The most famous painting on earth is smaller than most people expect, and it was never actually finished and handed over the way a commissioned portrait usually was.
What you're looking at
Leonardo da Vinci began this portrait around 1503, and the original panel measures just 77 x 53 cm, small enough to live comfortably on an ordinary wall. He worked on it, on and off, for the rest of his life, carrying the panel with him even after moving to France, where he died still in possession of it. From the French royal collection, it eventually passed into the Louvre, where it has hung ever since.
A face built from paint with no hard lines, and a landscape from nowhere
The soft, almost smoky quality of her expression comes from a technique called sfumato, dozens of translucent paint layers blended so gradually that there are no hard outlines anywhere on her face. She has no visible eyebrows or eyelashes; one theory blames centuries of past restoration and cleaning, though other experts disagree about the cause.
Behind her, the landscape isn't a real place at all. Leonardo invented it, among the first Italian portrait painters to set a sitter against a wholly imaginary background, and the two halves of the horizon don't even line up, two mismatched landscapes stitched together into one imagined world.
One detail to look for
Look at how her hands rest calmly, one folded over the other, anchoring the whole composition into a classic pyramid shape. It's a quiet, stable base for a face that's held the world's attention for over five centuries, including the two years she went missing after being stolen by a Louvre employee in 1911, a theft that helped make her the most famous painting in the world.
See it at its real size
Our canvas print is labeled against the true size of the original, 77 x 53 cm. Shop the canvas print.