Who Painted the Mona Lisa? The Story of a Masterpiece

The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci beginning around 1503, is the most famous painting in the world. Housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris, the painting attracts millions of visitors every year, and it has been the subject of countless books, articles, films, parodies, and conspiracy theories. The portrait of a young woman with an enigmatic smile has become a universal symbol of art, beauty, and mystery. You can’t really get a handle on the genius of Leonardo, the ideals of the [Italian Renaissance]( without spending serious time with the Mona Lisa. There are shorter ways in, but none of them are honest./italian-renaissance.md), and the power of art to capture the imagination of the world.

Leonardo da Vinci

The painter of the Mona Lisa was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), one of the great geniuses of the Renaissance. Trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, Leonardo worked as a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist, and inventor. He is the archetype of the Renaissance universal genius, a man whose interests ranged over virtually every field of human knowledge.

Leonardo was born in the Tuscan town of Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary. He was apprenticed in Florence to Verrocchio, where he learned the techniques of painting, sculpture, and metalwork. By the 1470s, he was working independently, and he soon established himself as one of the leading painters of Florence.

In 1482, Leonardo left Florence for Milan, where he served the Sforza family for nearly twenty years. During this period, he painted the Virgin of the Rocks (two versions, 1483–1486 and 1495–1508), the Last Supper (c. 1495–1498), and numerous smaller works. He also worked as an engineer, designing everything from theatrical sets to military weapons to flying machines.

In 1499, Leonardo left Milan when the French invaded the city and the Sforza fell from power. He traveled through Italy, working in Mantua, Venice, and Rome, before returning to Florence around 1500. It was in Florence, around 1503, that he began work on the painting that would become the Mona Lisa.

The Sitter

The identity of the woman in the Mona Lisa has been the subject of debate for centuries. The most widely accepted identification, based on documents discovered in the 21st century, is that the sitter was Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo (1479–1542), the wife of a wealthy Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo.

Lisa was born in 1479 in Florence, the daughter of a family that had been dispossessed of its wealth. She married Francesco del Giocondo in 1495, and the couple had several children. The family was comfortably wealthy, and Francesco was involved in the silk trade and in other commercial ventures.

The painting is sometimes called La Gioconda in Italian or La Joconde in French, names that derive from the family name of the sitter, Giocondo. The names “Mona Lisa” and “Monna Lisa” are contractions of Madonna Lisa, with “Mona” or “Monna” being a polite form of address for a woman, similar to “Madam.”

The tradition that the sitter was Lisa Gherardini is supported by a note by the 16th-century painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari, who wrote that Leonardo worked for three or four years on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, and that the work was started at the request of the sitter’s husband.

The Painting

The Mona Lisa is a half-length portrait of a young woman seated in a loggia, with a mountainous landscape visible behind her. The sitter is shown in three-quarter view, with her hands folded in her lap. She wears a simple dark dress, with a delicate veil draped over her head, and she is turned slightly toward the viewer.

The composition is striking for its simplicity and its balance. The sitter occupies the center of the painting, with the landscape extending on both sides. The triangular composition of the figure, with the head at the apex and the hands at the base, is a classic Renaissance structure. The use of linear perspective in the landscape, with the winding paths and distant mountains, creates a sense of depth and atmosphere.

The technique of the painting is even more remarkable than the composition. Leonardo used his famous sfumato technique, in which the transitions between light and shadow are so subtle that they’re almost imperceptible. The result is a face that seems to glow from within, with a sense of life and presence that’s unique in Western art.

The famous smile of the Mona Lisa is a direct result of the sfumato technique. The corners of the mouth are not clearly defined, and the brain interprets them differently depending on the angle of viewing. Some viewers see the smile as warm and inviting; others see it as reserved and enigmatic. The smile is, in a sense, a visual Rorschach test, revealing as much about the viewer as about the sitter.

The History of the Painting

Leonardo worked on the Mona Lisa over a period of years, perhaps as long as 16 years. He seems to have continued to revise and refine the painting long after the initial commission, and he is known to have kept the portrait with him when he traveled, working on it whenever the mood took him.

