Mona Lisa, Young Again

Seventeen years. That is how long Leonardo kept coming back to her, laying one thin glaze over the last, waiting for each to dry before he added the next.

She sat for him at the beginning of it. He never handed the painting to the man who commissioned it. He carried her with him to France instead, still working on her. She was his prized possession until he passed in 1519, at sixty-seven.

What hangs here is her at the start, before the glass and the rope and the crowds. She is young again, and she is in this century with the rest of us.