mona lisa descriptive essay

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa Painting Analysis

Mona lisa analysis: essay introduction, mona lisa painting analysis: description, mona lisa analysis: essay conclusion.

Name of the painting: Mona Lisa

Name of the artist: Leonardo da Vinci

Dates created: 1504-1506

Mona Lisa is one of the most prominent and recognizable paintings in the world and is considered the greatest masterpiece of its author, Leonardo da Vinci. Created in 1503, the painting has been discussed for centuries by artists, academics, medics, and the general public (Mehra & Campbell, 2018). A vast amount of the painting’s interpretations already exist, and some are still being proposed nowadays. However, this paper mostly aims to explore the central theme, subject, and message of the Mona Lisa .

Da Vinci’s masterpiece was written during the Renaissance, and thus, was strongly influenced by the ideas of that period. The philosophy of the Renaissance placed a human in the center of the world; that is why portraits were so popular with Italian masters of the 15 th and 16 th centuries. Leonardo was among the first artists to capture a person sitting in front of the fictional landscape. Even though Mona Lisa is reminiscent of Madonna, it is still clear that the painter tried to depict an ordinary person. For creating this painting, Leonardo used a technique called “sfumato.” This term refers to the technique of oil painting that allows achieving a soft transition from one color to another. The great combination of the woman and the landscape in Mona Lisa is due to this technique (Da Vinci, n.d.). Therefore, this work by Leonardo may be considered not as a classical portrait, and this is what makes it unique among other paintings of a similar genre.

Mona Lisa has an outstanding impact on various types of Western art, but there were some things that shaped Leonardo’s work as well. As it was already mentioned, the Renaissance period had a strong effect on Leonardo’s works. The painter portrayed a real woman who was not consistent with medieval Christian philosophy. Leonardo is also famous for creating paintings on religious themes, but Mona Lisa does not depict another Madonna. The painting shows a typical woman of Leonardo’s age which confirms his commitment to the humanistic vision of the world. Therefore, it is impossible to omit the influence of this woman on Leonardo’s painting. Most critics and researchers agree that Mona Lisa portrays an Italian woman Lisa Gherardini. She was the wife of a rich merchant who ordered her portrait from Leonardo. This happened soon after Lisa gave birth to a child (Kemp & Pallanti, 2017). This might partly explain why Leonardo depicted the woman smiling.

I have always appreciated Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, but after careful examination, I discovered a new meaning in it. Being aware of the story behind the painting helps to understand it better and makes it more interesting to observe. When you know which person is portrayed in the painting, it is possible to enter his or her life for some time and experience the feelings that he or she had. It is also essential to consider the social and philosophical contest in which the painting was written. It might be hard to realize the significance of the Mona Lisa for the history of art if you do not know that it was one of the first portraits that depicted a real person. Undoubtedly, one can enjoy a painting even if one is not aware of its background. However, once you have become familiar with the painting’s story, you may start to value the piece of art even more.

This paper did not attempt to discover or propose new interpretations of the Mona Lisa . I tried to focus on the main factors that influenced Leonardo’s masterpiece as well as study the most crucial features of the painting. Now that I have become aware of the fact that Leonardo was one of the first Renaissance masters to combine a regular person with the landscape, I can appreciate the painting not only from the artistic perspective but also from the historical.

Da Vinci, Leonardo. Mona Lisa .

Kemp, M., & Pallanti, G. (2017). Mona Lisa: The people and the painting . Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Mehra, M. R., & Campbell, H.R. (2018). The Mona Lisa decrypted: Allure of an Imperfect Reality. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 93 (9), 1325-1327.

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What’s so special about the Mona Lisa?

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Every day, thousands of people from around the world crowd into a stark, beige room at Paris’s Louvre Museum to view its single mounted artwork, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

To do so, they walk straight past countless masterpieces of the European Renaissance. So why does the Mona Lisa seem so special?

The mystery of her identity

The story told by one of Leonardo’s first biographers, Giorgio Vasari, is that this oil portrait depicts Lisa Gherardini, second wife of a wealthy silk and wool merchant Francesco del Giocondo (hence the name by which it is known in Italian: La Gioconda).

Leonardo likely commenced the work while in Florence in the early 1500s, perhaps when he was hoping to receive the commission to take on a massive wall painting of The Battle of Anghiari .

Accepting a portrait commission from one of the city’s most influential, politically-engaged citizens might well have helped his chances. A recently discovered marginal note by Agostino Vespucci, one-time assistant to the diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli, records that Leonardo was working on a painting of “Lisa del Giocondo” in 1503.

The Italian painter Raphael, a great admirer of Leonardo, leaves us a sketch from around 1505-6 of what seems to be this work . When Leonardo later moved to France in 1516, he took this still unfinished work with him.

