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High-Res Scan of Mona Lisa Reveals Its History
daevux writes "CNN is reporting that French engineer Pascal Cotte has discovered interesting details of the history of Da Vinci's Mona Lisa from a 240-megapixel scan of the artwork in various frequencies. Cotte surmises that the painted figure's eyebrows and eyelashes probably disappeared due to poor cleaning at some point in the past. He believes he can reconstruct the painting's original skin tones."
So will we ever know if it is a man or not?
It's a Man BABY!!
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Will THAT monstrosity be removed in Dan Brown's next book -> movie? His next one is about the Masons, and we know they don't tolerate that sort of frivality.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Let me guess... they've discovered that Mona Lisa's face is actually a combination of the faces of Da Vinci, Jesus, Dan Brown, and Tom Hanks?
The researcher said the "Mona Lisa's" smile was originally slightly wider than it appears today, and, in fact, so was her entire face.
;-)
Way to go Leonardo!!!!
I'm not saying I wouldn't love to see a print of what it looked like "originally" but the aging of the painting adds to the significance of the work as a whole doesn't it? If so wouldn't things like thing cheapen the priceless nature of these pieces?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
You did't get the first post...I did.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
240 megapixels and you link to a CNN article? Show me the pixels!
Yep - gotta move faster than that. Ah well. Still a bit underwhelmed.
I'd rather be flying
Let's see all her skin tone!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Mona Lisa, masterpiece ...
A painting, badly damaged
Gentlemen, we can rebuild her
We have the technology
We have the capability
Mona Lisa is that painting
Better than she was before
Brighter - Truer colors - Anatomically Complete
Did he find "THIS IS A FAKE" written on the canvas in felt tipped marker under all that paint?
He goes on at length here, down around page 190.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
:|
That's a kickass compressor.
Thou shalt not begin a subject line or post with the word "Umm".
I'm not saying I wouldn't love to see a print of what it looked like "originally" but the aging of the painting adds to the significance of the work as a whole doesn't it? If so wouldn't things like thing cheapen the priceless nature of these pieces? No, no, NO! No it doesn't.
DAMN no!
Oh my god. Seriously, what you're saying is that a worn VHS is better than a remastered DVD.
Worse, you're somehow thinking that we'll lose the historical context... as if restoration would eliminate the millions of pages detailing that context or the millions of reproductions of the work in its aged state.
The degradation, I'll have you know, is what causes the loss of historical context.
People think that old stone churches were always gray and foreboding buildings, when historically they were colorful, but that context was lost through erosion of the pigments.
You can't take the sky from me...
"Cotte surmises that the painted figure's eyebrows and eyelashes probably disappeared due to poor cleaning at some point in the past."
Maybe she should heave tried Noxema !!
How do they explain the words "THIS IS A FAKE" written in felt tip marker underneath all that aged paint?
Slashdot researcher CowboyNeal has used the same 240 megapixel camera and advanced imaging techniques to reveal the history of the goatsecx picture.
"Cotte surmises that the painted figure's eyebrows and eyelashes probably disappeared due to poor cleaning..."
I found it amusing that the ad I got while reading the article was for Botox...
would restoring the Mona Lisa to her original glory be in violation of the DMCA? Mother nature has specifically encoded the particles of the painting into their current state. Disassembling those particles or re-arranging them to unlock the original content seems to contravene explicit provisions of the DMCA.
While the rest of the world may enjoy Leonardo's original work, here in the US we simply will not tolerate such abashed attacks on the copyrights of Leonardo. What do you mean copyright has expired? Ok, give us one more congressional session (and a couple pleasure boat cruises) and we will have that fixed.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
It was written in Pascal? I knew the language was old but didn't realize it was /that/ old.
Has the researcher published online pictures with the original skintones? I was interested to see what they looked like, but couldn't turn anything up with a quick Google search.
