Some people are disappointed when they first
see the most famous painting in the world. At first glance it doesn't have the wow
factor that other paintings in the Louvre have. It lacks drama. But if we can ignore
the hundreds of people that surround her, if we can turn down the volume and
just push the off button for a second. What we actually see is a
quiet - contemplative painting. The greatest psychological portrait ever painted.
A portrait so ahead of its time that centuries later, we are still trying to figure it out. The
Mona Lisa however is not just the most famous painting in the world, it is also the source
of innumerable myths legends and supposition. In 1516, the 22 year old french king Francis
the first offered leonardo a job: Court painter Engineer and Architect to the king. Leonardo, now in
his sixties, moved to the chateau D'Amboise in France and never went back to italy. The young king
and Leonardo would form a deep friendship and the artist was given the king's royal summer
home Close Lucé where he lived for the last three years of his life - doing what he loved best,
learning and creating. He worked on architectural plans for a royal residence in central France,
and one of his masterpieces of this period is the double helix stairway at Chambord. He brought
dozens of notebooks like these with him to France, but he also brought the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo knew how important it was, he knew it was a masterpiece - and he would continue
to work on the painting until his death in 1519. Mona Lisa is the end product of the
greatest inquisitive mind in history. Leonardo anticipated theories by both Galileo and
Newton. His anatomical drawings are unparalleled as are his botanical studies. His treatise on painting
explored radical new ideas - as we shall see. He designed war machines, he used fossils
to disprove biblical accounts of the flood, and he had the skill to open the still-beating
heart of a pig to explain how ventricles work. He was a man for whom science and art are
complementary rather than distinct disciplines. He believed that ideas formulated in one
realm could - and should, inform the other. He would take all his scientific
knowledge and apply it to the Mona Lisa, a portrait of an ordinary woman
that he would transform into a myth. Often called "the first art historian"
Giorgio Vasari published his book about the Renaissance artists in 1550, and in it, he
wrote the very first account of the painting: "Leonardo undertook to execute for Francesco
del Giacondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa - his wife" There has always been a dispute about Mona Lisa's
true identity. But in 2005 a German scholar found a handwritten comment in the margins of a 15th
century book in Heidelberg university's library. It was dated october 1503 and was by Agostini
Vespucci, the secretary of Nicolo Machiavelli, the writer of "The Prince" and a good friend
of Leonardo. Vespucci notes that "Leonardo was painting a portrait of Lisa del Giacondo".
This is an eyewitness account that firmly establishes not only the identity of Mona Lisa but also the
date when leonardo was working on the portrait. Lisa Gherardini married Francesco del
Giacondo in 1495. She was 15 and he was 30. Francesco was a nouveau riche silk merchant.
And Lisa was from an old noble family - with no money. She had five children with him and lived
a long, and it seems happy life. One of the great mysteries is why Leonardo, who was used to
painting for royalty and Popes, painted the wife of a bourgeois merchant? Family connections - Leonardo's
father Ser Pierro da Vinci was Francesco's lawyer, and it was probably pressure from his father that
made Leonardo take on such a small commission. But i think Leonardo painted her because he wanted
to paint a relatively ordinary woman, to try out new ideas without the fear of interference.
It gave him the unusual opportunity to put all he knew about science and the poetry of painting into
the commission. Mona lisa would become a vehicle for all that he knew. This high resolution scan
taken by art technician Pascal Cotte in 2004, revealed that there is a similar sketch underneath,
reconstructed here as to how it might look. The pose looks the same, and it is quite possible
that this is the face of the real Mona Lisa. Leonardo worked on the painting for 16 years.
Knowing that it is Lisa del Giacondo gives us more information to work with. One example is, because
we have Francesco's will, we know that Lisa owned a large amount of jewelry, that is not shown in the
painting and that - as we shall see - is significant. We can be sure that the mona lisa IS
Lisa del Giocondo from Florence. To say that aspects of the Mona Lisa are just
"happy accidents" that he just painted and "hoped for the best" is to deny all the evidence of a
lifetime spent experimenting with techniques, dissecting human bodies, and collecting scientific
and geological data. For a painting with such a huge impact it is surprisingly small at
77 by 53 centimeters or 30 inches by 21 For Mona Lisa Leonardo used a thin grain of
poplar tree and applied an undercoat of lead white, rather than just a mix of chalk and pigment.
