I've never really gotten into the Mona Lisa; its iconic status seems so much a matter of historical accident rather than any reflection on its merits, and trying to see it in the Louvre is such a scramble that it hardly seems worth the effort.
But I was fascinated to learn that, at least on one account, we've been looking at the wrong aspect of the painting. In the essay "Poses and passions: Mona Lisa's 'closely folded' hands'," Zirka Z. Filipczak dismisses the smile in the few paragraphs, saying that it is a reference to the name of her husband, Giacondo, which means "jocund, merry, glad, joyous". (p. 70) "The faintness of her smile would not have puzzled contemporaries. No respectable adult smiled broadly as to display teeth, that would simultaneously reveal one's vulgarity."
What is interesting, the article argues, is the position of the hands, which broadly follow the conventions of the time in having hands crossed over the abdomen. e.g. Decor puellarum, a handbook for maidens published in 1461: "Whether you are standing still or walking, you right hand must always rest upon your left, in front of you, on the level of your girdle." (Quoted page 72)
Leonardo wasn't precise about the right on left, but he did believe: "Women must be represented in modest attitudes, their legs close together, their arms closely folded." (p. 73)
That this convention made it across Europe is shown by Haec Vir: or The Womanish Man, 1620 (London): "Because I stand not with my hand on my belly ... am I therefore barbarous or shamelesse?" The error lay, she says, not in behaviour, but "in the fashion, in the custom". (p. 73)
The most favoured pose for men in paintings, by contrast, with elbows projecting outward, which "proclaimed a man to be physically vigorous and to possess bravery, the virtue and feeling deemed as essential for men as chastity was for women". (p. 83)
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