According to the article, there's a postulation that a curator or restorer might have accidentally cleaned off the eyebrows and eyelashes.
FTA
"And if you look closely at the eye of 'Mona Lisa' you can clearly see that the cracks around the eye have slightly disappeared, and that may be explained that one day a curator or restorer cleaned the eye, and cleaning the eye, removed, probably removed the eyelashes and eyebrow," he said.
Why would a single pigment/color disappear?
Weren't colors back then all made with the same base? In that case, why would only the eyebrows disappear and nothing else shows a smudge from whatever cleaning agent it was used? (if this is the case).
Not to mention that I would have loved to be there for THAT occasion:
Owner: "Can you get this thing cleaned up for me?"
Curator: "Sure thing mister, I'm a professional."
Owner: "It's priceless you know..."
Curator: "I'll take good care of it."
Curator starts the restoration from the eyes and accidentally wipes off eyebrows and eyelashes.
Curator: "Fuck!"
Curator: "Well... maybe if I get the eyes soaked in enough oil to not crack for 500 years, no one will notice."
Owner gets back.
Owner: "Hmm... look at them eyes! They're awesome!"
Owner: "There's something different about her, is it her smile?"
Curator: "I'm just a restorer, but yeah, er... she looks mysterious."
Owner: "Nice eyes though!"
So much speculation...
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
That was my first thought. I've been scanning stuff at high resolution and downloading high res pictures for a while to carefully look at them, and this is like a dream come true. Now if they make it available to the public, I can die a happy man.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
I find it amusing that the "changes" to the painting that people don't like they attribute to outside sources instead of the artist. Who is to say he isn't the one that made those changes while he was painting the work? I'm not really a fan of looking behind works of art to see how they were created and what ideas the artist didn't like or covered over. The artist only intended for us to see the final layer of paint, and he hid the others from view intentionally.
On the other hand, it does make artists more human, in that we can see they didn't paint it the way they wanted perfectly the first time.
What?
What about an old black & white film versus a new remastered & colorized film? I'll admit they can sometimes do it subtly and well, but many times it looks horribly fake.
A movie that is originally filmed in black & white is not quite the same fill when it is colorized (sometimes it is better, sometimes it is worse). Remastering (if done well), generally does not detract from the film.
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
His company, and the restored colors can be seen here
Historically they were colourful, but that context was lost through whitewash.
Literally. Cromwell has a whole lot to answer for.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Restoring something to the way it was initially experienced is different from trying to enhance it beyond what it originally was.
Both are culturally beneficial, but the enhancement is more like a new work than an authentic reproduction of the old work.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
I don't know...they recently renovated an old, gothic-style church near where I live, and it's still gray and bleak.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Hasn't he?
a) The VHS/DVD argument is garbage because there are more than one of them and you cannot physically change one into the other.
b) How do you know that the restoration has returned the item to it's original luster. What if it was originally painted in dull tones, but today's experts say they used bright tones back then. Which leads to...
c) If the restoration is screwed up the item is lost. Forever.
Sure we have loads of information and reproductions of the original but, as this study shows, there are always new ways to gain more information from the original. If restorations are performed how do you know if new information is about the painting or the restoration techniques. Also, think of the statues the Taliban destroyed in 2001. Sure they can be recreated, but who knows what has been lost with the original.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
I'll never understand why somebody would spend so much time trying to perfect art. He should have just left it alone instead of kept redoing parts and details of the painting. I'm not trying to compare the two as equals, but it's like George Lucas screwing around with the original Star Wars movies. Leave your original work alone and move on to bigger and better projects.
Those are two different things entirely. "Restoration" is the process of making the art look like what it originally looked like. But the black and white films of the first half of the 20th century were also black and white when they came out.
Here's another example for you:
Restoration - re-releasing Star Wars on DVD, with video and audio copied from the original except visual/audio flaws and artifacts have been removed.
Crapification - re-releasing Star Wars on DVD, except there's all this CG crap in the background that wasn't there before.
