Mona Lisa : Leonardo's masterful technique

As the Louvre Curator Jean-Pierre Cuzin once said, "The entire history of portraiture afterwards depends on the Mona Lisa. If you look at all the other portraits - not only of the Italian Renaissance, but also of the 17th-19th century - if you look at Picasso, at everyone you want to name, all of them were inspired by this painting. Thus, it is sort of the root, almost, of occidental portrait painting." 

Leonardo perfected the technique known as sfumato, which translates from Italian meaning "vanished or evaporated", in a break with the Florentine tradition of outlining the painted image. He created imperceptible transitions between light and shade, and sometimes between colors, he tended to blend everything without any true borders- like smoke, with subtle, practically invisible, brush strokes. The veil, Mona Lisa's hair, the glowing skin -  all are created with layers of transparent color, none more than a few molecules thick, giving the painting an almost magical, ethereal appearance.

Giorgio Vasari wrote in his early biography of da Vinci, Lives of the Painters: "As art may imitate nature, she does not appear to be painted, but truly of flesh and blood. On looking closely at the pit of her throat, one could swear that the pulses were beating." , talking about the realism of the painting which is largely a result of Leonardo's diverse scientific observations. 

Even the landscape as a background was a departure from tradition; Leonardo saw creative and fictional possibilities in it. "The background may be a representation of the universe, with mountains, plains and rivers. Or possibly it is both reality and the world of dream. One could suppose that the landscape doesn't exist, that it is the woman's own dream."

In the same painting we move from soft places like the clouds to areas of extreme intricacy and fine detail, for example, around the neckline of the lady's dress we have delicate interlacing embroidery. The contrast of these different areas creates a cohesion very rare in painting.

All this we now take for granted. The Mona Lisa looks so natural, so familiar, that we forget to appreciate how innovative the painting was at the beginning of the sixteenth century.