Mona Lisa

Most likely Lisa Gherardini, wife of the merchant del Giocondo, she turns toward us with the faint, unreadable smile that sfumato makes possible - the smoky blurring at mouth and eyes that keeps it shifting as you look. Behind her a dreaming landscape of winding water and bare peaks tilts higher on one side than the other. Leonardo never delivered it, reworking it for years. It has since become the most famous painting on earth, so reproduced and parodied that it has half stopped being a painting and hardened into a pure icon - a thing known long before it is ever really looked at. The three-quarter seated pose it perfected became a template at once, borrowed directly in Raphael's portrait of Agnolo Doni elsewhere in this collection.