The most famous sfumato paintings are almost all by one artist. Leonardo da Vinci invented the technique, and the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks and the Lady with an Ermine all show what it can do to a face.
Sfumato means smoke in Italian. Leonardo built it by laying down layers of near transparent paint until every edge dissolved into the next.
In brief
Leonardo described the technique himself as blending colours without lines or borders, like smoke.
Engineer Pascal Cotte spent over fifteen years scanning the Mona Lisa with a multispectral camera to map how the sfumato was built underneath its varnish.
Andrea del Sarto adapted Leonardo's soft transitions into a warmer, more colourful palette.
Sfumato needs oil paint. Most Florentine painters before Leonardo worked in tempera, which dries too fast for this kind of blending.
1. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (about 1503 to 1519)
Leonardo worked on this portrait for at least fifteen years, carrying it with him until his death in France in 1519 rather than handing it to a client. The corners of the mouth and eyes dissolve into shadow instead of ending in a line, which is part of why the expression seems to shift as you look at it.
Engineer Pascal Cotte spent over fifteen years scanning the painting with a multispectral camera to map how Leonardo built the sfumato underneath centuries of varnish. It has hung in the Louvre, Paris, since the museum's collection was formed after the French Revolution.
2. Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks (1483 to 1486)
A confraternity in Milan commissioned this altarpiece in 1483, and Leonardo used soft, smoky transitions to merge the figures into the rock and mist behind them rather than outlining them against it.
Leonardo painted a second version of the same composition over the following two decades, now in the National Gallery, London. This first one, considered the earlier and unrestored of the two, stayed in the Louvre, Paris.
3. Leonardo da Vinci, Saint John the Baptist (1513 to 1516)
This is thought to be Leonardo's last finished painting, made in the years just before his death. Saint John emerges from total darkness with almost no outline at all, built from thin glazes of oil rather than a single visible brushstroke.
Specialists consider the sfumato in this canvas thinner and softer than in any of Leonardo's earlier work. It has hung in the Louvre, Paris, alongside the Mona Lisa for centuries.
4. Leonardo da Vinci, Ginevra de' Benci (about 1474 to 1478)
Painted when Leonardo was in his early twenties, this portrait already shows him softening the edges around Ginevra's face years before sfumato had a name. The juniper bush behind her, ginepro in Italian, is a play on her own name.
The National Gallery of Art in Washington bought the painting from the Prince of Liechtenstein in 1967. It remains the only Leonardo painting on public view anywhere in the Americas.
5. Leonardo da Vinci, Lady with an Ermine (about 1489 to 1491)
Cecilia Gallerani, mistress to the Duke of Milan, turns her head as if someone has just walked into the room, her skin built from layers so thin they read as light rather than paint. The ermine under her arm may be a pun on the duke own nickname.
The painting survived the Second World War after being seized by the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, who kept it in his home. It now belongs to the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland.
6. Andrea del Sarto, Madonna of the Harpies (1517)
Nuns in Florence commissioned this altarpiece in 1515, and del Sarto took two years to finish it, blending Leonardo soft transitions with a warmer, brighter range of colour.
The pedestal under the Virgin's feet carries carved figures art historians read as harpies, which gave the painting its name. It has hung in the Uffizi, Florence, since it left the convent that commissioned it.
Where to see them
Louvre, Paris: Leonardo's Mona Lisa, The Virgin of the Rocks and Saint John the Baptist.
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC: Leonardo's Ginevra de' Benci.
Czartoryski Museum, Krakow: Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine.
Uffizi Gallery, Florence: Andrea del Sarto's Madonna of the Harpies.
Sfumato paintings, what readers ask
What does sfumato mean? It comes from the Italian for smoke, and describes colours and edges blended so gradually that no line separates them.
Who invented sfumato? Leonardo da Vinci developed the technique and used it more than any other painter of his time, though later artists such as Andrea del Sarto adapted it too.
Why does the Mona Lisa's smile look like it changes? The corners of her mouth and eyes are painted without a hard edge, so the eye reads the shadow differently depending on where you look.
Is sfumato the same as chiaroscuro? No. Chiaroscuro is about strong contrast between light and dark, while sfumato is about the smooth transition between them.
Why the blur was the point
Sfumato is not a blur added at the end.
Leonardo built it into the paint itself, one transparent layer at a time, so that no line would ever separate light from shadow. Fewer than twenty finished paintings by him survive today, and five of them are on this list.
Sfumato sits alongside chiaroscuro, impasto, fresco, pointillism, oil painting, and watercolor in Painting Techniques Explained, a guide to all seven techniques that built these paintings.