He wanted a reflective base. Leonardo painted with semi-transparent glazes that had a very small
amount of pigment mixed with the oil, so how dark you wanted your glaze to be, depends on how
much pigment you use. He used more like a "wash", which he applied thin - layer by layer. Here you
can see two colours of contrast - light and dark. When you apply thin glaze over both of them
you can see it starts to unify the contrast but also brings depth and luminosity. The lead white
undercoat reflects the light back through the glazes, giving the picture more depth and
in essence, lighting Mona Lisa from within. As we move around the painting
that light shifts around. This microscopic cross section is
taken from another Leonardo painting. The first layer is the lead white ground.
Layer two is known as "Imprimatura". This layer gives the painting a transparent toned ground which will
allow light falling onto the painting to reflect through the paint layers. The imprimatura
became widely used during the Renaissance. Then we have a dark glaze - and that is followed
by various layers of different coloured glazes. Scientific analysis shows us that Leonardo used
up to 30 different layers of painted glaze on the Mona Lisa, applied so thinly that it only totals
40 micrometers of paint! That's half the width of a human hair. All of these layers applied
differently, with varying amounts of pigments refract the light in unique ways. He used tiny,
almost invisible brush strokes applied super slowly over months - or in Mona Lisa's case years.
By contrast on her skin the brush strokes were applied in an irregular way - and that makes
the grain of the skin look more lifelike. He also used the "Verdaccio" technique. We
see it here on one of his unfinished works. He would use green as a base color to produce
nuanced flesh tones. If you look down at your own hands there is a surprising amount of
green showing through the skin. This infrared image taken in 2004 by the Louvre, tells
us a lot about his techniques and use of paint. We know the Mona Lisa was meticulously created - nothing was
accidental. A technique he pioneered is "Chiaroscuro", where he contrasts prominent shades of light and
dark to create the illusion of three-dimensional forms. Along with this, Leonardo used the "Sfumato"
technique, which he is credited as inventing. Sfumato means "smokey" and it is a blending technique
for softening the transition between colours. To make sure there are no sharp, unnatural
lines. The soft blending creates an ambiguous mood, particularly around the corners of the mouth
and the corners of the eyes. This means there are no hard edges anywhere on the Mona Lisa. They
are all blended in, to form an ambiguous image. You can see how the smile ends at each corner -
it simply tails away unresolved and open-ended. We can demonstrate this with an X-ray.
If we put Raphael and Leonardo side by side, an X-ray shows us that Raphael used clearly
defined edges whereas Leonardo's figure disappears, as he uses none. As Leonardo wrote: "The eye never knows the edge of any body". This makes her facial expression "blurry" or "fuzzy",
so that when we look at her, we perceive the expression in different ways. THIS brings her to
life. Leonardo understood light as well as optics. The man who had worked out the reflection of light
from the Earth to the Moon, had also studied how ratios of light and shade hit the face according
to the angle of impact. And this knowledge combined with the Sfumato, the Chiaroscuro,
and the glazes which affect light refraction, means she constantly changes - through optical and
perceptual illusion. In essence these techniques take painting one stage further. It allows us
to look at a painting the way our eyes work. It allows "depth of field" never seen in a painting
before. The best way to see how incredibly skilled Leonardo was, is by looking at Mona Lisa's
gossamer thin veil. Look at it for a bit. On her forehead we can see the dark edges of the
silk veil, but the light of her skin shines through the translucent material. But where the veil
crosses the sky, it becomes darker and more visible. He would have painted the background first and
then used a transparent glaze to paint the veil over it. His representational skill is spectacular.
But his powers of observation are uncanny. Actually let's start with what she's NOT wearing.
When was the last time you employed a professional photographer? The answer is usually: A wedding or
a prom. What were you wearing in your prom photo? Your best clothes? Your best jewellery? Of course!
