No. Almost every Leonardo scholar reads the Mona Lisa as the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. The self-portrait idea comes from a computer experiment of the 1980s.
The experiment was the work of Lillian Schwartz, a computer artist working at Bell Labs. She mirrored a red chalk drawing of an old man, laid it over the painting, and watched the eyes and the mouth fall into place. The result made the cover of a magazine in 1987. It never convinced the people who study Leonardo.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
Everything in that experiment rests on the drawing. It is kept in the Royal Library in Turin, a sheet of red chalk spotted brown by damp, and for generations it has been called Leonardo's self-portrait. In 2006, Professor Pietro Marani of Milan's Polytechnic University told the Italian news agency ANSA: "I don't question the fact that it was done by him. But I'm convinced the features aren't his."
Marani has his own idea of whose face it is. If he is right, the man Schwartz laid over the Mona Lisa was never Leonardo, and the match tells us little about Leonardo's own face.
How did a computer find a match?
By pressing two faces together until they agreed. Schwartz scanned the Mona Lisa and the Turin drawing at Bell Labs in 1984, with a program by the engineer Gerard Holzmann. She used the eyes of each face as anchor points, mirrored one image, scaled it, and joined the two into a single composite.
At the center line, she reported, the eyes and the lips lined up within a 2 percent margin, a match she called "atypically perfect."
Aligning two faces on their eyes builds part of the match into the method. Holzmann himself, the man who gave her the program, doubted the result proved that Leonardo was the model. Schwartz published it in the magazine Art & Antiques in January 1987 and in the journal The Visual Computer in 1988.
Art historians stayed skeptical, since the sitter already had a name. Her whole case still depended on one thing: whose face was in the drawing.
What You'll Discover
Who the old man might be.
What Leonardo looked like in his sixties.
What a margin note says about her.
Who Lisa Gherardini was.