According to a team of investigators, the reason why the painting appears to be radiantly happy one moment and then sad the next one is because of the way our brain handles the signals forwarded by the eyes. There are several different types of vision cells in the retina, and each of them sends information to the brain on a specific channel. Traits such as size, clarity, brightness and location are all archived in these channels, and then sent to the visual cortex of the brain for deciphering.
The main question that still remains is whether Leonardo da Vinci, the painter that created the masterpiece, actually intended for it to cause so much confusion in the eyes of the beholders. According to Otero Martinez, the artist knew exactly what he was doing. “He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that's what he saw in the street,” the expert explains.