Painting · High Renaissance
Mona Lisa
Leonardo da Vinci began this small portrait of Lisa Gherardini around 1503, carried it into France, and continued revising it until his death in 1519. It is now in Room 711 of the Louvre.
- Painter
Leonardo da Vinci
Florentine painter and investigator of nature who carried the Mona Lisa into France and continued working on it until the end of his life.
Details
- 1452–1519
- 15 April 1452
- Vinci, Republic of Florence
- 2 May 1519
- Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise, France
- Italian
- Painter
About Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (1452–1519) was a Florentine painter, engineer, and investigator of nature. He completed fewer than twenty paintings in a working life of forty-five years and left thousands of pages of notes on anatomy, water, birds in flight, weapons, plants, geometry, and the human eye. Two of those paintings — the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper — became, in the four centuries after his death, the most reproduced images in Western art.
He was born out of wedlock in a hill town outside Florence, apprenticed to Andrea del Verrocchio in the workshop that shaped much of the next generation of Florentine painting, spent his most productive years in Milan under Ludovico Sforza, and ended his life in the Loire Valley as guest and salaried First Painter to King François I of France. The Mona Lisa was in his baggage when he crossed the Alps in 1516; he was still working on it when he died at Amboise three years later.
Vinci, Florence, and Verrocchio's workshop
Leonardo was born on 15 April 1452 in or near the small hill town of Vinci in the Republic of Florence, the illegitimate son of the Florentine notary Ser Piero da Vinci and a young peasant woman named Caterina, whose full identity is still debated. Because he was born outside marriage he was ineligible for the family's notarial trade and, by the same rules, ineligible for a university education. Both bans turned out to be a bequest: he was free to be trained instead as a workshop painter.
Around 1466 his father placed him in the Florentine workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the best studios of Quattrocento Florence, where Botticelli, Perugino, and Ghirlandaio were fellow apprentices at various points. Vasari records that Leonardo painted one of the angels in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ (c. 1475) so well that Verrocchio, on seeing the panel finished, put down his brushes and never painted again. The anecdote is unverifiable and probably improved in the telling; the angel is his, and the story of a master upstaged by his apprentice was already circulating in the sixteenth century.
Milan under Ludovico Sforza
In 1482 Leonardo left Florence for Milan and offered his services to Duke Ludovico Sforza in a letter that promised bridges that could be dismantled, mortars that could scatter stones like a hail-storm, armoured chariots, subterranean tunnels, and — almost as a courtesy at the letter's end — that he could also paint. Sforza took him on, and Leonardo stayed in Milan for the next seventeen years. The equestrian bronze he was commissioned to cast for Francesco Sforza's monument never got beyond the seventy-ton clay model; French troops used it for target practice when they took the city in 1499.
The Last Supper was painted between about 1495 and 1498 on the north wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, for the Dominican community and Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo chose not to use fresco (fast, permanent, unforgiving) but tempera on a dry-plaster wall (slow, correctable, catastrophic in the long term). The picture began deteriorating within his lifetime. It has been restored many times, most exhaustively between 1978 and 1999, and now shows perhaps twenty per cent of Leonardo's original hand. It is still, at that percentage, the most influential painting of the Renaissance.
The Mona Lisa
Around 1503, back in Florence after the French had driven Sforza from Milan, Leonardo began a portrait of a Florentine merchant's wife, Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. That is what the surviving evidence says — a note by Agostino Vespucci in 1503, and Vasari's later confirmation — and it is more evidence than most Leonardo pictures have. What he actually painted takes the sitter far beyond a commissioned portrait: a woman turning slightly toward the viewer, seated in a loggia over an atmospheric, geologically unlikely landscape, her expression settled and unreadable.
The painting is oil on a single poplar panel roughly 77 by 53 centimetres. Its surface is built up in dozens of translucent glazes of oil and pigment, laid on so thinly with the fingertips as often as the brush that no individual stroke is visible. The technique — sfumato, Leonardo's own term — creates the veil of shadow between the sitter and the viewer that is the picture's most quoted quality. Fifty-year-old X-ray and hyperspectral studies at the Louvre have shown earlier states of the head and hands under the finished surface: Leonardo repainted and adjusted the sitter over many years.
- Mona Lisa
The Louvre panel — its sitter, its condition, its bulletproof case in the Salle des États, and the 1911 theft that made it globally famous.
Florence, Rome, and the invitation to France
Between 1500 and 1516 Leonardo moved between Florence, Milan, and Rome, taking commissions from the Signoria, from the ruling French, from Cesare Borgia, and from the Medici pope Leo X. In Florence he undertook the Battle of Anghiari for the Palazzo Vecchio and left the fresco unfinished, again because of experiments with the wall preparation. Michelangelo, twenty-three years younger, was commissioned to paint the wall opposite. Neither wall painting survives; both were painted over within a century.
In 1516 the young French king François I invited Leonardo to France and installed him in the Château du Clos Lucé at Amboise, a few hundred metres from his own residence. Leonardo brought three paintings with him — the Mona Lisa, Saint John the Baptist, and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. François paid him a large salary and left him alone to work. He continued to draw, to refine the Mona Lisa, and to design festival machinery for the court. He died at the Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519, aged sixty-seven. He was buried in the Collegiate Church of Saint-Florentin at the Château d'Amboise; the church was destroyed in the 1802 demolition, and his remains, or a set of remains identified as his in 1863, were reinterred in the smaller Chapel of Saint-Hubert on the château grounds.
