Mona Lisa (c. 1503–1519)
Louvre, Paris
Portrait of Lisa Gherardini (La Gioconda); stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Art
Leonardo da Vinci
1452–1519 · Italian (Florentine)
High Renaissance
Leonardo da Vinci was the archetypal Renaissance polymath — painter, draughtsman, engineer, anatomist and inventor. Though few paintings survive, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper are the most famous in the world, and his soft sfumato modelling transformed European painting.
How to spot them
- ▸Sfumato: soft, smoky transitions of light and shade with no hard outlines, and hazy blue mountain backgrounds
- ▸Enigmatic half-smiles, pyramidal compositions and gestures that lead the eye around the picture
- ▸Notebooks in mirror writing full of anatomical, mechanical and botanical drawings
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Vinci', 'Verrocchio's pupil', 'Ludovico Sforza', 'Amboise', 'Codex Leicester' or 'sfumato'
Key works
The Last Supper (c. 1495–1498)
Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
Mural in the convent refectory, painted in tempera on dry plaster, so it deteriorated quickly
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Lady with an Ermine (c. 1489–1491)
Czartoryski Museum, Kraków
Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza; one of Poland's national treasures
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Vitruvian Man (c. 1490)
Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
Pen drawing of a man inscribed in a circle and a square, after the Roman architect Vitruvius
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1483–1486 (Louvre); c. 1495–1508 (London))
Louvre, Paris, and National Gallery, London
Two versions of the same composition exist
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Ginevra de' Benci (c. 1474–1480)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The only Leonardo painting on public view in the Americas; a juniper bush puns on her name
Image: Leonardo da Vinci · Public domain, Wikimedia Commons
Quick-fire facts
- •He was born in Vinci, near Florence, the illegitimate son of a notary, and trained in the workshop of Verrocchio
- •He painted an angel in Verrocchio's Baptism of Christ which, says Vasari, so outshone his master that Verrocchio gave up painting
- •He worked for Ludovico Sforza in Milan and planned a giant bronze horse that was never cast
- •He died at Clos Lucé, near Amboise, France, in 1519, in the service of King Francis I
- •He wrote in mirror script, right to left
- •His Codex Leicester notebook was bought by Bill Gates in 1994
- •Salvator Mundi, attributed to him, sold for $450.3 million at Christie's in 2017, the highest price ever paid for a painting at auction
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Sources
- Musée du Louvre — Mona Lisa
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Leonardo da Vinci
- Martin Kemp — Leonardo da Vinci: The Marvellous Works of Nature and Man