Martin Kemp with Mona Lisa – The People and the Painting

Read this book and the world’s most famous image will never look the same again! This cultural icon still has secrets to reveal…

For the first time, we meet previously undiscovered members of Leonardo’s immediate family and new information is revealed about his early childhood. We learn about the new money of the ambitious merchant who married into the old gentry of Lisa’s family. We discover Lisa’s life as a wife and mother, her association with sexual scandals, and her later life in a convent.

From these newly identified factual beginnings, Martin Kemp offers a radical interpretation of the Mona Lisa; we see how Leonardo’s science of optics, psychology, anatomy and geology are woven together to form a new understanding of the portrait that is the product of real people in a real place at a real time.

Martin Kemp is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford University. One of the world’s leading authorities on Leonardo da Vinci, he has published extensively on his life and work.