Mona Lisa, c. 1503
Leonardo da Vinci
Oil paint, poplar panel, wood · 79.4 x 53.4 cm
The most-stared-at smile in art history, still ambiguous after five centuries.
Leonardo began it around 1503 and never handed it over, carrying the panel with him to France and still working on it years later. The sitter is generally taken to be Lisa Gherardini, a Florentine silk merchant's wife. What made it radical was not the smile but the pose: turned toward the viewer, hands resting, meeting the eye of whoever stands in front of it.
What you're looking at
Leonardo built the face without a single outline. The technique is sfumato — pigment laid in glazes thin enough that the passage from light to shadow has no edge anywhere, which is why the corners of the mouth and the eyes seem to alter while you watch them. She has no eyebrows and no lashes. The landscape behind her does not line up either: the horizon on the right sits noticeably higher than the one on the left, so the two halves never resolve into one place. At 4K the craquelure across the poplar panel is visible as a fine web over the whole surface, which most reproductions lose entirely.
On a Frame TV
A tall portrait, roughly 2:3. The clean 3840 x 2160 crop cannot hold it without losing either the hands or the top of the head, so use the gallery-matted file, which sets the whole panel inside a mat and lets the Frame read as a hung picture rather than a cropped one. The palette is dark, warm and low in contrast: it holds a dim room well and washes out badly on a wall that gets direct sun.
Department of Paintings of the Louvre · Visit it in Paris →
- 4K master file (3840px+)
- Samsung Frame TV–ready crop
- Phone wallpaper crop
- Printable art card
Public domain · one .zip, no sign-up
The theft that made the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world →
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