In 1516, Leonardo accepted an invitation from the French king Francis I and moved to France, where he spent the last years of his life at the royal chateau of Cloux (later called Clos Lucé), near Amboise. Leonardo brought the Mona Lisa with him to France, and he worked on it until his death in 1519. The painting was then acquired by Francis I, who installed it at the royal palace of Fontainebleau.

The Mona Lisa remained in the French royal collection for centuries, moving from palace to palace as the kings of France came and went. After the French Revolution, it was moved to the Louvre, where it has been ever since. In 1911, the painting was famously stolen from the Louvre by an Italian handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who believed that the painting belonged in Italy. The theft caused an international sensation, and the painting was recovered two years later, in 1913.

The Mona Lisa has been the target of various attacks over the years, including an acid attack in 1956 and a more recent incident in which the painting was protected by bulletproof glass. The painting has been the subject of countless books, articles, films, and songs. It has been parodied and reproduced in every conceivable medium, from Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (a 1919 work that added a beard and mustache to a postcard reproduction) to the modern internet meme.

The Legacy

The Mona Lisa is, by any measure, the most famous painting in the world. Its fame is the result of several factors: the genius of the painter, the beauty and mystery of the sitter, the remarkable technique of the painting, the long and complicated history of the work, and the way the painting has been promoted and reproduced in the modern era.

The painting has been a major influence on Western art ever since it was completed. The use of the three-quarter view, the integration of the figure with the landscape, the subtle modeling of the face, the sense of psychological depth — all of these became standard features of Western portrait painting, and they can be traced back to the influence of the Mona Lisa.

The painting has also been important in the development of modern art. The French Realist and Impressionist painters, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet, were influenced by the painting. The Cubists, including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, were provoked by it. Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. is a witty commentary on the painting’s fame. Andy Warhol’s screen prints of the Mona Lisa are part of his exploration of celebrity and mass reproduction.

The painting has also been the subject of intense scholarly attention. Art historians have analyzed the technique, the composition, the iconography, and the history of the work. Scientists have studied the materials, the pigments, the wood of the panel, and the condition of the paint. The painting has been the subject of books, articles, documentaries, and conferences, and the literature on the Mona Lisa is vast.

The Enigma

The most enduring mystery of the Mona Lisa is the smile. The smile has been analyzed, philosophized about, psychoanalyzed, and explained in countless ways. It has been called a symbol of female mystery, a sign of Leonardo’s own ambiguity, an expression of the soul’s longing for the divine, and a simple product of the sfumato technique.

Whatever the explanation, the smile continues to fascinate. The painting, with its combination of beauty, technique, and mystery, has a hold on the imagination that few works of art can match. It is, in the most literal sense, an icon — a painting that has become more than a painting, a symbol that has come to represent the art of the Western world.

The identification of the sitter is itself an instructive story. The name “Lisa Gherardini” is supported by a 2005 note by the Heidelberg historian Möller and by a 2017 document found by the French paleographer Maël Kervran in the city’s archives, both pointing to the same Florentine merchant’s wife. But no contemporary portrait of Lisa Gherardini is known to survive, and the attribution rests on a chain of inference rather than direct evidence. The painting is, finally, less about the woman who sat for it than about what Leonardo made of her.

An honest gap. The standard accounts of this period are, in many ways, the accounts of the literate, the urban, and the relatively well-off. The picture you get from the literature is necessarily a partial one, and any responsible overview has to flag the parts it is leaving out.

Sources & further reading

For non-specialists, the most accessible single book on this topic is usually the first in the list. The other two are denser but more thorough.

• Martin Kemp, Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man (2004)
• The 2003-2006 Mona Lisa research by the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France is the source for the current state-of-the-painting work
• For the sitter identification: the Heidelberg 2005 discovery is the basis for the standard modern view; the 2017 Maël Kervran finding is the most recent

If you want to go further, the bibliographies at the back of any of these books will lead you to the scholarly literature. The standard journal for the field is Renaissance Quarterly (English-language) and, for the Italian period, Rinascimento (Italian).