Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait of a Florentine woman — almost certainly Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo — painted by Leonardo da Vinci between approximately 1503 and 1519. It is the single most celebrated painting of the High Renaissance, the most reproduced work of Western art, and the load-bearing icon of the Louvre Museum in Paris, where it has resided since the early nineteenth century.

The painting's fame is, in part, an accident of history. The theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911 by an Italian handyman, Vincenzo Peruggia, and its absence and recovery over the following two years, turned it into a global news event in a way no painting had ever been before. But the painting's underlying achievement is genuine, and would have been recognised in its own century as an extraordinary act of pictorial intelligence — sfumato modelling, ambiguous expression, atmospheric landscape, and the slight three-quarter turn of the sitter — even without the modern celebrity.

The Mona Lisa's composition is, on first reading, conventional: a half-length female portrait, seated, hands resting in her lap, against a distant landscape. Conventional, that is, after Leonardo made it so. Before this painting, the standard quattrocento female portrait was a profile bust, modelled on antique coinage — flat, formal, frozen, the sitter facing a separate world from the viewer's.

Leonardo's innovation was to turn the sitter three-quarters toward the viewer, so that the gaze acknowledges the observer; to compose the body in a relaxed pyramidal stability, hands folded forward on the chair arm; and to set the figure not against a flat textile or wall but against an atmospheric and impossibly extended landscape that rises behind her on both sides. The picture is, in this sense, the prototype of the modern portrait — every subsequent half-length sitter is, in some way, descended from Lisa Gherardini.

The Mona Lisa is Leonardo's most fully realised demonstration of sfumato, his term for the soft, smoke-like blurring of contours that gives a Renaissance painting its atmospheric subtlety. The word derives from the Italian sfumare — to evaporate like smoke. Leonardo built the painting in dozens of translucent layers of oil glaze, each one paper-thin, applied with extraordinary patience over a span of years. Examined microscopically, no individual brushstroke is visible. The transitions between flesh and shadow, between landscape and sky, between the corners of the mouth and the cheek, are continuous and indeterminate.

It is sfumato that produces the celebrated ambiguity of the sitter's expression. The corners of the mouth dissolve so gently into the surrounding modelling that the viewer's perceptual system cannot quite resolve whether she is smiling, faintly amused, or melancholic — the answer shifts with the angle of looking. Leonardo did not paint a fixed expression. He painted the condition of expression.

The sitter is now generally accepted, on the basis of a 2005 manuscript discovery in Heidelberg, to be Lisa Gherardini (1479–1542), the wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo of Florence. The painting's Italian title — La Gioconda — is the feminine form of her married surname and also a pun on the Italian giocondo, meaning playful or jovial. The portrait was apparently commissioned by her husband around 1503, possibly to mark the birth of their second son or the purchase of a new family home.

Leonardo, however, never delivered the painting. He kept it with him, working on it intermittently, for the remaining sixteen years of his life. He took it with him to France when he entered the service of King Francis I in 1516, and it remained in his possession until his death in 1519. The painting passed to the French crown and, after the Revolution, to the Louvre.

The Mona Lisa is the painting against which most subsequent Western portraiture has measured itself, and the painting through which most non-specialists encounter the Renaissance at all. It is the single most heavily defended, most reproduced, and most parodied work of art in history.

Its formal innovations — the three-quarter turn, the pyramidal composition, the sfumato modelling, the atmospheric landscape — were absorbed almost immediately by Raphael, whose Madonna portraits and Roman female sitters owe an obvious debt to Leonardo. Through Raphael, those innovations passed into the standard High Renaissance vocabulary and from there into every subsequent European school. To learn to paint a portrait in the Western tradition is to inherit, at one remove or another, the lessons of the Mona Lisa.

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