Mona Lisa 1519

You’ve definitely seen this one before! The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the most recognised painting in the history of art. The Italian polymath (meaning a person with knowledge of many subjects, from art and philosophy to science and mathematics) Leonardo was born outside the town of Vinci near Florence in 1452. Despite less than 25 of his paintings surviving to the present day, Leonardo is often credited as the most iconic artist of all time. His works embody the High Renaissance, a time of cultural flourishing and innovation that revolutionised artistic techniques and conventions. Painted in oil on poplar wood, the identity of the woman in this iconic portrait remains contested. It is now thought to depict Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco del Gicondo. Dressed in a dark silk dress and translucent black veil, the woman gazes directly out of the canvas to interact with the viewer. Her famous half-smile, resulting from the application of the sfumato technique (gentle shading to create a soft blur between colours), is enigmatic. The edges of her lips subtly recede, allowing her expression to be interpreted as both pleasant and melancholic. How do you interpret her emotions? Unusually for a portrait, Leonardo paints Mona Lisa to a mysterious landscape exterior rather than a flat studio background. The location of this distant landscape, with its river, valleys, and bridge, is mysterious. Is the space imaginary, or based on a real location? Some scholars argue that the landscape may represent Lecco, a region of northern Italy. But why is this portrait so iconic? The key to this answer lies in the life of the painting centuries after it was created. Mona Lisa was catapulted into the public eye after it was stolen from the Louvre in August 1911 by the Italian decorator Vincenzo Peruggia. Peruggia was a short-term workman in the vast museum, employed to clean and reframe paintings. This gave him an insider insight into the construction of the frame of the Mona Lisa, which he used to remove the frame. He then obscured the painting by wrapping it in a white smock. Peruggia was arrested in December 1913, and the painting was returned to the museum where it was met with a crowd of almost 30,000 eager viewers. Around 10 million people visit the Louvre per year, with around 80% believed to make the journey solely to briefly glimpse the Mona Lisa. At the end of January 2025, the French President Emmanuel Macron announced that the painting will be transferred to a new space in the museum, where visitors will be charged separately to see it. With its use of accurate perspective, sfumato, and realism, the painting embodies the technical advancements of the Renaissance. This, alongside its mysterious elements and striking history of theft, might explain why Mona Lisa has long been considered a timeless masterpiece of Western art. What do you think? Is the painting’s masterpiece status and world renown justified? Editor: Lucy Jude Grantham