The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world, and the crowds that gather before it in the Salle des Etats are now as much a part of its story as the panel itself. Leonardo da Vinci began the portrait around 1503 in Florence, depicting Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo - hence the Italian name La Gioconda. He never delivered it. Instead he carried the unfinished panel with him for the rest of his life, through Milan and Rome and finally to France, where it entered the royal collection after his death in 1519.
What makes the picture extraordinary is not its subject but its handling. Leonardo built the face from dozens of translucent glazes in a technique he called sfumato - "smoked" - so that the corners of the mouth and the eyes dissolve into shadow with no visible line. The result is an expression that seems to change as you look at it, and a landscape behind the sitter that recedes into a blue distance through atmospheric perspective.
The painting’s modern celebrity owes much to chance. In 1911 it was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who hid it under his coat and kept it in a Paris apartment for two years. The manhunt made it a global headline, and when it returned in 1913 it was no longer a Renaissance portrait but a celebrity. It has been displayed behind glass ever since.
