12-8-15
Secret Portrait Hidden Under Mona Lisa, Claims French Scientist
Breaking Newstags: Mona Lisa
Pascal Cotte, a French scientist, claims to have found another portrait beneath that of the world-famous Mona Lisa. Using reflective light technology, Cotte has spent more than 10 years analysing Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece. He claims to have found an underlying image of a model looking off to the side. The Louvre Museum in Paris, which houses the work, has not commented on Cotte’s alleged discovery.
The scientist is the co-founder of the Paris-based company Lumiere Technology, which works closely with galleries and museums to digitize their fine-art pieces. Its website claims to have digitized works by Marc Chagall, Claude Renoir, Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh. The Louvre granted Cotte access to the Mona Lisa in 2004, the BBC , which is airing a documentary about the discovery, reports.
The hidden image lacks both the Mona Lisa’s famed direct gaze and her smile. Cotte claims he found it by projecting intense light onto the portrait. A camera then measured the lights’ reflections, which allowed Cotte to reconstruct what was created with each layer of paint. This technique is known as Layer Amplification Method.
comments powered by Disqus
News
- Josh Hawley Earns F in Early American History
- Does Germany's Holocaust Education Give Cover to Nativism?
- "Car Brain" Has Long Normalized Carnage on the Roads
- Hawley's Use of Fake Patrick Henry Quote a Revealing Error
- Health Researchers Show Segregation 100 Years Ago Harmed Black Health, and Effects Continue Today
- Nelson Lichtenstein on a Half Century of Labor History
- Can America Handle a 250th Anniversary?
- New Research Shows British Industrialization Drew Ironworking Methods from Colonized and Enslaved Jamaicans
- The American Revolution Remains a Hotly Contested Symbolic Field
- Untangling Fact and Fiction in the Story of a Nazi-Era Brothel