What the Mona Lisa Tells Us About Fuller Figures in Art and Why Ozempic Might Change Body Image in Art History

I recently spent a full day at the Louvre and, as I got towards the end of my visit, I caved in and finally joined the slow shuffle toward the Mona Lisa. I’d heard the warnings about the crowds, and they weren’t wrong. People pushed forward with phones held high, trying to photograph a painting roughly the size of a kitchen tray.

And honestly, I didn’t get it. There are so many breathtaking paintings in this museum, vast Davids and Géricaults, the Winged Victory at the top of the stairs, and yet this small portrait is the one with the velvet ropes and the security detail. The same painting curators went to extraordinary lengths to hide from the Nazis, shuttling her around the French countryside in ambulances and crates marked with codes.

When it was my turn to be at the front, I took my time to really look at it. Lisa Gherardini, the woman behind that famous half-smile, has a soft jaw, a rounded chin, and shoulders that fill her dress. She belongs to a long line of fuller figures that painters celebrated. And we may be about to break that line for the first time in five hundred years.

The Woman Behind the Glass

Lisa Gherardini was the wife of a Florentine silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo started her portrait around 1503 and carried it with him for the rest of his life, refining it, fussing over it, and apparently never quite delivering it to the family who commissioned it. 

When he died in France in 1519, she was still in his possession. François I bought her, and she’s been a French resident ever since.

What strikes you when you finally see her in person, assuming you can see her at all through the phones, is how unidealized she looks. Her face is round, her hands rest one over the other with a softness that suggests a real body underneath the dark gown, not a sculpted mannequin. 

Leonardo painted what was in front of him. He was an anatomist as much as a painter, dissecting cadavers in candlelit rooms to understand how a smile actually worked, how muscle pulled on skin.

That refusal to flatter is part of why the painting survived the centuries. It isn’t in any way enhanced to flatter, but a true portrait of a married woman in her twenties with the soft features of someone who ate well and lived comfortably in Renaissance Florence. 

The Louvre’s curators understood her value even in wartime, which is how she ended up traveling in an ambulance with a nurse pretending to attend to a patient. She spent the war years hidden in châteaux across the Dordogne and Lot, including the Château de Chambord and later the abbey of Loc-Dieu in Aveyron.

When Fullness Meant Something

For most of European art history, a body with flesh on it carried meaning. It signaled wealth, health, fertility, and the favor of God or whichever god happened to be in fashion. Thinness signaled poverty, illness, or the kind of asceticism reserved for saints and hermits. Painters worked within those parameters.

Look at Rubens, the Flemish master who gave us the word Rubenesque. His Three Graces in the Prado, painted around 1635, are unmistakably women with bellies, hips, and dimpled thighs. The figure on the left is reportedly his second wife, Hélène Fourment, whom he married when she was sixteen and he was fifty-three. 

He painted her over and over, and he painted her as she was. The Graces aren’t being mocked or sexualized in some narrow modern sense. They’re being held up as the ideal of feminine beauty for a Catholic court that equated abundance with grace.

France had its own version of this. Boucher’s Odalisque, hanging in the Louvre not far from the Mona Lisa, shows a fleshy young woman draped across a divan. Fragonard’s bathers are all soft stomachs and round shoulders. 

Even Ingres, painting into the 19th century, gave his Grande Odalisque an extra vertebra or two to extend her back, but he didn’t slim her down. The fullness was the point.

The Charente Connection and the Painters Who Followed

Living in rural Charente, I’m reminded all the time that the French countryside fed the painters who built this tradition. The Cognac region sits in the middle of a food culture that prizes butter, duck fat, walnut oil, and slow-cooked everything. 

The bodies that emerged from that culture, the bodies the painters actually saw on market day in places like Aubeterre or Villebois-Lavalette, were not the bodies you see on a Paris runway today.

Courbet, who painted his scandalous Origin of the World in 1866, came from rural Franche-Comté and painted peasant women with the same unflinching attention he gave to landscapes. 

His Bathers of 1853 caused an uproar at the Salon precisely because the central figure was a large, ordinary-looking woman seen from behind, not a goddess. Napoleon III reportedly struck the painting with his riding crop. 

Renoir carried the same instinct into Impressionism. His bathers from the 1880s and 1890s are all soft pink flesh, dimples, and weight. He once said he painted what he wanted to touch, which tells you something about the painter’s relationship to the body as subject. 

What the Ozempic Study Actually Said

The recent study that started me down this rabbit hole by Dr. Michael Yafi of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston examined the visual record of human bodies across centuries of European art and compared it with what might come next. The argument, broadly, is that we’ve had roughly five hundred years of art that treated fuller figures as worthy of paint and canvas. 

Wealth made fullness, fullness signaled status, and painters recorded status. 

Weight-loss injections like Ozempic and Wegovy, originally developed for type 2 diabetes and now widely prescribed for weight management, could change the bodies artists see around them. 

If the people who can afford to commission portraits, or the celebrities whose faces become the visual currency of the age, are uniformly slim because of pharmaceutical intervention, the art that gets made about bodies will follow. 

The study’s authors suggested we might be entering the first era in Western art history where pharmacological thinness becomes the default visual reference.

I’m not in a position to argue with the medical side of any of this. People with serious health conditions deserve treatments that work. What strikes me, standing in the Louvre and then walking out into the Tuileries afterward, is how strange it would be if Lisa Gherardini turned out to be the end of a long line rather than a midpoint. 

Five centuries of painters made room for her face and figure. The next five might not.

What France Still Gets Right

One of the reasons I love living here is that the French food culture, at least in the rural parts I know best, hasn’t fully bought into the idea that bodies are a problem to be solved. The Sunday lunch in a Charentaise farmhouse still runs to four courses. The boulangerie still sells real butter croissants, and the cheese course is non-negotiable. Nobody apologizes for any of it.

That doesn’t mean France is immune. Paris pharmacies sell Wegovy, and magazine covers in the supermarket aisle look much the same as they do in London or New York. But there’s a residual respect here for the body that eats and works and ages, the body that shows up in a Renoir or a Courbet. 

You see it at the market in Verteuil on a Saturday morning, and it’s wonderful to watch as people really live their lives.

The Mona Lisa, in that sense, isn’t just a Renaissance portrait stuck behind reinforced glass, but a record of what painters once considered worth looking at, before the camera, before the airbrush, before the injection pen. 

I left the Louvre thinking I owed her another visit, ideally on a Wednesday evening when the crowds thin out and you can actually see her face. The half-smile makes more sense once you stop trying to read it as a riddle and start reading it as the expression of a woman who knew she was being looked at by someone who saw her clearly.