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The Mona Lisa is the height of sfumato.

He creates a technique called sfumato, which comes from the Italian word fumo, or “smoke.”

His new technique of sfumato blurs everything together, the way smoke dissolves into air.

But some behold a deeper beauty there, too—the Mona Lisa’s hazy landscape and beguiling expression alike arise from Leonardo’s use of sfumato, a complex technique in which soft outlines emerge from many delicate layers of paint, like figures from a fog.

Similar to the Italian lemons—the tarter Sorrento and the sweeter Sfumato—used to make limoncello, my two lemon varieties impart different levels of sweetness and tartness.