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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."
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
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...
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.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
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
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.
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.
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.