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For four years I have been working on a portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo. She sits for hours. I play music to keep her expression alive — the faint smile that is not quite a smile, that contains a thought she has not yet finished. The difficulty is not the likeness. The difficulty is this: that the soul must show through the face, and the soul does not hold still.

I have used no sharp outlines. The forms dissolve into one another as they do in life and in smoke. I call this sfumato — from fumo, smoke. A hard edge is a lie. Light and shadow meet in gradations we cannot name.