Being painted by one of the most celebrated and in demand painters of the day, is your chance
to really "show off" - and yet Mona Lisa is stripped of all the usual high status "symbols". Her clothes
are nothing special, they tell us nothing. Instead of the usual flamboyant, expensive outfits we see
in commissioned portraits, hers are pretty simple for a wealthy woman. Along with the complete lack
of jewellery and the simple hair, they serve one purpose - and one purpose only. Leonardo made sure we
would not be distracted from the face of Mona Lisa. Let's talk about her eyebrows, or lack
thereof. It's not down to "fashion". She almost certainly once had them, but over
time with cleaning and restoration, the most delicate parts of the painting - her
eyebrows and eyelashes - have disappeared. Copies of the painting produced by Leonardo's own
studio, are a good source of information on how she looked in 1503. And here's why. Leonardo had a team of
about six assistants and apprentices. Workshops were training grounds for young
artists to learn their craft over several years. And they begin by copying the masters
works. It's how Leonardo, Michelangelo and other great artists learnt. By copying
masters - then they developed their own style. Multi-spectral analysis in 2004 by art
technician Pascal Cotte, revealed that Leonardo used a preparatory sketch or a "Cartoon" to
create the Mona Lisa, using the "Spolvaro" technique, a similar idea to tracing. It is a technique that
Renaissance artists would use to make lucrative copies of their paintings from an original drawing,
as well as copies for their students to work on. Leonardo used the Spolvaro technique to transfer
his sketches of the Mona Lisa to a wooden panel. More than once. With this technique, holes are
pricked along the outline of an original drawing known as a "Cartoon" and then dusted with charcoal
to produce an outline ready for painting. The analysis shows faint
traces of the charcoal drawing. It is most obvious on her hands where the scan shows us the charcoal pinpricks used
to trace the drawing onto the wood. The same sketch would have been used as a base for
his apprentice's copies. From these scans we also know that as Leonardo made changes to his painting,
the pupil made the same changes to his copy. The logical conclusion is that the Prado Mona
Lisa was painted by an apprentice - side by side with Leonardo - using the same pigments and
the same adjustments. This copy was not really considered important until it was restored in
2012, and the original background was revealed. Scientific examination tells us it
was painted by someone working in Leonardo's studio as an apprentice - and
therefore under Leonardo's supervision. By use of infrared radiography we know it is
likely that it was created simultaneously in the same studio. The Prado copy doesn't have the
mystery of Leonardo's achingly beautiful painting, this is something that cannot be copied. But the
excellent state of conservation of the copy gives us unique insights into the original painting,
which has become cracked and yellowed with age. If we take the copy and overlay the two, we get
some idea of what the Mona Lisa might look like IF it were possible to restore her. Now we see the
"rosy lips" described by Vasari in 1550, and the "thin eyebrows and eyelashes" he wrote about. Suggesting
that indeed the Mona Lisa once had eyebrows. Leonardo uses the classic "pyramid shape"
composition that was introduced during the Renaissance. It is an important change
from the paintings of the 15th century. The structure provides stability, but
more importantly it provides a clear central focus, and directs your gaze. In Mona
Lisa's case, it is pulling us into her face. Leonardo pioneered the use of the "three-quarter
length pose" rather than producing a full length portrait or the standard profile used at
the time. But why? Because he completely fills the frame with his subject, making the painting
more intimate and cutting down on distractions. This three-quarter length pose becomes
the norm in italy for 400 years. Today we look at Mona Lisa's
pose and it seems fairly "normal". But for its day it was groundbreaking. Previously subjects were stiff and upright,
aristocratic. But Mona Lisa is relaxed, her hands are resting gently on the arm of her chair, as
she turns towards us. Almost as if it's a "snapshot". Mona Lisa is also rather content and self-assured,
which was more how aristocratic men were portrayed, not women. The standard renaissance portraits
of women were in profile and they didn't smile. We are looking directly into her eyes and
she is looking directly at us. Women in paintings just didn't do that. They didn't
look boldly and directly at the viewer. The entire painting deviated from the
traditional way women were painted in I taly. Portraits were usually drawn with an open sky as
the background - a monotone background - or a simple room. Mona lisa is in front of a complicated
landscape that only existed in Leonardo's imagination. Paintings in this period had both
the subject and the background in sharp focus. Whereas the background of the Mona Lisa is hyper-
realistic and is created using an illusion of depth or recession. This is "aerial perspective".
