Mona Lisa

Who was the Mona Lisa?

She was a real woman, and we know her name: Lisa Gherardini, born in Florence in 1479. At fifteen she married Francesco del Giocondo, a silk merchant much older than her, and she went on to raise a large family in a house not far from the centre of the city. In 1503, when she was twenty-four, her husband asked Leonardo da Vinci to paint her portrait.

We know the year because of a note in the margin of a book. In October 1503 a Florentine official, Agostino Vespucci, wrote beside a passage on the ancient painter Apelles that Leonardo was working on a head of Lisa del Giocondo. The note was only found in 2005, and it settled a question people had argued about for centuries.

Her two names come from the same place. In Italian she is La Gioconda, which is her married surname and also means "the cheerful one". In English she is the Mona Lisa, from monna, a short form of madonna, "my lady". So the title just means Lady Lisa.

Francesco never received the painting. Leonardo kept working on it for years, carried it with him to Rome and then to France, and still had it when he died at Amboise in 1519. A commission for a merchant's wife became the picture he could not let go of.

Why does her smile seem to change?

Look closely at the corners of her mouth. There is no line there. Leonardo built the face from many layers of very thin, translucent paint, so the lips do not end at an edge. They fade into shadow. He called the technique sfumato, from the Italian word for smoke, and this painting is the best-known example of it.

The smile seems to change because of how our eyes work. When you look straight at her mouth, the sharp centre of your vision reads those soft shadows as flat, and the smile almost disappears. When you look at her eyes instead, the mouth falls into the blurrier edge of your vision, where the shadows read as an upturn, and the smile comes back. She smiles most when you are not looking at her lips.

What you can see, and what is interpretation: the softened corners of the mouth are plainly visible. The explanation from peripheral vision comes from modern studies of perception. Whether Leonardo planned the effect is unknown, although his notebooks show he studied light, shadow and the eye in great detail.

The eyes do the rest. They seem to follow you across the room, and with no eyebrows or lashes there is nothing to soften her gaze. Were the eyebrows ever there? Giorgio Vasari, writing in 1550, praised them as perfectly natural, but he never saw the painting himself. In 2007 the French engineer Pascal Cotte scanned the panel at very high resolution and reported the trace of one painted hair above the left eye. The most likely explanation is that Leonardo painted fine brows and they were lost to cleaning or wear over the centuries.

Why was her pose so new?

Most Italian portraits of women before 1500 showed the sitter in strict profile, like a head on a coin. Leonardo turned Lisa three-quarters toward us, let her look straight out of the picture, and brought her down to the waist so that her folded hands rest in the foreground on the arm of a chair.

That arrangement feels normal today because almost everyone copied it. Raphael sketched the pose within a few years of seeing it, and it became the standard format for portraits across Europe. Part of the reason the Mona Lisa looks so familiar is that it is the model for so many portraits that came after it.

Her clothes are plain: a dark dress with gathered fabric at the neckline, a fine transparent veil over her hair, and no jewellery at all. For the portrait of a prosperous merchant's wife this is surprisingly simple. Some historians link the veil to the dress women wore during pregnancy or just after childbirth, which would fit the birth of her son in 1502. Others see it as simple, fashionable dress. Either way, nothing in the picture pulls attention away from her face and hands.

What is in the landscape behind her?

Behind her is a wild, empty landscape. On the right, a river winds under a stone bridge toward rocky peaks. On the left, a road curls between rocks toward a lake. There are no people and no buildings apart from that bridge.

The two sides do not quite line up. The horizon on the left is lower than the one on the right, so she can seem slightly taller when you look at one side of her face and slightly shorter when you look at the other. It is one more small thing that keeps the picture from settling.

The fading blue in the distance is what Leonardo called aerial perspective: faraway things look paler and bluer because of the air in between. His notebooks are full of studies of rivers, rocks and erosion, and this background looks like one of them. People have tried to match it to real places in Tuscany and elsewhere, but no single location has been proven. It is best read as an imagined landscape built from things he had studied.

How did it become the most famous painting in the world?

