The Mona Lisa and the Male Gaze: Who Controls the Look?

Who is looking, and who is being looked at? How is the subject positioned or presented to the viewer? What role do gender and power play in that relationship? These questions — drawn from Laura Mulvey's theory of the male gaze and John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' — find a fascinating focal point in one of the most celebrated paintings in history: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

The Mona Lisa: a painting that looks back

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa is perhaps the most visited and most written-about painting in the world. Millions travel to the Louvre each year to stand before her — and many report the uncanny sensation that she is looking back at them, even though she isn't (Horstmann & Loth, 2019). It is that steady, stoic gaze and the famously ambiguous smile that draws people in. But that gaze also holds power. Feminists have long looked at this painting as a source of strength. Others, following Laura Mulvey, see it as evidence that men still view women as objects — what Mulvey famously called the 'male gaze' (Mulvey, 2024).

Mona Lisa appears calm and self-possessed. She wears no jewellery or adornments. She is turned slightly away from the viewer, hands crossed in her lap, and yet the viewer is drawn in — as if trying to read what she might be thinking. During the 19th century, some writers and critics read something more unsettling into that smile. They described it as the expression of a dangerous femme fatale, a woman capable of driving a man to madness (Spector, n.d.). Even Freud weighed in, noting that the painting reminded him of his own mother — though Freud himself viewed women as both material and sensual objects (Spector, n.d.). Da Vinci, by contrast, is said to have intended the painting to signify both nature and humanity — to return power to the person being viewed.

Feminists have read the Mona Lisa as a symbol of liberation. And yet the debate persists: are women in paintings — and in visual culture more broadly — still viewed as objects? Mulvey's framework suggests the structure of looking itself is the problem, not simply the intentions of individual artists or viewers.

Berger and the surveyor and the surveyed

John Berger extended Mulvey's ideas in his influential television series and book 'Ways of Seeing' (1972). He argued that women in Western visual culture are conditioned to watch themselves being watched — to internalise the male gaze and become simultaneously the surveyor and the surveyed (Bahadur, 2017). Women, Berger suggested, must be more careful and self-conscious about their appearance because of how others — particularly men — look at them.

Berger argued that media and culture train us to look at images through the eyes of gender and power (Bahadur, 2017). When we look at a painting of a woman, are we seeing her as a full human subject — or have we reduced her to an object? Are we granting her agency, or withholding it? Berger believed men are judged by the power they wield, and women by how they appear. In the Mona Lisa, he saw something rare: a painting whose true meaning — that quiet, self-contained confidence — we no longer fully see.

The questions Berger and Mulvey raise are not merely academic. They ask us to examine the habits of looking we bring to every image — in galleries, in cinema, in advertising, and online. The Mona Lisa, painted over five hundred years ago, remains one of the most productive sites for that examination.