Mona Lisa
The portrait of Lisa Gherardini is perhaps the most famous painting in the world. Leonardo worked on it for many years and took it with him to France.
Sfumato: the contours around the mouth and eyes dissolve into haze, so that the smile can never be pinned down.
The Mona Lisa very probably depicts Lisa Gherardini, wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo in Florence. Hence the Italian and French names La Gioconda and La Joconde. “Mona” is a contraction of madonna, “my lady”. A note from 1503 in the margin of a book confirms that Leonardo was then working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.
The portrait was never delivered. Leonardo worked on it for several years and took it with him when he moved to France. After his death in 1519 it was bought by the French king Francis I. It later hung in various royal palaces, including Versailles. After the French Revolution it ended up in the Louvre. Napoleon kept it for a time in his bedroom before it returned to the museum.
The woman sits in a loggia with her hands folded on the arm of her chair. She turns her body slightly to the side but her face almost directly towards us. Behind her a dreamlike landscape unfolds with paths, a bridge, rivers and crags. The horizon on the left lies lower than the one on the right, which adds to the picture’s enigmatic mood. She has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes, something that has long been discussed.
Leonardo used sfumato, a technique in which the transitions between light and shadow are as soft as smoke. He built up the paint in very thin layers. The landscape becomes bluer and paler the further away it lies, a device known as aerial perspective. The painting is done in oil on a poplar panel and is quite small. The smile lies in the corners of the mouth and eyes, where the shadows are softest, and so it seems to change depending on where one looks.
On 21 August 1911 the painting was stolen from the Louvre by the Italian Vincenzo Peruggia, who had worked at the museum. He hid it for over two years. In December 1913 he tried to sell it in Florence and was arrested. The theft made the painting more famous than ever. After its recovery it was shown in Italy before returning to Paris. In the meantime the newspapers were full of speculation about who was to blame.
The Mona Lisa has been attacked several times, including with acid and a stone in the 1950s. Since then it has been protected by bulletproof glass. It has made two major journeys, to the United States in 1963 and to Japan in 1974. The varnish has yellowed over the years, and the colours were originally brighter than they are today.
Today the painting is perhaps the most famous work of art in the world and receives millions of visitors every year. It has been quoted and parodied by countless artists, for example Marcel Duchamp, who in 1919 added a moustache and beard to a reproduction. Since 2005 it has hung alone on a wall in the largest gallery in the Louvre.