Mysteries of the Two Mona Lisa's: Inside the Workshop of Leonardo da Vinci

Monroe Pettigrew © 2026

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Florence shaped Raphael at exactly the moment he was ready to be shaped. He had already proven himself in Umbria, already mastered grace, balance, and clarity of form. But in Florence, something quieter began to enter his work. He encountered a new kind of depth, a softness that seemed to come not from technique alone but from patience. Leonardo’s presence loomed over the city not as a loud authority, but as a subtle one. You did not need to meet him directly to feel his influence. You felt it in the way painters spoke about light, about atmosphere, about the way a face could seem to breathe rather than pose.

 

Raphael watched closely. He studied the way Leonardo blurred the edges of form, the way contours dissolved into shadow. This was not the sharp elegance of Perugino, nor the crystalline clarity of early Renaissance line. This was something gentler and more complex. It was a way of painting that invited the viewer inward rather than holding them at a distance.

 

Somewhere in those Florentine years, Raphael produced a small drawing of a woman seated in three quarter view, her hands folded, her expression calm and inward. Today it sits in the Louvre, often called Raphael’s Mona Lisa. The drawing is widely understood to be a study made in close proximity to Leonardo’s work on the Mona Lisa, and it is often associated with the same sitter, though this cannot be known with certainty. Rather than imitation or competition, the sketch stands as evidence of shared subject matter within a shared artistic environment.

 

What Raphael absorbed in Florence was not only technique but a way of seeing. His figures became more psychologically present. His portraits no longer simply displayed rank or beauty. They suggested inner life. Nowhere is this more evident than in his Portrait of a Cardinal, today in the Prado Museum. The painting is quiet, restrained, almost severe, yet the surface tells another story. The soft transitions of flesh into shadow, the gentle dissolving of edges, the way light settles on the face without hard lines. The influence of Leonardo’s sfumato is unmistakable, not identical, but close enough to feel intentional. Raphael was not borrowing a trick. He was absorbing a philosophy.

 

During these same years, Florence was the place where the Mona Lisa lived as an idea, not yet an icon. Leonardo worked on it slowly, openly, allowing the painting to be seen by artists who passed through his orbit. Raphael would have been in that proximity. He would have heard the conversations, seen the gestures, felt the atmosphere that surrounded Leonardo’s work. The Mona Lisa was not a finished legend yet. It was a presence in the room, something still becoming.