relationship with classical art. He does not destroy the Mona Lisa here, he barely touches her at all. He simply takes the most recognisable face in the world and places it next to something we see in today’s visual culture every day, a gun. The result asks the viewer a question: why does this image seem so easy to accept?