See the difference?
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
If you modify the original to modernize it, you're comparing apples to cement mixers.
You can't take the sky from me...
Seriously, I say "restore to original", you parse that as "modify to look like a newer technique".
No, that was done a lot to many works in the past, and it is definitely not even remotely similar to restoring the work to the original.
You need to find some way to learn logic. I don't know how you can go about doing that, but you really need to find out.
You can't take the sky from me...
The newer ones were made to look like the degraded state of the older ones, because the context of the originals was lost.
I also think that the ruins of the great pyramids of Egypt ought to be restored to their shiny white polished original state. There's no reason to let them degrade further, nor to keep them in the dilapidated state in which they were rediscovered, as if that coincidental level of degradation was somehow sacred.
But considering the horrors that the government of Egypt have erected around them to facilitate the tourist trade, I wouldn't put my faith in them to do it right.
You can't take the sky from me...
I ran a gamma and white point correction on a scan of the Mona Lisa too, but I wasn't clever enough to issue a press release.
Thank me later.
Maybe he did not like the way it looked and removed them himself is there any way to know I am not a painter but could this not be a possibility?
God way to sell his service though and how does one get permision to scan somthing like this?
When you consider that other restorations, e.g. the Acropolis in Athens, have replaced original art with castings (with the originals on display in the new museum nearby), and missing or damaged stone with new---
(I suppose after another hundred years of reconstruction the Parthenon will be entirely a replica.)
The next step will be to replace the painting in the Louvre with a reconstruction and move the original to the d'Orsay.
I owned a stone house in Pittsburgh when I lived there. I thought I'd bought a gray stone house, but when it needed repointing and got spray-washed, I discovered I owned a yellow, red, tan, and generally pretty interestingly-colored stone house. The stones had just all turned gray because of the soot through the 20th century. So it doesn't always turn out like that.
E pluribus unum
I think what the GP meant by historical context is that the aged look actually shows what the object of art has gone though over the centuries. For example, would the Parthenon or the Roman Colosseum still have the same attraction if it were as pristine as it were built yesterday? Should the Parthenon be rebuilt by adding walls and roof?
The most hi-res (unrestored) image I could find was this:
http://abm-enterprises.net/artgall2/monalisa.jpg
"Good news, everyone!"
No, no, NO! No it doesn't.
DAMN no!
As an example, it was only the degradation of the Turin Shroud that gave us the historical context that proved it was fake. (infiltration of pollen from the wrong area etc...)
America, Home of the Brave.
And people also think ancient Greco-Roman sculpture and architecture--which were painted in vivid colors--were all pure white marble, to the point of creating pure white marble sculpture and architecture in imitation of their models.
Chris Mattern
Also, a large detail of the eyes is provided by Wikipedia:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Mona_Lisa_detail_eyes.jpg
"Good news, everyone!"
A guy claims that something is missing from one of the most famous pieces of art in the history of the western world, and he thinks HE can "fix" it. Is it not obvious that this guy is trying to leave a mark (literally) on classical art by putting his personal touches on an existing masterpiece?
Surely, if he can "fix" the Mona Lisa, he could just as easily make a print and fix THAT to show the world what it might have really looked like, instead of mussing up the original based on little more than speculative theory.
Attempts to restore the original are now underway.
Have gnu, will travel.
I mean, think of the possiblities for a joke here... David Hasslehofe anyone? Sounds like a Conan O'Brian skit waiting to happen... lol
What I find fascinating about old art is that you can see the actual brushstrokes of the master. When a painting is restored, someone else adds paint over the old brushstrokes. No matter how careful they are to replicate the original, the new stroke is still in someone else's hand. Why not just look at a poster/replica of the original?
The DVD example fails because a DVD is a mass-produced product. Improve it all you want -- who cares? A better example would be if someone refilmed the lost scenes from Metropolis based on the story boards and spliced the new scenes into the one remaining print.
