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The portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo kept it with him, still adding to it, until his last years in France.
Vasari names the sitter, and a note by the Florentine official Agostino Vespucci, written in the margin of a book in October 1503 and found in 2005, confirms that Leonardo was then painting a head of Lisa del Giocondo.
The painting was never delivered. He carried it from Florence to Milan, Rome and France, and kept working on it. Her smile is made of glazes so thin that no line marks the corners of the mouth or eyes; the shadow simply deepens. Behind her the landscape does not join up: the horizon on the left is lower than on the right.
It passed to the French royal collection, probably through Salaì's estate. It became the most famous painting in the world after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and recovered two years later.
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by Mei Lin 