Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa has been shrouded in mystery for centuries, which may be one of the leading factors in its rise to fame. But two researchers from Sheffield Hallam University are looking to reveal the painted lady's best kept secret: is she or isn't she smiling?
Alessandro Soranzo and Michelle Newbury, the academics behind the study, believe that da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa's smile intentionally to appear and disappear - calling it "the uncatchable smile."
The idea struck while studying another of the artist's portraits, La Bella Principessa, as they noticed the young girl's smile was hauntingly similar to that of the Mona Lisa. Examining the painting closely and from every possible angle, it became clear that from certain vantage points the girl pictured was indeed smiling. Yet, from others, her upbeat demeanor seemed to completely vanish.
Leonardo da Vincis La Bella Principessa.
What Soranzo and Newbury discovered was that when focusing on the eyes, viewing from a distance, or when the painting was digitally blurred, a smile was visible. However, from up close or when looking directly at the mouth, it would disappear.
Applying this logic to the Mona Lisa, the researchers found the same effect, attributing the optical illusion in both paintings to the sfumato technique, which uses color and shading to alter perception.
Though they can't say definitively whether da Vinci planned "the uncatchable smile," Soranzo told The Telegraph, "given Leonardo's mastery of the technique and its subsequent use in the Mona Lisa, it is quite conceivable that the ambiguity of the effect was intentional."
So, after hundreds of years of arguing, we all get to be right: the Mona Lisa both is and isn't smiling.