That would be as fucked as having a shiny new Sistine ceiling, with paint applied by someone other than Michaelangelo -- which is what we have now.
Cleaning is fine -- 'restoring' is not.
Blowing statues to pieces is hardly restoration. That you would reference that is strange.
reveal any evidence of hot grits?
Thanks for your post. It made me realize just how much people are not interested in the actual work, but the sentimental value and charm of old worn things. Thinking of these works in pristine condition as being of greater historical value took me a few moments. Thanks.
Depending on where you are in the world, a lot of old churches were originally painted in bright colours and patterns inside. In many cases they've faded to the point of being almost invisible.
Bit of a shame really. You can still see the evidence in some churches if you look closely.
Cleaning is fine -- 'restoring' is not.
This is an age-old problem.
Nothing lasts forever. Yet at the same time, nobody wants to lose a great masterpiece. What do you do?
Anyway, using knowledge of how paint pigments aged, they took the image back in time to show what it most likely looked like when completed. Much nicer than the rather murky looking image we see today.
I'd love to get a copy of that image now. I've seen the Mona Lisa in person, and prefer the version as it looked when Leonardo had just laid down the last brush stroke.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And people also think ancient Greco-Roman sculpture and architecture--which were painted in vivid colors--were all pure white marble, to the point of creating pure white marble sculpture and architecture in imitation of their models. Exactly! It gives people a false context of history, and we shouldn't preserve that.
You can't take the sky from me...
IT'S A TRAP
;) )
(sorry, just had to
For extra fun, next time a baby boomer tells you they liked the original Batman better than the new ones, tell them you too liked the black and white one where he fights an evil Japanese scientist and his nuclear cannon
I like to inform them that the first one they saw was a parody, not the original. Context is crucial to all things.
You can't take the sky from me...
Who says it was Leonardo who couldn't stop. Let's face it, if it went anything like modern project management in a lot of places, it would be more like:
Act 1:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news Leonardo! We've won the preliminary round of talks with Francesco del Giocondo for a painting! Now he'll only want a time and cost estimate, and a tech demo to help him make up his mind!
Leonardo: Great! Did he say _what_ he wants painted? How big? I mean, the cost and time depends on that.
Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, Leonardo... what did I tell you about scaring the customers with that kind of technical questions? Get working on that demo already, and we'll ask for more details after he sees it.
Leonardo: Hmm, ok, WTH, I'll just paint the castle then...
Leonardo's PHB: That's the spirit!
Act 2:
Leonardo's PHB: Sad to say, Mr del Giocondo wasn't impressed with your demo. He said it was too sketchy and lacking any detail, but luckily the VP of Marketing managed to convince him to give you another chance.
Leonardo: Whoa there, you said he wanted a demo, not a full painting. Of course it's sketchy!
Leonardo's PHB: Now, now, we're not at assigning blame. What matters is that we get the contract, right?
Leonardo: Right. I guess I'll go back to painting the castle, then.
Leonardo's PHB: Oh, right, I forgot to mention that. He thinks that it doesn't quite fit what he had in mind, so he'll want it changed to a lake.
Leonardo: Ah well, I'll just get a fresh canvas then.
Leonardo's PHB: Not so fast, we don't have the budget for a new painting. You'll have to change the demo from a castle to a lake.
Leonardo: You're kidding, right? I mean, seriously...
Leonardo's PHB: Do I look like I'm kidding? I already promised the CEO it'll be ready in half the time of a new demo.
Leonardo: Oh, for fuck's sake...
Act 3:
Leonardo's PHB: Good news, Leonardo. Francesco was pleased, now he wants to see how the lake looks as a background for a woman's portrait.
Leonardo: Let me guess, he wants her painted _over_ the lake, because someone told him it'll be cheaper, right?
Leonardo's PHB: Well, duh, of course.
