Did the Mona Lisa’s Mystery Begin as Victorian Clickbait?

Image: Leonardo da Vinci, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Today, the Mona Lisa is rarely discussed without mentioning her mysterious smile. Viewers are encouraged to wonder what she is thinking, what secret she might be hiding, or why her expression seems to change. Yet this obsession with mystery was not part of the painting’s original reputation. It developed centuries after Leonardo da Vinci painted the portrait.

During the Renaissance, writers celebrated the Mona Lisa primarily because she appeared astonishingly lifelike. Giorgio Vasari praised Leonardo’s ability to imitate nature, describing the moisture in her eyes, the delicate color of her skin, and a mouth that appeared to be made of flesh rather than paint. He even claimed that a viewer could almost see the pulse beating in her throat. Her smile was described as beautiful and natural, not as evidence that she was concealing a dark secret (Clark, 1973).

That interpretation began to change during the nineteenth century. As books, newspapers, and literary journals became more widely available, written descriptions could reach audiences who had never seen the original painting. According to historian Donald Sassoon (2001), these publications increasingly taught readers how famous artworks were supposed to be understood. The Mona Lisa was gradually transformed from a realistic portrait of a Florentine woman into a mysterious and dangerous figure.

French writers were especially influential in creating this new image. Théophile Gautier described the woman’s thoughts as vague and impossible to express. Other critics portrayed her as seductive, deceptive, and capable of destroying the men who attempted to understand her. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the smiling woman had become a femme fatale: an alluring but dangerous figure whose face supposedly contained hidden desires and ancient secrets (Sassoon, 2001).

Art historian Kenneth Clark (1973) argued that this Romantic fascination changed how the public understood the painting. A work once admired for its realism and technical finish became an embodiment of mystery. The writers had not discovered a secret hidden inside Leonardo’s portrait. They had created a dramatic new interpretation and shared it with a growing reading public.

In modern terms, it worked much like clickbait. The promise of danger, seduction, and an unsolved secret made the portrait irresistible. More than a century later, audiences are still repeating the story those nineteenth-century writers taught them to see.

Further Reading

Clark, K. (1973). Mona Lisa. The Burlington Magazine, 115(840), 144–151.

Sassoon, D. (2001). “Mona Lisa”: The best-known girl in the whole wide world. History Workshop Journal, 51, 1–18.