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subject that he painted another that he continued to work on for years.) A Gioconda at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg has an exposed breast and is thought to have been painted by Leonardo’s pupil and heir, Francesco Melzi. It was not uncommon for pupils to imitate their masters’ work in this way, nor would it have been unusual for one or more copies to be made, since there was no other way to increase the audience for a work of art. Donald Sassoon, a modern historian, has written, “We know that Leonardo was widely admired during his lifetime because of the number of copies made of his works. In an age when information about a painting could travel only through written comments and the production of copies, the activities of Leonardo’s followers… functioned as an information system which contributed to the expansion of his fame.” 41

Vasari was also the first to note what has become the most commented-on feature of the painting: the smile. “Since Mona Lisa was very beautiful,” he wrote, “Leonardo employed this technique while he was painting her portrait — he had musicians who played or sang and clowns who would always make her merry in order to drive away her melancholy, which painting often brings to portraits. And in this portrait by Leonardo, there is a smile so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original.” 42

Vasari never saw the actual painting. One contemporary who did was Antonio de Beatis, the secretary of an influential cardinal, who kept a journal of the cardinal’s trip to France in August 1517. They visited François I in his castle at Rouen, where Leonardo lived in an adjoining residence connected by a tunnel. De Beatis wrote that Leonardo showed his visitors three paintings, one the portrait of a “Florentine lady.” He describes them as “tucti perfectissimi” (“all of the greatest perfection”). 43

A century later, when the painting was at Fontainebleau, the royal château that François I had renovated and expanded, Cassiano del Pozzo, an Italian scholar, came to view it. He wrote of it afterward as “the best-known work of this painter, because she lacks only the power of speech.” 44 More important, he called the painting La Gioconda, confirming the sitter’s identity as Lisa Gherardini, who at the age of sixteen, in 1495, had married Francesco del Giocondo of Florence. The identification has been challenged over the years, but most authorities agree that the portrait is of this particular woman, who would have been in her mid-twenties when she sat for Leonardo.

During the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715), the painting occupied a place of honor in the king’s personal gallery at the grand residence he built at Versailles. His successor, Louis XV (reigned 1715–74), however, preferred the more erotic, openly joyful works of such artists as Fragonard and Boucher and sent Leonardo’s work to hang ignominiously in the office of the keeper of the royal buildings. In 1750, the king’s courtiers selected the 110 best works of art in his collection for an exhibition. La Joconde was not included.

After the Revolution, the former royal palace known as the Louvre became a gallery open to all citizens, who could view the treasures formerly owned by kings and nobility. In 1797 the Mona Lisa was chosen to be one of the works displayed there. Ironically, Fragonard, once the court favorite, was now a lowly employee of the new regime’s artistic policy makers and was assigned to transport the Mona Lisa from Versailles to the Louvre. It didn’t remain there long, for when Napoleon Bonaparte took power, he ordered the painting to be hung in his bedroom. Later, after the Louvre was renamed the Musée Napoléon, he allowed the painting to be returned to public display. He was the last to enjoy such a personal relationship with the portrait until someone carried her off in August 1911.

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Tastes in art ebb and flow, and in the early part of the nineteenth century the Mona Lisa was not regarded with the same awe it enjoys today. Nor was