Leonardo: So when does he send this woman here, so I can paint her?
Leonardo's PHB: Who said anything about doing the final product already? You're just supposed to do another demo, so he can see if that's what he wants. Just take any woman and paint her there.
Leonardo: Grrr... Ok, I'll just paint my girlfriend, then.
Act 4:
Francesco del Giocondo: Ah, yes, Mr da Vinci, I presume. Yes, that's very interesting, indeed. See, the lake is exactly what I had in mind for the background, but what I actually want is a portrait of my wife, Lisa.
Leonardo: Great. I'll just get a new canvas, and we can talk about what time should I start.
Francesco del Giocondo: Wait, new canvas? I was assured that we can just change that bit in the demo. I mean, look at it, it looks almost ready...
Leonardo's PHB: Yes, of course, Mr del Giocondo. No need to waste money on starting from scratch.
Leonardo: Guys, that's crazy, that wasn't supposed to work that way.
Francesco del Giocondo: Well, I see... I guess I'll have to find another painter, then.
Leonardo's PHB: Leonardo, so help me God, if we lose this customer, I'll make sure you never work again in this city!
Leonardo: Ok, ok, I'll just... ummm, make her a bit thinner then to match Mrs Gioconda. Right.
Francesco del Giocondo: Oh, I'm so delighted we could reach an agreement.
Act 5:
(Several months later.)
Mona Lisa: Hmm, no, those eyebrows just won't do... They'll have to go.
Leonardo: Completely??
Mona Lisa: Yes. My friend, Maria assures me that that's the latest fashion in Constantinople.
Leonardo: But... but... you'll look like a radiotherapy patient without them.
Mona Lisa: Mr da Vinci, I think you forget who's the customer here! No way I'm accepting this product as it is!
Leonardo: Ah, ok, let me get my turpentine bottle then. Anything else?
Mona Lisa: In fact,
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But of even more interest than the eyebrows and lashes was the discovery a thin mustache and goatee...
"then along came Rubens who only painted fat chicks "
They're not fat they're Ruebenesque.
Need Mercedes parts ?
In fact da Vinci and all the artists of the time were well aware of the effects of aging on their work and took account of it.
Their patrons wanted work that would remain interesting over several generations, so there are usually a lot of "subtexts" in the picture that will only be revealed by repeated viewing.
Artist knew that the colours and varnishes they used would not finally "set" for some months or years so they had in mind a finished look that would not be achieved on day 1.
The artists themselves were fascinated by the way the paintings would look under different lighting conditions and took advantage to make their works "living".
Of course they didnt always get it right, and sometimes used experimental materials that did not last: The Last Supper degraded a lot during da Vinci's own lifetime.
150,000 pixels per square inch would put your numbers in the right order of magnitude...around 387 pixels per inch. -R
"He believes he can reconstruct the painting's original skin tones."
Finally the world will see that she was a beautiful black woman, just like Jesus.
Actually, sometimes it is. A while back I saw a restored church - where the worn stone steps were replaced with new ones, and the worn and discolored pews treated similarly. The aged floor was carefully sanded down, covered with polyurethane and polished. etc... etc...
It truly is a beautiful building - but today it looks like it never did historically, except maybe on the day it was completed. All historical context and evidence that it wasn't built yesterday - gone. Forever.
The degradation also creates historical context. A few years ago I visited a restored colonial (America) era kitchen - and despite the great pains to make the new parts match the old in color, the new stood out glaringly to my eyes. Why? Because the old parts showed wear - you could see where people stood and worked because the evidence was preserved in brick and stone. The new looked like what it was, a museum piece rather than part of a living structure.
Conservation and restoration to to fix building etc... in a single idealized state.
Then why, historically, have they been illustrated as being nearly monochrome? That alone suggest that they weren't historically colorful, and that if they were it was for a brief time only.
