Leonardo da Vinci: When a Smile Built a Room Time Could Not Enter

In Florence, Lisa Gherardini sits before Leonardo, folds her hands and asks him to paint her face, and he answers that he can paint her eyes without knowing who looks through them. On a small poplar panel he lays out the portrait like a building, with the body as foundation, the hands as threshold, the eyes as windows and the mouth as a half-open door, while sfumato dissolves the edge between face and air and a divided landscape of roads, bridges and mountains rises behind her shoulders. The painting wakes at night to ask why he has not finished it, and Leonardo is summoned before the Court of Unfinished Works, where Time sits as judge among his unbuilt machines and accuses him of refusing completion; the eyes, the hands and at last the smile are called to testify, and the smile says it reveals the visitor to the self. He carries the panel from Italy to France, and after his death it passes through royal palaces to the Louvre, is stolen, leaves an empty place that crowds come to see, and returns as the most famous question in the history of art. At the end of the trial Time waits for the Mona Lisa to change, she smiles, and Time feels afraid as it never has before, realizing that Leonardo built an entire age inside a woman's face.