Leonardo was the first to write about it, and if he didn't invent it, then he certainly
perfected it. Behind Mona Lisa, the vast landscape proceeds to distant icy mountains. A path and a
bridge are the only indication of human presence. The curves of her hair and clothing reflect
the rolling valleys and rivers behind her, connecting humanity and nature. Microcosm
and macrocosm, a favourite theme of Leonardo's. He used his pioneering studies of hydrodynamics,
not only to explain how an aortic valve closed, but also to explain the weight, volume and
direction of the curls of hair. The twist of the earth parallels her torso. Look at the river
on the right. It flows into the scarf over her left shoulder and we see that she is connected with the
earth. Even the background is informed by science. This time of "sedimentary layers" he studied in
the Apennines. Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo guessed, through his studies of rocks and fossils,
that the world is far older than Genesis claims. His knowledge of geology ensures that there are
no accidents in his plotting of the background. And yet the horizon of the landscape does not
quite line up behind the figure. It is very slightly "skewed", while her shoulders are painted
level. This is a typical Leonardo visual trick that gives an illusion of movement. Leonardo knew that
our brains would struggle with this conflicting visual information: We know that the horizon should
line up so we read it as level. This causes us to interpret the shoulders as being on a slant -
which they are not. As our brain corrects this, it creates an illusion of movement,
as if the figure "shuffles" a bit in its frame. Lisa's eyes are in fact looking to her left,
but step back and she is looking directly at us. If your screen is big enough, move to
the right and left. Her eyes follow you. This effect only works with two-dimensional images,
since the elements of perspective and light and shadow are fixed and don't change. They look the
same, no matter from what angle you are standing. It is a real phenomenon, but
not unique to this painting. Then there is the smile that
pulls everything together. Before, during and long after the Renaissance,
artists did not paint their subjects smiling. When you think about it, portraits are generally
very serious. It's easy enough to smile for a few minutes, but not for the weeks if
not months it takes to paint a portrait. And yet despite the scarcity of a smile in
paintings, Leonardo almost makes it his signature. It is said that Leonardo kept Lisa
happy by employing musicians and jesters. Look at her for a while.
Really look into her eyes. First she is smiling and then she is not. The smile "comes and goes" as we scan around
the face. When we look away the smile lingers. When Leonardo was perfecting Lisa's smile,
he was spending his nights in the morgue peeling the flesh off cadavers and exposing
the muscles and nerves underneath. He became fascinated by "how a smile works" and analysed every
possible movement of each part of the face. Working out the origins of every nerve which controls the
facial muscles. Here we see two partially dissected faces in profile. They show the muscles which
control the lips and other elements of expression. In the one on the left, Leonardo has removed
part of the jawbone to expose the muscle which pulls back the angle of the mouth,
and flattens the cheek - as a smile begins to form. Leonardo reveals the actual mechanisms that
transmit emotions into facial expressions. Extraordinary. Here are puckered lips, pouting lips,
the muscles that move the mouth. Then almost forgotten at the top of this page is a
simple drawing of a gentle smile sketched lightly in black chalk. Even though the fine lines at the
end of the mouth turn down slightly, the feeling is that the lips are smiling. This simple anatomical
drawing is the beginning of Mona Lisa smile. Astonishingly Leonardo had studied the
11th century Islamic physicist Al-Hazen, whose pioneering theories on the psychology of
visual perception inspired his own work on optics. Leonardo knew from his optic studies, that light
rays do not come to a single point in the eye, but instead hit the whole area of the retina -
and this is the key to her enigmatic smile. "Her expression changes as you look at this painting..." In the year 2000, Dr. Margaret Livingston,
a Harvard neuroscientist discovered that Mona Lisa's smile changes because
of how the human visual system is designed. She explains that the human eye has
two distinct regions for seeing the world: A central area called the "Fovea" is where people
see colours, read fine print and pick out details. And the peripheral area surrounding the Fovea is where
people see black and white, motion and shadows. When we look at a face, we spend most
of the time focused on the other person's eyes using central vision. So when a person's
center of gaze is on Mona Lisa's eyes, the less accurate peripheral vision, is on her
mouth - and because peripheral vision is not interested in "specific details", it also picks up
shadows from Mona Lisa's cheekbones. This is where both his Sfumato and Chiaroscuro techniques come
into their own. Keep looking directly into her eyes. The shadows and tones suggest the curvature of
a smile, but when your eyes go directly to Mona Lisa's mouth, your central vision doesn't see the
shadows and she isn't smiling - smirking at best. You can prove this theory quite simply by
scanning back and forth between her eyes and her lips, and her expression changes. That is not
your imagination it is all to do with how we "see", not how we "think". The genius of Leonardo,
is that he understood this 500 years ago! Some claim that the Mona Lisa is only well known
because she was once stolen. This is nonsense. As previously noted, Mona Lisa was seen as a
great painting - right from the start. in 1797 she was moved to the Louvre where Napoleon
saw her and decided he "had to have her". So in 1800, he had her moved to his
private bedroom in the Tuilleries. Already the Mona Lisa was a "masterpiece"
fit for Europe's greatest leader. In 1825, the first engravings of Mona Lisa
were made - and sold - adding to her popularity. And in 1854 the first photograph was taken of her.
