Reading the Mona Lisa After Five Centuries

There is no painting in the world that has been looked at as much as the Mona Lisa. No other artwork has been photographed, parodied, reproduced, defended, vandalised, lectured on, satirised, marketed, or sentimentalised at anything close to the scale of Leonardo's small Florentine portrait. Tens of millions of viewers have stood in front of it. Several billion have seen a reproduction of it.

This is itself a problem. It is, by some distance, the hardest painting in the world to see, because every act of looking at it is mediated by the accumulated weight of every other person who has ever looked. The Mona Lisa one encounters in the Louvre is not, in any pure sense, a Renaissance painting. It is a Renaissance painting plus five centuries of looking — every reproduction, every joke, every postcard, every queue.

To see it clearly, then, requires a kind of deliberate archaeological excavation: stripping away the accumulated layers of cultural meaning to try to reach the actual object. This is not entirely possible. But it is worth attempting, because what lies beneath the famous face is a painting of genuine and extraordinary quality — one that repays close attention in a way that the celebrity version entirely obscures.

The first thing to notice, approaching the painting on its own terms, is how small it is. Visitors who have not seen it before are reliably surprised by this: 77 by 53 centimetres is a modest size for a portrait, considerably smaller than the Raphael Madonnas that hang nearby. The bulletproof glass, the viewing distance imposed by the barriers, and the surrounding architecture all conspire to make the painting feel larger than it is; in reproduction, of course, it is routinely presented at any scale the printer chooses.

The second thing to notice is the landscape behind the sitter. In the centuries of celebrity that have concentrated attention on the face and the famous expression, the landscape has been overlooked or treated as background. It is not background. It is one of the most intellectually ambitious elements of the painting — an imaginary landscape of extraordinary atmospheric depth, with winding roads, an arched bridge, and water threading through formations of rock that appear to be geological rather than decorative. The horizon level on the left side of the painting is higher than on the right, creating a subtle asymmetry that destabilises the space in a way that reinforces the general quality of unresolvedness that the painting creates.

The third thing to notice is the hands. Leonardo's preparation of the Mona Lisa included an extraordinary series of drapery studies for the hands and forearms, and the hands as painted — resting on the chair arm, one folded over the other — are among the most subtly observed and rendered passages in the entire painting. They have been, almost entirely, ignored by five centuries of commentary focused on the face.

The question of the expression — the most-debated single detail in the history of art — resolves, on close looking, into a question about the technique of sfumato rather than about the psychology of the sitter. The corners of the mouth are so softly modelled, the transition from the raised corner to the surrounding flesh so gradual and indeterminate, that the viewer's perceptual system genuinely cannot resolve whether the mouth is smiling or not. The ambiguity is not in the sitter's psychology; it is in the paint. Leonardo did not paint a woman whose expression is ambiguous; he painted an expression that the physics of his technique makes impossible to read definitively.

What twenty generations of viewers have done with this technical fact is the real subject of any account of the Mona Lisa's history. The nineteenth century made it melancholy; Pater's famous description of the sitter as "older than the rocks among which she sits" established a reading of tragic, timeless feminine mystery that had everything to do with Victorian attitudes toward women and almost nothing to do with Leonardo. The twentieth century made it ironic: Duchamp's mustachioed version (L.H.O.O.Q., 1919) turned it into a weapon against the museum and the canon. The advertising industry made it generic: an index of sophistication available to anyone who reproduced it on a product.

What the painting has done to its viewers, across five centuries, is perhaps more interesting than anything viewers have done to it. It has made them look — really look — at a painted face in a way that no other single image has made them look. Whether they come to mock, to reverence, to admire, or to fulfil a tourist obligation, the painting produces in most of its visitors a moment of genuine attention: a recognition, however brief and however obscured by expectation, that there is something here that repays looking at. That quality — the capacity to return the look — may be the best definition of a great painting.

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