The Mona Lisa Hiding in Plain Sight
For nearly two centuries it hung in Madrid as a forgettable copy — until conservators peeled back the black paint and found something Leonardo himself may have watched being made.
In the Museo del Prado, tucked among masterpieces by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, hung a portrait of a woman with a familiar, knowing half-smile. For decades curators walked past it without much thought, cataloguing it as an anonymous copy from the first quarter of the 16th century — a competent imitation of the far more famous Mona Lisa in Paris. Nobody suspected that behind its darkened varnish lay a secret nearly as old as the Louvre's masterpiece itself.
The painting's documented history stretches back to 1666, when it appeared in an inventory of the Alcazar in Madrid, listed simply as 'Mujer de mano de Leonardo Abince' — 'Woman by Leonardo da Vinci's hand.' No one knows exactly when it entered the Spanish Royal Collection, though it may have arrived as early as the start of the 17th century. When the Prado opened its doors in 1819, the painting became part of its permanent holdings, where it would remain, largely overlooked, for nearly two hundred years.
What set it apart, even before anyone understood why, was that it lacked something every other known copy possessed: a landscape background. Where the Louvre's Mona Lisa gazes out over hazy blue mountains, the Prado's version showed only flat, featureless black. A lithograph of the painting existed too — unusual for a work considered merely anonymous.
The truth emerged only when the Louvre requested the Prado's painting for a 2012 exhibition on Leonardo's Saint Anne. To prepare it for travel, restorers at the Prado undertook a full conservation between 2011 and 2012 — and the black paint began to give way. Beneath it, they uncovered a genuine landscape, hidden for roughly 200 years, since oxidized varnishes showed the black repaint had been applied not before 1750 — long after the portrait itself was made.
Infrared reflectography and radiography revealed something even more startling: the underlying drawing beneath the paint was essentially the same as the one beneath Leonardo's original in the Louvre, complete with matching corrections, though rendered in a different hand. The implication was extraordinary — this was not a copy made years or decades later by someone studying the finished Mona Lisa, but a painting created in Leonardo's own workshop, at the very same time as the original.
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