After Leonardo died in France, the painting passed to King François I, who had invited him there in his last years. For almost three hundred years it belonged to the kings of France, at Fontainebleau and then at Versailles. After the Revolution it went to the new Louvre museum. Napoleon borrowed it for his bedroom in the Tuileries Palace from 1800 to 1804 before it went back.

For most of that time it was admired, but it was not yet the most famous painting in the world. The nineteenth century made it mysterious. In 1873 the English critic Walter Pater wrote that she was older than the rocks among which she sits, and poets and novelists followed his lead. Then, in 1911, it disappeared.

On Monday 21 August 1911, when the Louvre was closed, a former museum worker named Vincenzo Peruggia walked out with it hidden under his clothes. He was an Italian decorator who had helped fit protective glass to paintings in the museum, so he knew the building and blended in with the staff. Nobody noticed the painting was missing until the next day, when a visiting artist asked where it was.

The theft made headlines around the world. For weeks crowds queued to stare at the empty wall. The police questioned the young Pablo Picasso and briefly jailed the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, both of whom were innocent. The painting stayed hidden in Peruggia's room in Paris for more than two years. In December 1913 he took it to Florence and offered it to an art dealer, saying he wanted to return it to Italy. The dealer called the police. After an exhibition in Italy, the Mona Lisa returned to the Louvre in January 1914, and by then everyone knew her face.

Why is the Mona Lisa behind glass?

Fame made her a target. In 1956 she was attacked twice: once with acid, which damaged the lower part of the painting, and once with a thrown stone that chipped the paint near her left elbow. Since then she has been kept behind protective glass. Since 2005 she has hung in the Louvre's largest gallery, the Salle des États, in a climate-controlled, bulletproof case. Later attacks have all hit the glass: a teacup in 2009, a smear of cake in 2022, and soup in 2024.

The painting is also fragile in itself. It is painted on a thin panel of poplar wood, not canvas, and the wood has warped over time. A crack runs down from the top edge. The old varnish has turned yellow, which is why the sky looks greenish and the skin looks warm and golden. The Louvre has never risked a full cleaning.

For an idea of the original colours, look at Madrid. In 2012 the Prado Museum cleaned its own copy of the Mona Lisa and found a bright landscape under later black overpaint. Technical study showed that it was painted in Leonardo's workshop, probably by one of his pupils, at the same time as the original and following the same changes. It shows a blue sky, red sleeves and fresh skin tones, which is likely close to how the Louvre painting first looked.

What does the Mona Lisa mean?

There is no secret code. Theories that she is Leonardo in disguise, or his mother, or a hidden message have no support in the documents. The records point to a straightforward answer: a portrait of a Florentine woman that its painter kept refining for the rest of his life.

Its importance is what it changed. Before Leonardo, a portrait mostly recorded who someone was: their face, their rank, their wealth. The Mona Lisa tries to show a person thinking. The soft smile, the steady eyes, the uneven horizon and the shifting landscape all stop you from reading her in one glance, and that is why people keep looking.

Over the twentieth century she also became a symbol of art itself. Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on a postcard of her in 1919, Andy Warhol repeated her face thirty times in 1963, and today she appears on everything from mugs to advertisements. None of that is in the painting, but it is part of why almost everyone recognises her.

Lady with an ErmineLeonardo, c. 1490The Last SupperLeonardo, 1495 to 1498Salvator MundiLeonardo, c. 1500

Fewer than twenty paintings by Leonardo survive, and 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 Mona Lisa?

The original is in the Louvre in Paris, in the Salle des États, behind glass. It is oil on a poplar panel and it is smaller than most people expect: 77 by 53 centimetres, about the size of a large book. Visitors usually see it from several metres away, over a crowd of raised phones. The Louvre has announced plans to give it a room of its own in the coming years.

That distance is one reason a reproduction makes sense for this painting in particular. At home you can stand close enough to see the soft edges of the smile, which is impossible in the Louvre. Our hand-painted Mona Lisa reproduction is painted in oil on canvas from the Louvre original, at the original size or larger, with the sfumato built up in thin layers the way Leonardo built it. We paint her as she looks today, warm varnish and all, unless you ask for the brighter colours of the Prado copy.

See all of Leonardo's work in our Leonardo da Vinci collection, and explore the wider Renaissance collection.