Mona Lisa
Traditional end of the Mona Lisa’s first Florentine phase
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The Louvre's own catalogue dates the painting all the way from 1503 to 1519 and calls it unfinished at Leonardo's death.
Why 1506 ended up on the calendar
No contemporary document records Leonardo da Vinci finishing most of the Mona Lisa in 1506. The milestone is an inference: Giorgio Vasari wrote in 1550 that Leonardo worked on Lisa's portrait for four years, and four years added to a picture known to be underway by October 1503 lands about there.
Vasari was writing decades later and never saw the painting now in the Louvre. He also said Leonardo left the portrait unfinished.
The note in the margin of a Cicero
The secure contemporary evidence is a marginal note by Agostino Vespucci, written into a printed volume of Cicero in October 1503, saying that Leonardo was then at work on the head of Lisa del Giocondo.
That note proves Leonardo was painting a portrait of Lisa in October 1503. It does not establish the later history of the panel now in Paris.
Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo was the Florentine wife of the silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. The Louvre identifies her as the sitter, and Vespucci's note corroborates it.
The panel went to France with him
The Louvre now dates the object broadly to 1503–1519 and says Leonardo kept it, went on working on it, and left it unfinished at his death.
Leonardo took the painting to France himself. François I bought it from him in 1518 — before Leonardo died in 1519, not after.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited Date disputed
How this was checked
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Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1506.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The approximate 1506 endpoint derives mainly from applying Vasari’s “four years” to a work known to have begun by October 1503; Vasari wrote decades later and never saw the Louvre painting.
- The Louvre’s current catalogue treats the work as continually executed from about 1503 until Leonardo’s death in 1519 and still unfinished then.
- A 1517 account by Antonio de Beatis describes a Florentine lady’s portrait associated with Giuliano de’ Medici, creating a documentary complication that the Louvre discusses but does not regard as overturning the Lisa identification.
- The claim that the portrait celebrated Andrea’s birth and a new house is a modern hypothesis, not a stated fact in the surviving commission record.