> MONA LISA

Overview

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait painted by the Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci between roughly 1503 and 1519. Executed in oil on a poplar panel, it measures just 77 by 53 centimeters — smaller than most first-time visitors expect. Yet it is almost certainly the most famous painting in the world, studied by art historians, reproduced endlessly in popular culture, and viewed by an estimated ten million people every year at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

The Sitter

The painting is widely believed to depict Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the wealthy Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo — which is why the work is also called La Gioconda in Italian and La Joconde in French. This identification, first recorded by the biographer Giorgio Vasari in 1550, is supported by a 2005 note discovered in the margin of an ancient manuscript written by Leonardo's contemporary Agostino Vespucci. Some scholars have proposed other sitters, but most consider Lisa Gherardini the most likely subject.

Technique and Innovation

Leonardo used sfumato, his characteristic technique of building up very thin, nearly translucent layers of paint to create soft transitions between light and shadow. The effect is most famous around the corners of Mona Lisa's mouth and eyes, where the boundaries of her expression blur into ambiguity. Her famously uncertain smile — seeming to shift as the viewer moves — is a product both of this sfumato and of the fact that peripheral vision sees the face slightly differently from direct vision. Leonardo also positioned the sitter against an imaginary aerial landscape, with receding mountains and winding paths, breaking with earlier Italian portrait conventions.

Fame and Theft

The Mona Lisa was admired from the start but became a global sensation only in the twentieth century. In 1911 it was stolen from the Louvre by an Italian handyman, Vincenzo Peruggia, who believed the painting should be returned to Italy. The disappearance made front-page news around the world for more than two years, and when the painting was recovered in Florence in 1913 it was already one of the most recognized images in Western culture. It survived two world wars in hidden storage, was attacked with acid in 1956, and is now displayed behind bulletproof glass with climate and humidity control. It is formally priceless but has been insured for valuations exceeding one billion dollars.

Did You Know?

• The sitter has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes — they may have faded or been removed during restoration.
• The painting was stolen in 1911 and missing for more than two years.
• Its Italian name, La Gioconda, is a pun on the sitter's married surname Giocondo.
• Leonardo appears to have kept the painting with him until his death in France in 1519.