However, art scholars have increasingly voiced doubts about whether the image in the Louvre can indeed be Vasari’s Lisa, for the style and techniques of the painting match far better Leonardo’s later work from 1510 onwards.

Additionally, a visitor to Leonardo’s house in 1517 recorded seeing there a portrait of “a certain Florentine woman, done from life,” made “at the instance of the late magnificent Giuliano de Medici.” Medici was Leonardo’s patron in Rome from 1513 to 1516. Was our visitor looking at the same image Vasari and our marginal diarist describe as Lisa, or another portrait of a different woman, commissioned later?

All in all, just who we are seeing in the Louvre remains one of the work’s many mysteries.

A portrait stripped bare

In comparison to many contemporary images of the elite, this portrait is stripped of the usual trappings of high status or symbolic hints to the sitter’s dynastic heritage. All attention is thus drawn to her face, and that enigmatic expression.

Before the 18th century, emotion was more commonly articulated in painting through gestures of the hand and body than the face. But in any case, depictions of individuals did not aim to convey the same kinds of emotions we might look for in a portrait photograph today — think courage or humility rather than joy or happiness.

Additionally, a hallmark of elite status was one’s ability to keep the passions under good regulation. Irrespective of dental hygiene standards, a broad smile in artworks thus generally indicated ill-breeding or mockery, as we see in Leonardo’s own study of Five Grotesque Heads.

Our modern ideas about emotions leave us wondering just what Mona Lisa might have been feeling or thinking much more than the work’s early modern viewers likely did.

A 20th century phenomenon

In fact, there is a real question as to whether anyone before the 20th century thought much about the Mona Lisa at all. The historian Donald Sassoon has argued that much of the painting’s modern global iconic status rests on its widespread reproduction and use in all manner of advertising.

This notoriety was “helped” by its theft in 1911 by former Louvre employee, Vincenzo Peruggia . He remarkably walked out of the museum one evening after closing time with the painting wrapped in his smock coat. He spent the next two years with it hidden in his lodgings.

Shortly after its return, the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp used a postcard of the Mona Lisa as the basis for his 1919 ready-made work, LHOOQ, initials that sound in French as “she has a hot ass”.

Although not the first, it is perhaps among the best known examples of Mona Lisa parodies, along with Salvador Dali’s Self Portrait as Mona Lisa, 1954 .

Cultural furniture

From Duchamp and Dali, we have increasingly seen the Mona Lisa used as a trope. Balardung/Noongar artist Dianne Jones has reprised the work in her inkjet photographic portraits of 2005 , which are less pointed in their swipe at white European art and more luminous in their appropriation of Mona Lisa’s sense of dream-like plenitude.

The painting appears as cultural furniture in the recent music video Apeshit, 2019, by Beyoncé and Jay Z , in which they romp across the Louvre backed by a troupe of scantily clad dancers, striking Lady Hamilton-like poses in front of famous works of art.

Apeshit itself closely imitates earlier works of contemporary high culture, not least French New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders), 1964, in which three friends, including Mona Lisa-like Anna Karina (Godard’s famous muse), meet up and run through the Louvre in record time.

Meanwhile, the notorious theft of a work of art by German performance artist Ulay in 1976, in which he removed the most famous (and kitsch) painting in the National Gallery in Berlin, Carl Spitzweg’s 1839 portrait of The Poor Poet, was a reprise of the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.

Many contemporary artists have rubbished all the reverence surrounding bucket-list art visits such as that to the Mona Lisa.

Recently, Belgian art provocateur Wim Delvoye (whose shit-producing machine, Cloaca, 2000, is one of the centrepieces of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art) installed Suppo (2012), a giant steel corkscrew suppository, under the Louvre’s central glass entry pyramid. This made it the first sighting of art in the museum to which the Mona Lisa’s visitors flock.

Still, the mysteries of the Mona Lisa look set to intrigue us for years to come. It is precisely the breadth and depth of possible interpretations that makes her special. Mona Lisa is whoever we want her to be - and doesn’t that make her the ultimate female fantasy figure?

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The Secret of Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

Categories: Leonardo Da Vinci Mona Lisa Painting

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Published: Feb 12, 2019

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Essay on Mona Lisa

Students are often asked to write an essay on Mona Lisa in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Mona Lisa

The mona lisa’s mystery.

The Mona Lisa is a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It shows a woman with a soft smile. People are curious about her smile. They also wonder who she is. Some think she is Lisa Gherardini, a merchant’s wife.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Masterpiece

Leonardo took many years to paint the Mona Lisa. He was very careful with details. The painting is small, but it is very valuable. It is kept in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

The Painting’s Fame

The Mona Lisa is well-known around the world. Many people visit the Louvre just to see it. The painting became even more famous when it was stolen in 1911. It was found and returned two years later.

