The Mona Lisa: Why the World's Most Famous Painting Is So Small

Her name was Lisa Gherardini (1479–1542). She came from an old family of landowners in the Chianti and, in 1495, married Francesco del Giocondo, a silk merchant, with whom she had six children.¹

The painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550 that Francesco asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint his wife. In the twentieth century, some began to doubt it. Then, in 2005, a note was found in the margin of a book at Heidelberg University Library: written in October 1503 by Agostino Vespucci, it mentions Leonardo working on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.¹

Giorgio Vasari's 1550 account is full of detail. He wrote that Leonardo labored over the portrait for four years and left it unfinished, and that it was by then with the king of France at Fontainebleau.¹

He praised details that seemed alive: the moist shine of the eyes, the rosy tones around them, eyebrows that grow out of the skin hair by hair, a mouth that looked like flesh rather than paint. He even claimed you could see the pulse beating in her throat.¹

And he told a story that is still repeated: while Lisa sat for him, Leonardo had musicians, singers and jesters keep her cheerful, to chase away the melancholy that so often creeps into portraits.¹

Agostino Vespucci, in his 1503 margin note, made a different comparison. He likened Leonardo to Apelles, the painter of ancient Greece who left a picture of Venus unfinished: Leonardo, he wrote, did the same with all his paintings.¹

Leonardo began the portrait around 1503, but he never delivered it. He kept it with him for the rest of his life and went on working on it; according to the Louvre, it was still unfinished when he died. It was very probably bought by the French king Francis I in 1518.¹

Part of its magic comes from technique. To make the face move and the smile flicker, Leonardo pushed oil painting further than anyone had: soft, smoky transitions with no hard outlines, the effect known as sfumato.¹

From the second half of the nineteenth century, writers began describing her as a mysterious, fatal beauty, and the legend of a hidden secret was born.¹

Then, in 1911, it vanished. Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier who worked at the Louvre, stole it. The theft made the painting famous around the world. When it was found in 1913, it returned as the museum's greatest star.¹

Over the long years Leonardo spent on it, the painting probably became more than a likeness of Lisa. The Louvre describes how her identity slowly mattered less than the picture's extraordinary sense of life, physical and psychological: a demonstration of what Leonardo saw as the science of painting, able to recreate life itself.¹

From the French royal collection, it passed to the Louvre, where it hangs today in the Salle des États.¹

In front of her, it helps to know what to look for. Here is what the Louvre's own record points out.¹

The setting. Lisa sits in a chair set almost side-on, in front of a low balustrade. Two slim columns at its ends frame a vast landscape of mountains and rivers: a winding road on the left, a bridge on the right.

The clothes. Under the yellowed varnish is a rich Florentine outfit: a dress that was probably dark green, detachable yellow sleeves, a white shirt showing at the shoulder, and a large veil of transparent silk held at the chest by embroidered gold thread.

The hair. It is not loose, as is sometimes said. Only a few strands fall beside the face; the rest is gathered in a bun under a cap, visible in infrared images.

The smile. It is built from imperceptible transitions between shadow and light, laid down in very thin, oily glazes that blur every outline.

The unfinished corner. Look at the bottom right of the landscape: part of the ground is still only sketched in.

The colors you see are not quite the colors Leonardo painted. After his death, the panel was covered with thick layers of varnish during successive restorations. They have aged into a yellow filter that changes the whole palette: the blue of the sky now reads as green, and several areas look darker than they were.¹

One face per wall. A portrait holds a room on its own. Give it space, in a hallway, above a console or at the end of a corridor where it meets you head-on.

Eyes at eye level. A portrait looks back at you, so hang it with its center around 57 inches from the floor. The method is in How High to Hang Art.

Warm light. Soft, warm lighting flatters skin tones and old-master palettes alike.