Which art student isn't familiar with the iconic Italian painting of a half-smiling woman named Mona Lisa?

That classical painting, on display at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France, is the subject of Twitter parodies after an Italian author who is writing a book about Italian inventor and painter Leonardo da Vinci shared with the South China Morning Post his theory about the ethnicity of the model for Mona Lisa.

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Italian historian and novelist Angelo Paratico's forthcoming book titled "Leonardo da Vinci: a Chinese scholar lost in Renaissance Italy," cited the 1910 assumption by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud that the woman who was da Vinci's model for the painting was his mother Caterina. This woman was said to be a Chinese slave of a rich client of Leonardo's father with whom he begot a son who was born in 1452 and became the famous Renaissance man, reports ABC.

Paratico, besides citing Freud's theory, also pointed to the Chinese landscape on the Mona Lisa painting's background and the "apparent" Chinese features of the woman on the painting as his proofs that Mona Lisa is an Oriental woman, which makes da Vinci half-Chinese.

The absurdity of Paratico's theory gave birth to parodies of the Mona Lisa painting on Twitter.

One image posted by Ray Kwong showed Mona Lisa with slit eyes typical of Chinese women. Haji S. Pasha disputed Paratico's theory and insisted that Caterina was an Indian and the painter was a Hindu man who did the masterpiece in 3000 BC. The woman, aptly named Mona-li Shah, even had a bindu - the red dot - on her forehead and a nose ring, while garbed in an Indian sari.

THAT's version of a Chinese Mona Lisa had her look like an empress complete with Chinese headdress, while in Sina Weibo, China's version of Twitter, the woman's features were replaced by various personalities ranging from Chinese comedian Zhao Benshan to Brit actor Rowan Atkinson.

With these different interpretations of Mona Lisa now circulating in social media, would it not be surprising if in a few days Chinese version of da Vinci's iconic "The Creation" on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican be spared from creative minds and the magic of Photoshop?

Would we see a Chinese Adam? Or perhaps a Chinese God the Father who looks like Confucius?

Tagsmona lisa, leonardo da vinci