Twelve paintings, made between about 1470 and 1995, break one of the oldest habits of portraiture: keeping the mouth closed. In a dignified likeness, a laugh had no place.
Some of these smiles are so faint that they seem to vanish under a direct look. One shows a row of teeth, and it got its painter condemned in the Paris press.
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How These Were Chosen
Laughter is hard to paint. A sitter had to hold still through long sessions, while a laugh lasts a few seconds, so the painter had to build it from pieces: the corner of the mouth lifted, the cheeks pushed up, the eyes narrowing.
Custom stood in the way too. A portrait was meant to show a person composed for posterity, and for a long time the open mouth was left to the drinkers, fools and comic actors of everyday scenes.
Each painting on this list breaks that composure, from a faint lift of the lips to a full laugh, and in each the smile is what people noticed first, or argued over.
12. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (about 1503)
In the Mona Lisa, the smile sits at the corners of a closed mouth. There the outline of the lips is never drawn: it softens into the shadow of the cheeks. The woman has her hands folded before a landscape of rock and water.
Leonardo da Vinci started the panel around 1503, probably for the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, whose wife, Lisa Gherardini, is the sitter.
In those years a sitter rarely smiled, since a portrait was meant to show dignity, so this expression called for an explanation. The oldest one comes from Giorgio Vasari, a painter who wrote the first great collection of artists' biographies, his Lives of the Artists, published in 1550.
According to Vasari, Leonardo kept musicians, singers and jesters around the young woman while she posed, to keep her cheerful and chase melancholy from her face. The result, he wrote, was an expression so pleasing that the picture seemed more divine than human.
The story has one weakness: its author never saw the painting. The panel had been in France since 1516, and Leonardo was still retouching it there at his death in 1519, so Vasari had to rely on what Italian informants told him.
Leonardo's own method gives a better explanation. He painted in glazes, layers of oil paint so thin that they are almost transparent, and laid them one over another.
This technique, called sfumato, lets shadow pass into light by steps too small to see. The mouth is left with no sharp edge for the eye to hold on to.
That missing edge may also be why the smile seems to come and go. In 2003, the Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone argued that peripheral vision picks up shadows better than central vision does.
Looking at the eyes, a viewer catches the shaded corners of the mouth from the side and sees them curve upward. Looking straight at the lips, those shadows weaken, and the smile fades with them.
At a Glance
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519)
Painted: Begun about 1503, worked on until 1519
Medium: Oil on poplar panel
Size: 79.4 × 53.4 cm (31.3 × 21 in)
Where to see it: Musée du Louvre, Paris (Denon wing, room 711)
11. Antonello da Messina, Portrait of a Man, known as the Unknown Sailor (about 1470)
Leonardo was not the first to let a smile into a portrait. A generation earlier, a painter from Sicily did it in a small panel of a man in a black cap, turned three quarters toward the viewer, halfway between profile and full face.
Light falls across his ruddy skin, his eyes meet the onlooker's, and one corner of his mouth lifts. Antonello da Messina painted him around 1470, a date scholars still dispute, and nobody knows who the sitter was. When the panel resurfaced in the nineteenth century, the story goes, it was not hanging on any wall.