The Smile That Never Left: Leonardo Paints the Mona Lisa
1503 · event
Around 1503 a Florentine silk merchant's wife, Lisa Gherardini, sat for a portrait her husband probably never received. Leonardo da Vinci carried the small poplar panel with him for the rest of his life, reworking it layer by translucent layer, a technique so fine that no brushstroke is visible under a microscope.
For centuries she was simply one treasure among many, until an Italian handyman stole her from the Louvre in 1911 to "return her home." The two-year manhunt made her the most famous face on Earth; when she came back, crowds queued not to see a painting but a celebrity.
Today she draws ten million visitors a year behind bulletproof glass, the most viewed, most parodied, most protected image ever made by a human hand. The smile, after five hundred years, still refuses to explain itself.