What’s Sfumato With You?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Mona Lisa Leonardo da Vinci

Each day, people from all over the globe travel to Paris to visit the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa. Many are just curious, and want to see the real thing for themselves. Some admire the famous enigmatic smile, the perfect proportions and ideal composition of the piece. Still others seek to explore some of the fantastical and mysterious claims about the painting. Unfortunately, the painting is behind thick glass and a wooden railing keep everyone a good distance away. The huge crowds create additional obstacles to close inspection. It’s too bad, for Leonardo was the most prominent practitioner of a painting technique known as “sfumato,” which translates literally as, “gone up in smoke.”

Leonardo himself described the sfumato technique as “without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or beyond the picture plane.” During the Renaissance, painting underwent radical changes as artists learned …