Mona Lisa

"Not colours but flesh"

The first person to write about the Mona Lisa had never seen it. Giorgio Vasari, describing Leonardo's work in 1550, thirty years after the painter's death, had only the reports of people who had, and on their word he wrote the description that has shaped what everyone has looked for since:

The mouth, with its opening joined by the red of the lips to the flesh of the face, seemed to be not colours but flesh itself. And the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human.

Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists, 1550

He also praised the eyebrows, "which could not be more natural", and the painting has none. Either they have been cleaned away, or Vasari was working from a copy, or he was making it up. The Mona Lisa has been like that from the beginning: the most looked-at painting in the world, and the one people see least clearly.

Who she was

Her name was Lisa Gherardini. She was born in Florence in 1479, married a silk merchant called Francesco del Giocondo at fifteen, and had five children. In 1503, when she was twenty-four and had just had a son, her husband commissioned a portrait from Leonardo da Vinci, who was fifty-one and back in Florence after nearly twenty years in Milan. We know the date because a Florentine clerk called Agostino Vespucci wrote it in the margin of a book that October: Leonardo, he noted, was working on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.

Francesco never got his painting. Leonardo worked on it, on and off, for the rest of his life, took it to Rome, then to France, and still had it in his rooms when he died at Amboise in 1519. The portrait of a merchant's wife became the thing he could not stop touching. Her Italian name, La Gioconda, means the joyful one, and it is also her husband's surname. The French, and the rest of the world, call her by the short form of Vasari's Monna Lisa: my lady Lisa.

The smile

Look at the corners of the mouth. There are no lines. Leonardo built the face out of layers of glaze so thin that the edges of the lips are not edges at all, only places where light gives way to shadow. He called the method sfumato, from the Italian for smoke, and the Mona Lisa is its masterpiece.

The smile works because of how the eye sees. Look directly at the mouth and the sharp central part of your vision reads the shadows as shadows: the smile flattens. Look at her eyes, and the mouth falls into the blurrier edge of your sight, where shadows read as shape: the smile returns. She smiles when you are not looking at her lips, and stops when you are. Leonardo, who wrote notebooks on the mechanics of seeing, may or may not have planned that. He certainly noticed.

The eyes are the other half of the trick. They meet yours from anywhere in the room, and the absence of eyebrows and lashes, whatever its cause, leaves nothing between you and them. In 2007 a French engineer, Pascal Cotte, scanned the panel and found the trace of one painted hair over the left brow. Leonardo had painted them. Restorers, or time, took them off.

The hands and the hair

She sits in a chair with her body turned three-quarters to us and her hands folded on its arm, the right over the left. That pose, body one way, face another, hands at rest in the foreground, did not exist in portraiture before Leonardo. Within five years Raphael was drawing it, and within a century every court painter in Europe was using it. The Mona Lisa is famous partly because it is the template.

She wears a thin dark veil over her hair and a plain dark dress with gathered fabric at the neck: no jewellery, no rings, no sign of rank. The loose hair has been read as a sign of mourning, or of virtue, or of Leonardo simply not caring about fashion. The plainness is deliberate. There is nothing in the picture to look at except her.

The landscape that does not match

Behind her is a landscape that exists nowhere. On the right a river winds under a stone bridge toward mountains that dissolve into blue. On the left a road curls into rocks and a lake. The two halves do not join: the horizon on the right is higher than on the left, so that when you look at the right side of her face she seems taller, and when you look at the left, shorter. That, too, keeps the picture moving.

The blue is aerial perspective, which Leonardo described in his notebooks before anyone else: distant things go blue and soft because of the air between. He painted the geology the way he drew it in his studies of water and rock, as a world in slow motion, wearing away. The woman in front is twenty-four. The world behind her is a million years old.

From François I to Napoleon's bedroom

Leonardo died in France as the guest of King François I, and the king acquired the painting from the painter's heir. For three hundred years it belonged to the kings of France: at Fontainebleau, where it hung in the bathing rooms, at Versailles, and then, after the Revolution, in the Louvre. In 1800 Napoleon took it out of the museum and hung it in his bedroom in the Tuileries. He called her Madame Lisa. It went back to the Louvre in 1804.

Through all of this it was admired, copied and written about, but it was one Leonardo among several and not yet the painting. The nineteenth century made her mysterious: the critic Walter Pater in 1873 called her older than the rocks among which she sits, and a generation of poets took the hint. Then, on 21 August 1911, somebody stole her.

