Sublime

In this portrait, Leonardo also continued to experiment with his haunting method of creating a stare or gaze that seems to follow a viewer around a room. This “Mona Lisa effect” is not magical; it simply comes from drawing a realistic set of eyes staring directly at the viewer with proper perspective, shading, and modeling. But Leonardo discovered

If you stand close enough to the painting at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, you can see his fingerprint just to the right of Ginevra’s jaw, where her ringlets of hair blur into the background juniper tree and a distinct little spiky sprig juts out. Another can be found just behind her right shoulder.

During this period of intense anatomical study, Leonardo made 240 drawings and wrote at least thirteen thousand words of text, illustrating and describing every bone, muscle group, and major organ in the human body for what would have been, if it had been published, his most historic scientific triumph.

At the time when he was perfecting Lisa’s smile, Leonardo was spending his nights in the depths of the morgue under the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, peeling the flesh off cadavers and exposing the muscles and nerves underneath. He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyze every possible movement of each

Thus did Leonardo pioneer a new form of anatomical drawing, perhaps better described in his case as anatomical art, that is still in use today.

Even though Leonardo was not the first to create the appearance that the eyes of a portrait are following you around the room, the effect is so closely associated with him that it is sometimes called “the Mona Lisa effect.” Dozens of experts have studied the Mona Lisa to determine the scientific reasons for this effect. One is that in the three-dim