A French scientist who has spent more than 10 years analyzing the Mona Lisa using reflective light technology claims that he has discovered the image of at least one portrait and perhaps as many as three different paintings hidden beneath Da Vinci’s masterpiece.
According to CNN.com and BBC News reports, Pascal Cotte created a digital reconstruction of what is purportedly the actual portrait of the woman called Lisa del Giocondo or Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine merchant believed to be the true subject of the artwork.
The woman in the reconstruction shows an image of a female subject looking off to the side, with no trace of that the BBC refers to as the Mona Lisa’s “enigmatic smile,” the feature that the 500-plus-year-old painting is arguably best known for. Cotte used a technique of his own design, known as Layer Amplification Method (LAM), to analyze the painting.
He explained that LAM works by “projecting a series of intense lights” on to the painting. Measurements of the lights’ reflections are then collected using a camera and used to recreate what happened between the layers of paint, the scientist explained to BBC News.
Imaging technique used to discover the alleged second painting
While over the past 50 years, several scientific examinations have studied the Mona Lisa, but Cotte, who was given permission from the Louvre to work with the masterpiece back in 2004, claimed that LAM is able to penetrate more deeply into the painting than previous methods.
In a statement, he told reporters that this technique “takes us into the heart of the paint-layers of the world’s most famous picture and reveals secrets that have remained hidden for 500 years. The results shatter many myths and alter our vision of Leonardo’s masterpiece forever.”
In fact, he claims that his reconstruction of Lisa Gherardini is “totally different to Mona Lisa today. This is not the same woman,” according to BBC News. Furthermore, he reportedly found two other images beneath the surface of the painting: a portrait of a person with a larger head and nose, bigger hands and smaller lips, and a Madonna-style image with a pearl headdress.
Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, told CNN and BBC News that he was skeptical of Cotte’s claims. While he called the images “ingenious in showing what Leonardo may have been thinking about,” he called the notion that there are other pictures hiding beneath the surface of the Mona Lisa “untenable.”
“There are considerable changes during the course of the making of the portrait – as is the case with most of Leonardo’s paintings,” he added. “I prefer to see a fluid evolution from a relatively straightforward portrait of a Florentine women into a philosophical and poetic picture that has a universal dimension.”
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