The theft

Vincenzo Peruggia was an Italian house painter who had worked at the Louvre fitting glass to the picture frames. On a Monday morning when the museum was closed, he walked in through a staff entrance in a white workman's smock, lifted the painting off its hooks, took it out of its frame in a stairwell, wrapped it in the smock and walked out. Nobody noticed it was gone until the next day, and then only because a painter who had come to copy it asked where it was.

For two years the Louvre hung the empty hooks, and people queued to look at the space. The police questioned Picasso, who had bought some stolen Iberian statuettes from a friend, and briefly held the poet Apollinaire. Newspapers printed the face on every front page in Europe. When Peruggia finally tried to sell the painting to a dealer in Florence in December 1913, saying he wanted to return it to Italy, he was arrested and served seven months. The Mona Lisa toured Italy and came back to Paris in January 1914 as the most famous painting in the world. She has not stopped being that since.

Behind the glass

Fame has a cost. In 1956 a visitor threw acid at the lower half of the painting, and a few months later a young Bolivian threw a rock that chipped the paint by the left elbow. Since then she has lived behind glass: bulletproof since 2005, in a climate-controlled case in a room built for her, the Salle des États, where the ten million people a year who visit the Louvre file past at a distance of several metres. Things thrown since have hit the glass: a mug in 2009, a cake in 2022, soup in 2024.

The panel itself is poplar, and it has been warping since it was cut. A crack runs down from the top edge. The varnish has yellowed so much that the sky, which Leonardo painted blue, reads as green, and the museum has never dared clean it. What you see in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa under five hundred years of varnish and a sheet of glass. What she looked like new is a guess, and the best guess is in Madrid.

The one in Madrid

In 2012 the Prado cleaned a copy of the Mona Lisa that had hung, unregarded, in its collection for two centuries, and found under a black overpaint the same landscape as the Louvre's, in fresh colour: blue sky, red sleeves, a pink face, a clear view of the bridge. Examination showed that it had been painted in Leonardo's studio at the same time as the original, by a pupil working alongside him, with the same corrections made in the same order. It is the closest thing there is to seeing the Mona Lisa without the varnish.

There are other claimants: the so-called Isleworth Mona Lisa, a younger woman between columns, promoted by its owners as an earlier version by Leonardo and accepted as such by almost nobody else. The Louvre's painting is the one Vasari described, the one François bought, the one Peruggia stole. Every other Mona Lisa is a copy of a reputation.

What does the Mona Lisa mean?

Nothing hidden. She is not Leonardo in a dress, or his mother, or a coded message; she is a Florentine merchant's wife, painted by a man who kept the picture because he could not finish making it as alive as he wanted.

What it means in the history of painting is that a portrait can be a person rather than a record of one. Before Leonardo, a painted face told you who someone was and what they owned. The Mona Lisa tells you what it is like to be looked at by somebody who is thinking. The smile, the eyes, the shifting horizon, the world dissolving behind her: everything in the picture is designed to keep you from settling, and that unsettledness, five hundred years on, is what the queues are for.

It has also become something else, which Leonardo could not have foreseen: the picture that stands for pictures. Duchamp drew a moustache on her. Warhol printed her thirty times. She is on mugs, mouse mats and the wall of every art teacher's classroom. None of that is in the painting. All of it is why you know her face better than your grandmother's.

Lady with an ErmineLeonardo, c. 1490The Last SupperLeonardo, 1495 to 1498Salvator MundiLeonardo, c. 1500: the one nobody can see

Leonardo painted fewer than twenty pictures that survive. We have written about most of them: Lady with an Ermine, The Last Supper, Virgin of the Rocks, Salvator Mundi, and the rest in our guide to Leonardo da Vinci.

Where is the original?

In the Louvre, Paris, in the Salle des États, behind glass, with its own queue. It is oil on poplar panel and it is small: 77 by 53 centimetres, the size of a large book, which surprises almost everyone who sees it for the first time. The Louvre has announced plans to give it a room of its own by the early 2030s. Until then you see it from several metres away over a hundred phones.

That is one reason a reproduction of this painting makes more sense than of almost any other: at home you can stand a foot from it, which nobody has done in the Louvre since 1956. Our hand-painted reproduction of the Mona Lisa is painted in oil on canvas from the Louvre original, at the original size or larger, with the sfumato built up in glazes the way Leonardo built it. We paint her as she is, under the varnish, unless you ask for the Prado's colours. A dark wood or gilt frame, at eye level, in a room where you will pass her every day. The smile still works.

All of Leonardo, from the Annunciation to Saint John, in our Leonardo da Vinci collection, and the wider Renaissance archive.