Charles Baudelaire, George Sand and Jules Verne were amongst many to write about her. And in
1867, the art critic Theophile Gautier published a popular article "praising her mysterious smile and
her eyes that hid secrets". While Baedeker guidebooks told tourists as early as the 1870s that she was
"the most celebrated work of Leonardo in the Louvre". She was being mass produced
and written about extensively. Mona Lisa was already on her way to
becoming known worldwide. And then she was stolen. On the 21st of august 1911, Vincenzo Perugia, a petty
criminal, stole the Mona Lisa and took her to Italy. It was not until the next afternoon that
anyone realized the painting had been stolen, fuelling the idea that nobody cared - but the truth
(as always) was simpler. The Louvre was cataloguing its collection and museum staff believed that
she had been removed to be photographed. Suspects, including Picasso who was living in Paris
at the time, were rounded up - but no answers were found. In fact the Mona Lisa was
missing for over two years, during which people lined up around the block
to look at the empty space where she once was. Perugia was eventually arrested and the Mona Lisa
was recovered. But why did he steal the Mona Lisa rather than any of the other paintings? The answer
(again) is simple. Because it was the most well-known. So for sure her fame grew enormously after
she was stolen - but it did not begin in 1911. Something else to consider is that it was only by
this time that photography was becoming commonplace. Suddenly thanks to the press, millions of
people who might not have seen it in person, might never have even heard of it, soon
became "experts" on Leonardo's stolen painting. What really cemented her fame
was her 1963 visit to the U.S. This made global headlines, and television brought
the Mona Lisa into the living room of billions. "...share the great moment when the 450 year old
masterpiece makes its first public appearance here..." In the same year, Andy Warhol
reflected on her transformation from a painting into a "celebrity icon". So yes, the theft made her more well-known
and the U.S. tour made her a global "celebrity". But regardless of all this, the Mona Lisa was
always considered a masterpiece and would have become famous in the same way "The Birth of
Venus" or "The Girl with the Pearl Earring" did. The Mona Lisa, is an image that is so
"familiar" that it has been stripped of meaning. Her "celebrity" status is a distraction
from what a masterpiece she really is. In an era in which we are bombarded with images,
it is more important than ever to stop - and look again. Whether she is "Mona Lisa", "La Giaconda" or "La
Jaconde", she is the face of a revolution in art. The Mona Lisa embodies Leonardo da Vinci's
belief that everything is connected. He had the ability to combine intellect with imagination. Art
and science are perfectly blended in a single work, that may have started as a "simple portrait" of
a bourgeois woman but has become something much more poetic something "universal". Leonardo once
said that "Art is never finished - just abandoned" and it would seem apt that a painting
created by a man who never stopped learning still manages to teach us something - 500 years
after he created it. Despite all the myths and legends surrounding her, we ARE learning more
and more about her through science and studies. Who knows? One day we may see the Mona
Lisa exactly the way Leonardo saw her.
