Woman with dark hair and a sheer veil, seated with folded hands and a faint smile before a landscape of water and rocks

Mona Lisa

See it in the 3D Museum View the full image

What you see

A woman in a dark dress sits with her body turned three-quarters and her face almost toward us. Her arm rests on the arm of a chair, hands folded, the right over the left. Behind her opens a distant landscape of rocks, rivers and bluish mountains. The eye moves from her gaze to her barely smiling mouth, then down to her hands.

Muted browns, ochres and greens take over. There are no hard outlines: face and hands are shaped by soft shadows that melt into one another, especially at the corners of the mouth and eyes. Compare the two sides of the landscape, since the horizon on the left sits lower than the one on the right, and look for the sheer veil over her hair.

About Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo was born in Vinci, near Florence, and was a painter, inventor, engineer and scientist all at once. He filled thousands of notebook pages with flying machines, studies of the human body and mirror-written notes. He finished only a few paintings, but almost all of them changed the history of art.

All 12 works by Leonardo da Vinci