It was a tiny discovery, but for an anatomist who was also an artist, especially one who was in the midst of painting the Mona Lisa, it was worth noting. Pucker your lower lip and you can see that this is true it can pucker on its own, with or without the upper lip, but it is impossible to pucker the upper lip alone. The muscle that purses the lips is the same muscle that forms the lower lip, he discovered. The Mona Lisa’s smile makes it worth revisiting the remarkable page of anatomical drawings from around 1508 that shows a pair of lips in an open-mouth grimace and then drawn pursed. Image credit: Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017.

Anatomical drawings of lips by Leonardo da Vinci. Tracing which of those nerves are cranial and which are spinal may not have been necessary for painting a smile, but Leonardo needed to know.

He became fascinated about how a smile begins to form and instructed himself to analyze every possible movement of each part of the face and determine the origin of every nerve that controls each facial muscle. Never in a painting have motion and emotion, the paired touchstones of Leonardo’s art, been so intertwined.Īt 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. We look away, and the smile lingers in our minds, as it does in the collective mind of humanity. What is she thinking? Our eyes move a bit, and her smile seems to change. “In this work of Leonardo,” wrote Vasari, “there was a smile so pleasing that it was more divine than human.” He even told a tale of how Leonardo kept the real Lisa smiling during the portrait sessions: “While painting her portrait, he employed people to play and sing for her, and jesters to keep her merry, to put an end to the melancholy that painters often succeed in giving to their portraits.” And finally, there is the Mona Lisa’s most mystical and engaging element of all: Her smile.

Leonard de vinci walter isaacson