Leonardo, The Mona Lisa


Martin Kemp – The Mona Lisa: Painting beyond Portraiture from HENI Talks on YouTube.

The Mona Lisa is an extraordinary painting; so much so that the small portrait of a bourgeois Florentine woman has been the subject of many myths and conspiracy theories. But Leonardo da Vinci expert Martin Kemp is keen to emphasise the very ordinary circumstances of the portrait’s commission and the sitter’s life.

Over the course of his career, Kemp has debunked many of the myths the iconic painting has given rise to and has helped to identify the people instrumental to its creation. But he also argues that the painting became more than ‘just a small portrait’ for Leonardo: the artist poured all he knew about science and the poetry of painting into the commission. How did this work change the way artists painted portraits for centuries afterwards?

Cite this page as: HENI Talks, "Leonardo, The Mona Lisa ," in Smarthistory, June 15, 2018, accessed March 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/heni-mona-lisa/.