250 Words Essay on Mona Lisa

Who is mona lisa.

The Mona Lisa is a world-famous painting by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is a picture of a woman with a mysterious smile. This painting is special because many people are curious about who she was and why she is smiling. The woman in the painting is thought to be Lisa Gherardini, a lady from Florence, Italy.

Where Can You See Her?

You can find the Mona Lisa in a museum in Paris, France, called the Louvre. It is kept behind bulletproof glass to protect it because it is so precious. Every year, millions of people go to see this painting.

The Mystery of Her Smile

One of the reasons the Mona Lisa is so famous is because of her smile. It looks like it changes when you look at it from different angles. Some people think she is happy, while others think she might be sad. This mystery is part of what makes the painting interesting.

Why Is She Famous?

Besides her smile, the Mona Lisa is famous because Leonardo da Vinci was a very skilled painter. He used techniques that made her look real, like the way he painted her eyes and the light on her face. Also, the painting has been stolen in the past, which made it even more famous.

The Mona Lisa is not just a painting; it is a piece of history that has fascinated people for over 500 years. Its simplicity and mystery make it a masterpiece that people of all ages can appreciate.

500 Words Essay on Mona Lisa

Introduction to mona lisa.

The Mona Lisa is a world-famous painting by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci. It is often called the best-known, the most visited, and the most written about piece of art in the world. The painting shows a woman sitting with her hands folded, and she has a gentle smile on her face. The Mona Lisa is a treasure that has been admired for many years and is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris, France.

One of the most interesting things about the Mona Lisa is her smile. People often talk about how her smile seems to change when you look at it from different angles. Sometimes, it looks like she is smiling, and other times, it does not. This effect is because of Leonardo’s skillful painting technique. He was able to create this mysterious effect with his brushstrokes and the way he used light and shadow. This smile has made many people curious and has become a big reason why so many people love this painting.

The Woman in the Painting

The woman in the painting is believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy businessman from Florence, Italy. Her husband may have asked Leonardo to paint her portrait. Even though most people agree that it is Lisa in the painting, some still debate and come up with different ideas about who she might be. This adds to the mystery and interest in the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo da Vinci’s Technique

Leonardo da Vinci was not just a painter; he was also a scientist and an inventor. He used his knowledge of the world to make his paintings look real. In the Mona Lisa, he used a technique called ‘sfumato’, which means ‘gone up in smoke’ in Italian. This technique makes the edges look soft and helps to create a more lifelike image. Leonardo’s skill in painting and his use of this technique make the Mona Lisa a very special artwork.

The Painting’s Journey

The Mona Lisa has had a long history. After Leonardo finished it, the painting was in the hands of many different people and even a king of France. It was stolen from the Louvre Museum in 1911 but was found and returned two years later. The painting has also been attacked and damaged, but it has been carefully fixed each time. Now, it is protected by bulletproof glass to keep it safe.

Why People Love the Mona Lisa

People from all over the world come to see the Mona Lisa. They might love it because of its mystery, the story behind it, or just because it is so famous. The painting is a piece of history and shows Leonardo da Vinci’s amazing talent. It is a symbol of how art can last for a very long time and still be important to many people.

The Mona Lisa is more than just a painting; it is a piece of human history that tells a story of art, mystery, and beauty. It shows Leonardo da Vinci’s incredible skill and reminds us why he is still known as one of the greatest artists ever. The Mona Lisa’s gentle smile will continue to fascinate and inspire people for many years to come.

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The Ambiguity of Mona Lisa Painting Essay

This paper will provide a rhetoric analysis of the Mona Lisa painting, because it has rendered its audience into a redundant situation where the individual who admires this painting always ends up in his or her own interpretation or assumption of the different meanings of the image.

This is a painting that has received mixed responses from scholars, art lovers, and unfussy viewers of the painting. This has led the painting to being involved into a process that has attracted, what can be termed as a celebration from “pregnancy” to “morning.”

As the painting has been subject to wear and tear just like other paintings, it has endured over times and emerge as one of the most remarkable paintings, and which is characterized as a unique painting that has the most fascinating features.

Mona Lisa painting may sometimes be described as a definitive art; this is because it has nearly all qualities and properties of the art-painting (Barolsky 62). For this reason, the Mona Lisa art happens to be viewed as one of the well-regarded paintings in the world.

The proportions of the face and body are indeed perfect. The painting represents a feeling of completeness, as it incorporates all elements of art that is well engineered (64). The use of colors in the portrait of Mona Lisa brings out the art to full perfection revealing Da Vinci’s artistic skills.

The analysis of Mona Lisa revolves around a portrait of a woman who has a mysterious facial expression. Many art critiques believe that the smile of a woman is hiding some secrets. Her hands are seen to be folded across her bosom; her breast, face, and neck are well illuminated with the same light models.

