Bani Thani: The Woman Behind India's Mona Lisa

Every culture has its enigmatic painted woman. India's lives in a palm-sized painting from Kishangarh, Rajasthan, around 1750 — and unlike Leonardo's, we know exactly who she was.

Her name was Bani Thani, roughly 'the lady all dressed up.' She was a singer and poet at the Kishangarh court. Her admirer was the king himself, Sawant Singh, who also happened to be a devotional poet writing under the pen name Nagari Das.

The painter Nihal Chand turned her into an ideal: impossibly elongated lotus eyes, an arched brow, a swan's neck, a single serpentine curl of hair. Not so much a portrait as a definition of beauty.

The king didn't just commission the painting. Legend says he sketched her first and handed it to his artist — patron as co-author, love as art direction.

Smitten and distracted, Sawant Singh eventually abandoned the throne and left for Vrindavan with Bani Thani to live out his Krishna devotion. He died in 1764; she followed about a year later. The kingdom's golden age of painting went quiet with them.

In 1973, India put her on a postage stamp and labelled her 'Radha.' She had spent a lifetime being painted as the goddess of love. The post office simply made it official.