Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa, perhaps Leonardo's most beloved masterpiece (he carried it with him for years), is considered by many to be the world's most famous painting. In The Da Vinci Code, Jacques Saunière leaves an anagram scrawled across the painting's Plexiglas cover. While Sophie and Langdon approach the painting to read the message, Langdon ruminates on a lecture he once gave to a group of convicts about the mystery and popularity of the painting.

Many prominent scholars agree that the painting is of a young Florentine woman, one Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, a wife of a Florentine merchant. It is from the name Giocondo (which has the felicitous meaning of "happy") that the painting receives the name La Joconde or La Gioconda.

Langdon seems to diminish the artistic mastery of the painting, crediting its fame with the secret it supposedly carries behind its smile. Many scholars and art historians have speculated on the nature of this smile and the secret it hides. Some maintain that the secret is the sitter's identity: the painting is a well-disguised self-portrait in drag, a possibility that Langdon mentions in his lecture.

Leonardo used a pyramid design to place the woman simply and calmly in the space of the painting. Her folded hands form the front corner of the pyramid. Her breast, neck and face glow in the same light that softly models her hands. The light gives the variety of living surfaces an underlying geometry of spheres and circles. Since the brightly lit face is practically framed with various much darker elements (hair, veil, shadows), the observer's attraction to Mona Lisa's face is brought to even greater extent. Thus, the composition of the figure evokes an ambiguous effect: we are attracted to this mysterious woman but have to stay at a distance as if she were a divine creature. The painting was one of the first portraits to depict the sitter before an imaginary landscape. The sensuous curves of the woman's hair and clothing, created through sfumato, are echoed in the undulating imaginary valleys and rivers behind her. The blurred outlines, graceful figure, dramatic contrasts of light and dark and overall feeling of calm are characteristic of Leonardo's style.

Mona Lisa's smile has repeatedly been a subject of many - greatly varying - interpretations. Sigmund Freud interpreted the 'smile' as signifying Leonardo's erotic attraction to his dear mother; others have described it as both innocent and inviting. Many researchers have tried to explain why the smile is seen so differently by people. The explanations range from scientific theories about human vision to curious supposition about Mona Lisa's identity and feelings. In late 2005, Dutch researchers from the University of Amsterdam ran the painting's image through "emotion recognition" computer software developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. They used a grid to break the smile into small divisions, and then checked it for each of six emotions: happiness, surprise, anger, disgust, fear, and sadness.The software found the smile to be 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful, 2% angry, less than 1% neutral, and not surprised at all.