[A] stimulating study grounded in documentary and literary sources, not to mention the painting itself.Readable and informative, this book is invaluable for offering a better understanding of the painting.Essential
na, CHOICE
Fascinating... revelatory... with their scholarly and fluent book Kemp and Pallanti have given Lisa Gherardini, mother and silk merchants wife, a new lease of authentic life and ... Read morere-established the Mona Lisa as an extraordinary painting with ordinary origins.
Michael Prodger, The Sunday Times
Brings the portrait of the enigmatic Lisa into a sharper focus than ever before.
Ross King, Woodstock and Bladon News
[Kemp & Pallanti] marshal meticulous research into the family histories of painter, patron and subject; deep knowledge of the traditions and allusions of Renaissance art; and scientific analyses of the venerated object.
Philip Ball, Nature
A model of clear-headed rationality, succinct, intriguing and marvellously readable.
Michael Bird, Daily Telegraph
This book is state of-the-art informative and will be mightily useful for students.
James Hall, Literary Review
Riveting reading... This book is a veritable mine of information. Beautifully written, it reaches out in an engaging and fluid way to those who know relatively little about the subject, whilst still imparting fascinating new evidence to the more experienced on the origins of the painting, and also about Mona Lisa herself. It is not just a further paean to 'the most famous painting in the world', it also offers to the reader a rich and tantalising picture of the world in which Leonardo da Vinci inhabited, and the huge part that an insignificant bourgeois woman, Mona Lisa del Gioconda, played in history.
Sandra Callard, On: Yorkshire Magazine
This well-researched book is also highly readable: after so many bunkum theories, the sober truth about the Mona Lisa's origins comes across as surprisingly radical and refreshing.
Alastair Smart, Prospect
Elegantly-produced study.
Richard Owen, The Tablet
Kemp analyses the painting as a key to all of Leonardos thinking and works, describing it as the 'window of the soul', in which is reflected all the knowledge acquired by the artist-scientist in the course of his life spent in the study of anatomy, optics, perspective, geology, atmosphere, hydrology and the science of painting.
Pietro C. Marani, The Burlington Magazine
Show Less