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New Scanning Technique Reveals Secrets Behind Great Paintings (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

Researchers in the US have used a new scanning technique to discover a painting underneath one of Pablo Picasso's great works of art, the Crouching Woman (La Misereuse Accroupie). From a report: Underneath the oil painting is a landscape of Barcelona which, it turns out, Picasso used as the basis of his masterpiece. The new x-ray fluorescence system is cheaper than alternative art scanning systems -- and it is portable, making it available to any gallery that wants it. Details were revealed at the American Association for the Advancement for Science in Austin, Texas. The Crouching Woman is a painting from Picasso's blue period.

What is remarkable is that the landscape painting beneath -- probably by a student artist -- is turned 90 degrees. The contour of the hills in the background becomes the crouching woman's back. She takes on the shape and form of the Catalan countryside. Kenneth Brummel, a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, said that he was "excited" when he first learned what lay underneath the Crouching Woman. "It helps to date the painting and it also helps to determine where the painting was made," he told BBC News. "But it also gives a sense of the artists with whom the painter was engaging. And these insights help us ask new, more interesting and scientifically more accurate questions regarding an artist, their process and how they arrived at the forms that we see on the surface of a painting."

15 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. Paint over by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 1

    Painting over a crappy painting doesn't mean it was a foundation for the final painting. Paint-overs were common as canvas wasn't exactly cheap and easy to get.

    1. Re:Paint over by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 2

      The article claims different for this particular painting, however they only show a picture of the final painting and of the x-ray machine in front of the painting. They don't show the x-ray scan of what is underneath, so it is hard to actually prove it by using this article. Unless my ad blocker is somehow hiding it, you would think the article would actually show the x-ray to prove the point.

    2. Re:Paint over by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The xray shows the real work of art...the one which Pablo Picasso maliciously defaced

    3. Re:Paint over by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 2

      Of course we can never really know the thought process of the artist. But there inevitably are going to be some coincidental shape matches with paint-over. There seems to be a underlying human need to assign deeper meaning or make associations of intent, etc. Often an artist did something because , well, he just felt like it at the time.

    4. Re:Paint over by nospam007 · · Score: 1

      "Painting over a crappy painting doesn't mean it was a foundation for the final painting. Paint-overs were common as canvas wasn't exactly cheap and easy to get."

      You don't understand, the 'secret' they discovered is that artists are as poor as church mice.
      And now that gizmo is portable on top. So they can discover more poor artists.

    5. Re:Paint over by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      It's still hard to say if that's the case though. Conceivably Picasso could have chosen from several painted canvases to paint over instead of this particular one. Did he already have his idea in mind when selecting a canvas to paint over such that he chose one that would lend itself most naturally to that endeavor? Or did he choose this canvas at random, allowing what was already there to shape his own creation through some happenstance connection between rolling hills and a woman's hunched back? Perhaps it was some experiment where he selected a random canvas and rotated it to purposefully induce some creative thought, much like one might stare at clouds to imagine what else they might be.

      I think there are too many possibilities to definitely try and treat any as definitive truth or even more than possibility.

    6. Re:Paint over by mapinguari · · Score: 3, Informative

      Other sources, like this article
      https://news.nationalgeographi...
      have more images.

    7. Re:Paint over by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      Welcome to the internet, where we have text stories about spectacular photographs, which we won't include in the article.

    8. Re:Paint over by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 1

      The 'picture' in the article is not a picture but a movie.
      If you click it, you see the X-ray scan ...

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
    9. Re:Paint over by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 1

      Now it is a video, but when I was there earlier it was just a picture of the painting. Since this is how internet news seems to work nowadays, I dunno if they updated it or if the video was sponsored by an ad that of course gets blocked on my end.

  2. A useful version of the article by dane23 · · Score: 5, Informative

    With the the mentioned x-ray images.

    --


    Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
  3. Similar Technology used on the Mona Lisa by Old-Claimjumper · · Score: 2

    There is a wonderful exhibit currently at the Albuquerque Museum of Natural History showing how multi-spectral analysis was used on the Mona Lisa. There are at least three different layers and the technique allows analysis of pigment/varnish types and their ageing.

    The big news here seems to be not so much the particular Picasso painting analyzed, but that there is a newer technology that is more portable and so will allow more analysis of old paintings.

    I highly recommend the Di Vinci Mona Lisa exhibit to everyone interested in this technology either in Albuquerque or as it moves around the country. I saw it last week as it opened in Albuquerque and was fascinated.

  4. Re:There is a kernel of usefulness in it though. by mikael · · Score: 1

    Our high school art classes taught about the use of guidelines for faces, outline sketches to get everything into position then adding the detail. Even simple scenes like colored glass bottles in the sunlight would go through this process.

    Digital technology is quite different as it allows the option to save stages as you go along, then go back or undo something if it turns out wrong. With 3D digital art, sometimes it is better to complete the detail on some things (like furniture) unless it is already pre-made, then they can just be repositioned and rendered with new lighting. Then there are all those procedural geometry creation methods.

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  5. neat by bobmajdakjr · · Score: 1

    i dont feel so bad about photoshopping other peoples work now and saying i made it!

  6. Painting... turned by 90 degress. by OolimPhon · · Score: 3, Informative

    Well, duh!

    It's a landscape painting turned into a portrait, what did you expect?