Then why, historically, have they been illustrated as being nearly monochrome? That alone suggest that they weren't historically colorful, and that if they were it was for a brief time only. Have they? I can't readily recall any ancient illustrations of churches... You got any?
You can't take the sky from me...
Yes, I think the original Groucho Marx eyebrows and moustache should be restored.
involved in the cleaning ?
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Was she a virgin or not?
proud caffeine whore
Was she a virgin or not?
****
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15029288/
No, the clothes she is wearing were common for expecting women of her time. It's also probably who Leonardo might have made her cheeks look less round. There is some speculation that he tried to cover up the fact later in his life by altering the painting.
In Leonardo's time, no one really knew about how artwork degrades over centuries. They did have access to artworks that were centuries old at the time, but they had no way to analyze how those works had been degraded over the years.
All they knew was what they could remember over their lifetimes. It's only recently that we have developed tools for chemical and physical analysis that are accurate enough to allow us to extrapolate what we measure in the lab over several centuries.
I was trying to be rhetorical, jokingly referring to getting laid.
proud caffeine whore
1. Buy the Mona Lisa.
2. Turn it (back) into bukakke.
FRA: STFU GTFO
b) How do you know that the restoration has returned the item to it's original luster.
You don't. What we DO know is that todays version is wrong and faded. You seem to think there's only two states, right and wrong. In reality we can likely get closer to that original state.
What if it was originally painted in dull tones, but today's experts say they used bright tones back then.
What if todays experts said they used cheese instead of paint, and decided to cover it with cheese wiz? You can make up a lot of nonsense about something you don't know anything about.
c) If the restoration is screwed up the item is lost. Forever.
The thing is already "lost", in that it's not the way it was originally. If you can clean it up and not do any harm, what's the problem?
Until you have any evidence that cleaning it up will do damage to it, kindly keep your mouth shut. Speculation based on speculation tells us nothing.
AccountKiller
Is it possible that Da Vinci, being the prolific inventor and genius that he was, could have painted the Mona Lisa such that the painting actually ages with time? The eyebrow and eyelash hair fallen or gone, wrinkles around the eyes and the smile becoming shorter could be signs that he actually painted it to age gradually.
People think that old stone churches were always gray and foreboding buildings, when historically they were colorful, but that context was lost through erosion of the pigments. That's definitely true in this case. Even more interesting than the skin tones is the vibrant blue background, painted with "Lapis lazuli, the most expensive pigment to buy, actually more than 20.000 $ the Kg !", according to this page linked earlier.
There was an interesting exhibition on at a London gallery recently with an 18th century 'copy' of the Mona Lisa. Because it was painted using a different method (no thick layer of varnish etc) the colours survived much better. So, if it was an accurate copy, might give a good insight into how the original really looked before it dulled. Link. This shows that the original could have been much brighter, which changes a lot of the feel of the piece.
Begins at the bottom of this page, but the stuff about the eyebrows starts on the next page.
http://www.jstor.org/view/00076287/ap020301/02a00030/0
Giorgio Vasari (July 30, 1511 - June 27, 1574) was an Italian painter and architect, known for his famous biographies of Italian artists.
He would have seen the Mona Lisa when it was relatively new.
-- Boycott Shell
It was the same whenever they would spray-wash the Cathedral of Learning. I though the building was grey/black. They cleaned it off in around '99 and it was actually a tan/yellow, and really quite beautiful.
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." - Golda Meir
So true, so sad. Interesting parallel today, since "wine, women & song", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine,_women_and_song, are among the many things banned by extremists, (both Jewish & Muslim extremists, and others, of course).
No wonder the 'joyful' religions, such as 'modern' evangelists are gaining ground...
Apart from the cultural barbarism, (viz. Taliban destruction of historic works, Communists *everywhere*), what's the chance of creating a better world 'down here' when the deal imposed by these false prophets is suffering 'now', in exchange for a better life 'later, up there'. Urm, I'll take my self-made paradise now, thanks.