The Etownian >> Features
Mona Lisa’s secrets revealed in new scans
Thursday October 25 2007
In life, Mona Lisa was the wife of a 16th-century Florentine merchant. This seemingly ordinary woman with the mysterious smile went on to become one of the most famous faces of the art world. Mona Lisa’s portrait, painted by Leonardo Da Vinci himself, has beguiled art buffs for centuries, as questions about her origins and meaning are woven as thickly as a tapestry. Parisian engineer and photographer Pascal Cotte is helping to unravel some of the mysteries. Using his training in optics, he has invented a camera capable of seeing through the many layers of Mona Lisa’s portrait. According to Cotte, the camera uses sensors to detect light from both the visible spectrum and the infrared and ultraviolet ranges, which are invisible to the human eye.
Three years ago, Cotte was granted permission from the Louvre to photograph Mona Lisa’s delicate portrait. He has since spent over 3,000 hours studying the data he took from the 240-megapixel scanned images, searching for the tiniest of details. Cotte shared his findings in San Francisco, at the United States debut of an exhibition detailing his research.
Originally, Cotte said, the Mona Lisa’s face included the eyebrows and lashes of both eyes that to us seem to be missing, but they were erased by previous restoration efforts. His scans also reveal that Mona Lisa was painted holding a blanket that is no longer visible in the painting. Close looks at her scanned hands reveal that Da Vinci changed his mind about the placement of his subject’s fingers. In addition, Mona Lisa’s subtle smile was once much more expressive, and her enigmatic face slightly wider than Da Vinci left them in the final painting.
“With just one photo you go deeper into the construction of the painting and understand that Leonardo was genius,” Cotte said.
Cotte said his analyses also revealed what he believes to be the painting’s true colors the way they looked on Da Vinci’s easel and on the canvas before it become corrupted by age, varnish and attempted preservations. From her place behind bulletproof glass in the Louvre, the painting appears to be comprised mainly of heavy browns, yellows and greens, but Cotte’s studies have revealed otherwise.
Working with a 22-gigabtye digital photo that Cotte made from 23 different color filters, he created an image of Mona Lisa painted in dazzling color:light blues and brilliant whites.
The exhibition includes all of Cotte’s scans, which include the different color filters and scans of individual layers of paint.
Cotte, 49, took his first visit to the Louvre when he was a boy in the 1960’s. He said that this first encounter with Mona Lisa’s famous face left him staring for hours, and created a lifelong obsession and goal.
Since his first work with the Mona Lisa, Cotte has made similar scans of over 500 paintings, including works by Van Gogh, Courbet and other European masters. He hopes to reveal their secrets as effectively as those he believes he has discovered those of the Mona Lisa. While some critics are skeptical of Cotte’s work, he also continues to hope that other engineers and art enthusiasts may follow in his footsteps to find out even more about famous paintings and their hidden secrets.
“To communicate our cultural heritage to our kids, we need to provide the maximum of information,” Cotte said.
For more information, readers can log on to www.monalisarevealed.com.
The Etownian >> Features