What he left the century after him
Leonardo's paintings entered the Renaissance's canonical list within a generation. His notebooks — around six thousand loose sheets of drawings, mirrored-script text, mechanical designs, and anatomical dissections — did not. Most were bequeathed to his pupil Francesco Melzi, who kept them safely at his villa near Milan for another fifty years, after which they were scattered. The Codex Atlanticus, the Codex Arundel, the Windsor drawings, and the Codex Leicester (bought by Bill Gates in 1994) are the four biggest surviving groups. Their scientific content was only decoded and published from the nineteenth century on, so anatomists and engineers who had worked out the same things independently discovered, one by one, that Leonardo had got there first.
The reputation of the Mona Lisa was built more slowly. It hung in François I's bathroom, then at Fontainebleau, then at Versailles, before entering the Louvre with the Revolution's confiscations in 1797. Its 1911 theft by Vincenzo Peruggia — an Italian house painter who kept it under his bed in Paris for two years and returned it to Florence hoping to be received as a national hero — made it, in the two years of its absence, the most famous painting in the world. Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. in 1919 confirmed the change: it was now the picture whose reverence had to be provoked.
Life events
Born in or near Vinci, in the Republic of Florence, the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci and a peasant woman named Caterina.
Apprenticed in Florence to Andrea del Verrocchio, whose workshop trained a generation of Quattrocento painters.
Paints one of the angels in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ — the earliest work firmly attributed to his hand.
Working at the Milanese court of Duke Ludovico Sforza; produces the Virgin of the Rocks, the equestrian clay model for the never-cast Sforza monument, and the Last Supper.
Paints the Last Supper on the refectory wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, in tempera on dry plaster rather than fresco.
Back in Florence after the French take Milan; begins the Mona Lisa around 1503, works on the (unfinished) Battle of Anghiari for the Palazzo Vecchio.
Second Milan residence; then Rome under the Medici pope Leo X.
Accepts King François I's invitation to France and moves to the Château du Clos Lucé at Amboise, taking the Mona Lisa, Saint John the Baptist, and the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne with him.
Dies at the Clos Lucé, aged sixty-seven. Buried at the Collegiate Church of Saint-Florentin at the Château d'Amboise.
The Mona Lisa enters the collections of the Louvre.
Vincenzo Peruggia steals the Mona Lisa from the Louvre; it is recovered in Florence in 1913. The two years of its absence make it the most famous painting in the world.
Marcel Duchamp pencils a moustache on a reproduction of the Mona Lisa and titles it L.H.O.O.Q.
Selected works
Who drew from them
Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp's most famous engagement with Leonardo is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919): a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he pencilled a moustache and a goatee and wrote the five-letter title beneath. The gesture — turning the Louvre's most reverent object into a Dada readymade — depended entirely on Leonardo's picture being the century's yardstick for what a masterpiece was. Duchamp returned to the same image several times over the next fifty years.
Questions about Leonardo da Vinci
Who was Leonardo da Vinci?
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was a Florentine painter, engineer, anatomist, and investigator of nature. He completed fewer than twenty paintings in his lifetime; two of them — the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper — have been the most reproduced images in Western art for the last five centuries.
Where can you see Leonardo da Vinci's paintings today?
The Louvre in Paris holds the Mona Lisa, Saint John the Baptist, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and the earlier Virgin of the Rocks. The Last Supper is on the north wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, on a timed-entry ticket. The Salvator Mundi, controversially attributed, is in private hands. The Vitruvian Man drawing is at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice.
Why is the Mona Lisa famous?
She is famous partly because Leonardo painted her — a small oil portrait built up from dozens of translucent glazes with an expression the language of art criticism spent centuries trying to name. She is famous globally, however, because Vincenzo Peruggia stole her from the Louvre in 1911 and kept her hidden in Paris for two years. The theft turned the picture into a story ordinary readers followed on the front page. The reverence, and the 1919 Duchamp response to it, followed from the story.
Where is Leonardo da Vinci buried?
In the Chapel of Saint-Hubert on the grounds of the Château d'Amboise in the Loire Valley. His original burial in 1519 was in the Collegiate Church of Saint-Florentin at the château; that church was demolished in 1802, and the remains identified as his in an 1863 excavation were reinterred in the small Saint-Hubert chapel that survives.
How many paintings did Leonardo da Vinci finish?
Fewer than twenty are firmly attributed to his hand as sole author, and only a handful of those are unquestionably finished by him alone rather than by his workshop. The count depends on how the disputed attributions (the Salvator Mundi, the second Virgin of the Rocks version, the Vitruvian Man drawing, a handful of others) are treated.
Why did Leonardo da Vinci die in France?
The young French king François I invited him in 1516 to a large salary, the Château du Clos Lucé at Amboise, and the title of First Painter, Engineer, and Architect to the King. Leonardo accepted, crossed the Alps at sixty-four, and stayed. He died there three years later.
Sourced claims
Influenced · 1919
Marcel Duchamp
Duchamp's most famous engagement with Leonardo is L.H.O.O.Q. (1919): a cheap postcard reproduction of the Mona Lisa on which he pencilled a moustache and a goatee and wrote the five-letter title beneath. The gesture — turning the Louvre's most reverent object into a Dada readymade — depended entirely on Leonardo's picture being the century's yardstick for what a masterpiece was. Duchamp returned to the same image several times over the next fifty years.