The Mona Lisa gets around.  She’s an attention glutton too, but I digress.  The point I’d like to make here is that the Mona Lisa was painted around 1503, and people are still nuts about it.  The painting has staying power.

What's the sfumato with you?

Stolen by thieves, psychoanalyzed by Freud, imitated and satirized by artists, deciphered by university computers to be mostly happy.  Why do we keep gawking at a lady who apparently had a bad run-in with eyebrow wax?  It’s been 5 centuries.  They’re not growing back.

Da Vinci was a genius.  I’m about to oversimplify, but this isn’t a dissertation, so hopefully I’m aloud to.  Da Vinci did two things:

• sfumato
• simple clothing

Sfumato is a painting technique that avoids use of extreme darks and lights.  It means “smoke” in Italian, which basically helps us picture this technique as a hazy, low contrast way of making an image.  It was perfect for creating Mona Lisa’s smile.  Sfumato doesn’t appear ground-breaking, but it has effected art-making for over 500 years.

Da Vinci preferred simple clothing in portraiture.  Da Vinci wrote in his Treatise on Painting,

“As far as possible avoid the costumes of your own day.…Costumes of our period should not be depicted unless it be on tombstones, so that we may be spared being laughed at by our successors for the mad fashions of men…”

Da Vinci changed the practice of painting this way.  The results have been long-lasting.  How does this apply to work?  If you want to create permanent change in how work gets done, seek subtlety and avoid fads.