The Duke of Milan asked him to paint it on the wall of a dining hall of a monastery. His other most famous masterpiece is “ The Last Supper ,” which you call “the most spell-binding narrative painting in history.” Take us inside its creation-and explain why it is such a supreme work of art. Unlike other portraits of the time, this is not just a flat, surface depiction. Every time you look at her it seems slightly different. You see that most obviously in “The Last Supper.”īut the “Mona Lisa” is the culmination because the emotions that she’s expressing, just like her smile, are a bit elusive. He carried his notebook around as he walked through Florence or Milan, and always sketched people’s expressions and emotions and tried to relate that to the inner feelings they were having. As you move your eyes across her face the smile flickers on and off. If you look directly at the Mona Lisa smile, the corners of the lips turn downward slightly, but shadows and light make it seem like it’s turning upwards. During that period, he dissected the human eye on cadavers and was able to understand that the center of the retina sees detail, but the edges see shadows and shapes better. Leonardo kept that painting from 1503, when he started it, to his deathbed in 1519, trying to get every aspect exactly right in layer after layer. On one of those pages you see a faint sketch at the top of the beginning of the smile of the Mona Lisa.

Leonardo spent many pages in his notebook dissecting the human face to figure out every muscle and nerve that touched the lips. The Mona Lisa’s smile is the culmination of a lifetime spent studying art, science, optics, and every other possible field that he could apply his curiosity to, including understanding the universe and how we fit into it.

Where does the “ Mona Lisa ” fit into Leonardo’s life and work-and how has she managed to bewitch us for 500 years? We have to start with the most famous smile in the world. When National Geographic caught up with Isaacson by phone at his home in Washington, D.C., he explained why Mona Lisa’s smile is the culmination of a lifetime of inquiry how Michelangelo and Leonardo couldn’t stand each other and why being curious was Leonardo’s defining trait.

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