Mona Lisa

Leonardo's Mona Lisa, painted approximately 1503-1519 and now in the Louvre, is the most famous painting in the world — a condition that paradoxically makes it both the most reproduced and most interpreted work in Western art and the hardest to see freshly. Painted for Francesco del Giocondo (giving her the Italian name 'La Gioconda') or perhaps as a private work, it was never delivered to its patron and remained in Leonardo's possession until his death. Its innovations — the sfumato technique, the three-quarter pose, the atmospheric landscape, the ambiguous smile — were so fundamental to subsequent painting that their influence has become invisible through familiarity. The painting arrived in France with Leonardo and entered the Louvre collection through the Revolution.

Leonardo's revolutionary sfumato creates imperceptible transitions between light and shadow, lending the subject her legendary enigmatic expression. The atmospheric landscape recedes through subtle gradations of blue, demonstrating aerial perspective at its most refined.