Mona Lisa (Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo)
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) · c. 1503-1519
Behind the glass sits a Florentine merchant's wife, almost certainly Lisa Gherardini, married to the silk dealer Francesco del Giocondo, which is why Italians call the picture La Gioconda and the French La Joconde. She is shown half length, turned three quarters toward you, hands quietly crossed, seated on a loggia whose parapet and the bases of two flanking columns are just visible at the edges. She wears no jewellery and a dark, plain dress with a fine veil, unusual restraint for a portrait of the period. Behind her a wild landscape of winding water, bridges and hazy peaks recedes on two levels that do not quite match.
The famous ambiguity of the expression is a technical effect as much as a psychological one. Leonardo used sfumato, building the face from many almost transparent glazes so that the corners of the mouth and eyes are left deliberately soft and undefined. Because human peripheral vision reads shadow differently from central vision, the smile appears to shift depending on where you look. Notice the veil over the hair, the barely visible transparent gauze across the bodice, the anatomical precision of the hands, and the fact that she has no eyebrows, probably the result of past cleaning rather than fashion.
Leonardo kept the painting with him for years and took it to France, where Francis I acquired it; it has been in the French royal and then national collection ever since. Its modern celebrity dates largely from 22 August 1911, when an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out of the Louvre with it under his coat. The two year hunt made front pages worldwide, and the painting returned in 1914 as a global icon.
Did You Know? The Mona Lisa became the most famous painting on earth partly because it was stolen in 1911 by a Louvre workman who hid it in his Paris apartment for two years.
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