Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa's actual size

The painted panel is 79.4 centimetres high and 53.4 centimetres wide — about 31.3 by 21 inches. The Louvre also records the framed size as 101 by 77 centimetres. It is a modest portrait, not a monumental canvas.[1]

That scale surprises people because reproductions have no fixed size. A textbook can shrink the portrait and a poster can enlarge it; online, it usually fills the screen. In the Salle des États, the small panel also faces Paolo Veronese's Wedding Feast at Cana, a painting nearly ten metres wide. The contrast makes Leonardo's work look smaller still.

Who Mona Lisa was, and what the names mean

The Louvre identifies the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, born in Florence in 1479 and married in 1495 to the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. An October 1503 note by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci records Leonardo working on the 'head of Lisa del Giocondo.' Giorgio Vasari's 1550 life of Leonardo also says Francesco commissioned a portrait of his wife.[1]

Mona was not her first name. The Italian Monna is a contraction of madonna, a respectful form of address similar to 'my lady.' La Gioconda turns her husband's surname into a feminine form; the French La Joconde does the same. The early evidence supports Lisa Gherardini as the sitter, while the Louvre treats her husband's role as the probable commission rather than a completely settled fact.[1]

Why the smile changes as you look

Leonardo built the face from gradual transitions between light and shadow instead of drawing hard borders around the mouth, cheeks, and eyes. The technique is called sfumato, from the Italian word for smoke. It makes the edge of the smile difficult to pin to one exact line.[2]

The rest of the pose also resists a fixed reading. Lisa looks outward, but her hands, torso, and head turn on slightly different axes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes this as a sense of arrested movement. The smile can therefore appear warmer or more reserved as the viewer's attention shifts. That visual effect is observable; claims about Lisa's private thoughts are interpretation.

Reading the painting, detail by detail

Because the Mona Lisa is small, and because visitors typically see it across a barrier at twenty feet, most people never read it up close. High-resolution imaging by the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France (C2RMF) has made the panel legible in detail. Six passages reward that reading.

The eyes look out and slightly to the right of the viewer. Leonardo built each eye from dozens of translucent oil glazes, each thinner than a human hair; the effect at scale is that the whites of the eyes have a very faint blue-grey cast that reads as living tissue rather than white paint. Under raking light the eyelids show the sfumato technique doing its work — no drawn line, only a gradient of tones dark to light — and the effect is that the eye seems to focus at whatever distance the viewer is standing.

The mouth is the passage most Mona Lisa criticism has focused on. Leonardo painted the corners of the mouth in shadow rather than with hard edges. If a viewer fixes their central vision on the mouth, the smile looks fainter. If a viewer looks at the eyes and lets the mouth fall into peripheral vision, the smile broadens. The Harvard visual scientist Margaret Livingstone has argued this is a real optical effect of how the retina reads soft edges at different distances from the point of focus — the smile changes according to where a viewer is looking.

The hands are the second-most-studied passage. Lisa's left hand rests across her right wrist in a pose that turns the whole torso into a spiral — shoulders one way, head another, hands anchoring the picture at the bottom. Leonardo drew hands more carefully than almost any Renaissance painter, and here the fingers are painted so that the flesh over the tendons of the back of the hand is warmer than the fingers themselves, which is anatomically correct. There is no ring on the marriage finger.

The chair arm at the lower left has a low balustrade that reads at first as decoration. It is actually a spatial device: Leonardo used it to put a physical distance between Lisa and the viewer. She is behind the arm rather than beside it. Traces of paint along the panel's edges show that the picture once had painted columns on both sides — cropped at some point later — which would have framed the sitter as if seen from a loggia.

The landscape behind Lisa is not a real place. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's essay on Leonardo describes it as a composite of rocky forms, roads, and waterways drawn from his geological studies. The horizon on the right sits higher than the horizon on the left by a few centimetres — a discontinuity Leonardo did not correct — so the two halves of the background are at slightly different scales. The eye reads the two halves as one continuous distance in spite of this.[2]

Up close, the wood grain of the poplar panel shows through the paint in places. A vertical crack in the upper part of the panel, running above the head, has been stabilised repeatedly since the eighteenth century, and the Louvre's climate-controlled case is there to keep the crack from opening further. The Mona Lisa is oil paint applied over the course of about sixteen years onto a piece of Italian poplar wood a little larger than a sheet of A4 paper.[3]

How an Italian portrait entered the French collection

Leonardo did not deliver the portrait to the Giocondo household. He retained it and continued working on it over many years. When he entered the service of François I and moved to France in 1516, the painting came with him. The Louvre says the king probably acquired it in 1518.[1]

This is why the painting is in France: Leonardo brought it there and the French king acquired it from him. It was not seized during Napoleon Bonaparte's campaigns in Italy. The former royal collection became part of the national museum opened at the Louvre during the French Revolution.[1]

The theft that put the empty wall in the newspapers

On 21 August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre, removed the painting. The next day visitors found an empty space in the Salon Carré. The investigation reached the Paris avant-garde: the police arrested Guillaume Apollinaire and questioned Pablo Picasso because of unrelated antiquities stolen earlier by Apollinaire's former secretary. Both men were cleared.[1]

Peruggia kept the panel for more than two years. In 1913 he took it to Florence and tried to sell it to an art dealer, who alerted the authorities. The painting returned to France and went back on display at the Louvre. The theft did not create its reputation from nothing, but the repeated newspaper image of the missing portrait enlarged that reputation far beyond the museum-going public.[1]

Why the Mona Lisa is so famous

The painting was admired long before 1911. Its turning pose, direct gaze, continuous landscape, and sfumato offered a powerful model for sixteenth-century portraiture. It also belonged to the French royal collection and was displayed in a major public museum, giving generations of artists access to it.[2]

Modern reproduction added another kind of fame. The theft circulated the face through newspapers; Marcel Duchamp's 1919 L.H.O.O.Q. could make its joke because a cheap postcard of the portrait was already recognizable; and the 1963 loan to Washington and New York drew enormous crowds. The painting is famous not for one secret but because artistic reputation, royal provenance, crime reporting, parody, tourism, and mass reproduction accumulated around the same image.

Where to see it in the Louvre

As verified on 13 August 2026, the Mona Lisa is in Room 711, the Salle des États, on Level 1 of the Denon wing. It has been displayed in a temperature- and humidity-controlled protective case since the room's 2005 renovation. The case protects both a globally famous target and a poplar panel that has warped and developed a crack.[4]

There is no separate Mona Lisa ticket. A Louvre admission ticket covers the permanent collection. The museum says the room is normally open every day the Louvre is open, barring technical problems, but may limit viewing time when it is particularly busy. Room assignments and closures can change, so check the Louvre's current map on the day of a visit.[5]

More by Leonardo da Vinci

Painting · High RenaissanceThe Last Supper1494–1498Painting · High RenaissanceSaint John the Baptistc. 1508–1519Painting · High RenaissanceThe Virgin and Child with Saint Annec. 1503–1519Painting · High RenaissanceVirgin of the Rocksc. 1483–1494