As a university trained oil painter I have been through the mill of intellectualizing this topic and so I shall not bore you with all that verbiage, nor will I pontificate upon my position -- rather, I will simply put it out there that if One looks at the portraiture of the time (especially up until this portrait) Mona Lisa's eyes stand out, it's a life, a sparkle that is not seen in other portraits until then and for that, it was and remains a masterpiece. It was a sea-change moment in truly capturing the "soul" of a person and not about her visage as a whole, or the fashion of the day.