Mona Lisa

A portrait that was never delivered

Around 1503 the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint his wife, Lisa Gherardini. It was an ordinary commission: a portrait to mark a new house, perhaps the birth of a son. What happened next was not ordinary. Leonardo kept the panel, carried it with him to Milan, Rome and finally France, and was still refining it in the last years of his life. The Giocondo family never received their picture.

That long life in the studio is the key to the painting. The Mona Lisa is not a quick likeness but the summary of everything Leonardo had learned about light, anatomy, optics and the way the eye reads a face. It passed after his death to the French royal collection, hung in Fontainebleau and Versailles, and entered the Louvre after the Revolution.

The smile

Everyone comes for the smile, and the smile is a trick of technique. Leonardo painted the corners of the mouth and the eyes, the two places where we read expression, with the softest transitions of tone, so there is no line to fix on. The Italians called this sfumato, "vanished like smoke". When you look straight at the mouth it seems almost serious; when your eye moves to her eyes, the soft shadows at the corners of the lips read as a smile.

Detail 1Zoom to detail

A face without eyebrows

Visitors often notice that Lisa has no eyebrows or eyelashes. High-resolution scans suggest they were once painted very finely and have been lost through cleaning and the ageing of the varnish. What remains is a face of extraordinary smoothness, modelled almost entirely by light, without any hard edge.

Detail 2Zoom to detail

The landscape behind her

Behind the sitter opens one of the strangest landscapes in Renaissance art: winding roads, a river, rocky peaks and lakes that fade into blue haze. Leonardo used aerial perspective, making distant things paler and bluer, as the atmosphere does. The horizon on the left is lower than on the right, a small mismatch that adds to the sense of movement around her head.

Detail 3Zoom to detail

The hands

Below the face, the hands rest one over the other on the arm of a chair. They are painted with the same care as the face, the fingers softly rounded by light. Their calm is part of the effect: the whole figure forms a stable pyramid, and the stillness of the hands makes the movement of the smile even more mysterious.

Detail 4Zoom to detail

From portrait to legend

The Mona Lisa was admired by painters from the start; Raphael sketched it within a few years. But its global fame is more recent. In August 1911 it was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman, and was missing for more than two years. Newspapers around the world printed its image, and when it was recovered in Florence in 1913 it had become a star. Since then it has been copied, parodied and reproduced more than any other painting.

Today it hangs behind protective glass in the Salle des États, and most visitors see it for only a few seconds over a crowd. That is one reason so many people choose to live with a hand-painted copy: a reproduction lets you see, slowly and at home, the glazes, the haze and the half-smile that made Leonardo keep the painting for himself.

Seeing the Mona Lisa

The original is small, about 77 by 53 centimetres, painted in oil on a poplar panel. It is in the Louvre in Paris, in the Denon wing on the first floor.