Secrets of the Mona Lisa Revealed
Posted on September 26, 2006
New scientific techniques have yielded some fascinating new facts about Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, "Mona Lisa." It appears that da Vinci changed his mind about several things in the composition of the painting.
Photographs taken with invisible infrared light and a special infrared camera suggest that at least one of the details was hiding in plain sight, the scientists and conservators said. The sitter in the Louvre Museum's 16th-century masterpiece, believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, was originally painted wearing a large transparent overdress made from gauze, they said. Under normal light, part of the garment is visible on the right-hand side of the painting, but appears simply to be part of the background. "You can see it when you know what you're looking for," said Bruno Mottin, a curator in the research department of the Center of Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, known as C2RMF.Well, that's a relief. Art buffs will certainly want to read more secrets that have been revealed about the painting in the new book, Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting by Jean-Pierre Mohen, Bruno Mottin and Michel Menu (Harry N. Abrams).*****
Mr. Mottin said such transparent robes were worn by expecting or nursing mothers in 16th-century Italy. The robe's reappearance in the "Mona Lisa" would dovetail with scholarly research indicating that the painting might have been commissioned to commemorate the birth of Lisa Gherardini's third child. The imaging also shows, although less clearly, that some of the sitter's hair was rolled into a small bun and tucked under a tiny bonnet with an attached veil. (The images are too cloudy to be reproduced on newsprint.) "That is not surprising," Mr. Mottin said. "The bonnet was usually worn by women in the 16th century." More generally, the researchers said they realized that centuries of grime had obscured some elements of the painting.
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While the "Mona Lisa" has become famous for the sitter's calm, some say enigmatic, smile, it appears that the composition was not always so restful. For example, the new images show that at one point one of her hands was painted in a clenched rather than a relaxed position. "It was as if she was going to get up from a chair," Mr. Mottin said of the version Leonardo ultimately changed.
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Among other cutting-edge technologies, the scientists used a newly developed Canadian laser camera to construct an extremely detailed three-dimensional model of the painting. It reveals that while the "Mona Lisa" may be old and dirty, it is not, as had long been thought, particularly fragile. "We have a good handle on the physical state of the painting," Mr. Taylor said. While the wood panel on which it is painted is quite warped at points, he said, the 3-D model shows that it is sound and that the paint remains well bonded to its surface.