The availability of light gives different shades in the foreground, middle, and background surfaces. Da Vinci used the sfumato technique in this painting; he created shadowy areas upon which the shapes blend over each other.

Interpretation of the meaning of this piece of art created by Da Vinci reveals a detailed piece of work, imagination, a gift in painting, and high in accuracy (Barolsky, 63). One may well believe that Da Vinci could has been motivated by a personal curiosity to paint a perfect woman who represented the epoch in which he lived.

A notable woman has numerous secrets but never reveals them. The smile on the woman’s face reveals that she is holding some secrets that are a misery to reveal. Mona Lisa painting can be judged as one of the most famous and viewed pieces of art.

The painting portrays a calm woman who is seating peacefully in front of the painter. The art clearly shows a distance between the portrait and the observer (66). This is brought out by the armrest of the chair that serves as division between the observer and Mona Lisa.

Looking at Mona Lisa painting from different positions, her facial expressions seem to change; it is so astounding that Da Vinci captured several emotional and character qualities in a single painting. It is the main reason why different meanings are provided by different people who look at Mona Lisa painting.

This piece of art appeals to the viewer on many levels describing the subject of the theme in a much simple, familiar, and pleasant manner.

The reality about Mona Lisa painting is that it has proven fact that whenever individuals set up their mind in discovering its secrets, they certainly disclose whatever they would want to find in the image. The painting offers its viewers a prospect of viewing the differences arising from viewing the work as an art, or in a reality perspective (Barolsky, 64).

Careful analysis of the paintings of the Mona Lisa reveals a woman sitting in an imaginary landscape that has factored in the aerial perspective. Behind the woman in the painting, there are mountains, paths and bridge that gives an impression of human presence. The rivers and valleys seen on the background of the Mona Lisa painting are entirely echoed by the hair and the worn clothing.

This enables the portrait to draw a natural and affectionate appeal to individuals who come across it. To a large extent, the portrait reveals an idealistic rather than realistic woman (66). The harmony achieved in this painting is in the form of a smile that links the nature and humanity.

If one looks closer at the Mona Lisa painting, he/she will notice that she lacks the eyelashes and the eyebrows. This may have been left intentionally by the painter or may have happened as a result of the painter forgetting to put the final touches on the painting. However, careful analysis of the painting on the left eyebrows region, one notices a masterful use of brush strokes.

To attain this deceptive mile, Da Vinci used different blends of shades in order to blur the outlines (Barolsky 62). It is the masterful use of shades that have fascinated many artists in the world. Today, many artists use this idea to deliver the messages that they want their viewers to get.

The painting depicts a woman gazing at viewers at different angles, no matter whether these viewers are relative to the painting or not. From the historical point of view, it is believed that Da Vinci took four years to come up with the full painting of Mona Lisa.

The facial expression shows how Da Vinci has mastered the use of tones and colors in the painting. Some artists argue that this painting portrays the painter in one’s feminism form, or maybe it is the picture of his secret admirer (Barolsky 65). However, it is a mythological point of view, and it is the reason why many artists interpret the Mona Lisa’s smile in different ways.

On the other hand, Mona Lisa may be seen as being portrayed by Da Vinci as a saint and, to some extent, a higher being (Barolsky 62). Cross examination of Mona Liza painting portrays a young woman, but somewhat insecure.

The painting is also representational because the painting represents human traits, which can have bad and good aspects. Since bad and good representations are well illuminated in human nature, the painting may be attractive to a wide range of the target audience, which may vary from the art lovers, historians, and any scholar who is interested in conducting research to reveal some of the painting’s hidden aspects.

The art is engaging, as one tries to get the inner meaning of this art, he or she becomes rejuvenated by its strong realism and rhetoric nature, which probably makes people desire to discover more inner implication.

To wrap this analysis of Mona Lisa work by Da Vinci depicts a range of characteristics. From what one sees from the art, it is clear that the author used art to depict several meanings in the paintings that are evident.

The painter has instituted a spirited reality into the image, which has been fabricated to being an image that can, by no means, be replaced by any other painting. Mona Lisa painting can be denoted as one of the utmost art of all times, this is because it one of the arts that has risen most curiosity among the artist.

Works Cited

Barolsky, Paul. Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1987.

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IvyPanda. (2023, November 2). The Ambiguity of Mona Lisa Painting. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ambiguity-of-mona-lisa-painting/

"The Ambiguity of Mona Lisa Painting." IvyPanda , 2 Nov. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/the-ambiguity-of-mona-lisa-painting/.

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IvyPanda . 2023. "The Ambiguity of Mona Lisa Painting." November 2, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ambiguity-of-mona-lisa-painting/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Ambiguity of Mona Lisa Painting." November 2, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-ambiguity-of-mona-lisa-painting/.