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Secrets of the Mona Lisa Revealed: Mona Lisa Had Eyebrows

by Amy Judd | November 12, 2009 at 12:51 pm

271 views | 15 Recommendations | 3 comments

Secrets of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece the Mona Lisa have been revealed by Pascal Cotte, a French art expert with a camera that can see through all the layers of paint.

Pascal Cotte said that due to the building up of the painting in layers, and the last being a special glaze to make the face appear 3-D, there were originally eyebrows painted on top of the glaze, which could be why the eyebrows are no longer there as they have rubbed off.

Using a 240 megapixel camera that can see light as to see through the top paint surface, and shows things like the fact that da Vinci repainted the position of a finger on her left hand to make the hand appear more relaxed. Pascal Cotte said that the painting of the Mona Lisa today looks totally different to what it did 500 years ago.

The underlying layers of the face - painted using lead white and mercury vermillion - also show it was wider than the end result appears.

"The smile, the glance, the face were all wider," said Cotte.

All the optical effects that da Vinci used to create the 3-D effect of the face have all disappeared according to Cotte. He also claims that for da Vinci the Mona Lisa was an effort to produce real life and was not just a painting.

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Uwe Paschen

at 18:39 on November 12th, 2009

That painting is rather remarkable and I am not surprised either that he tried to make it a real life like representation.

I was fortunate to see it in Paris once.

Microcinema International (not verified)

at 15:18 on November 13th, 2009

Hi there. I work for Microcinema International. We curate, exhibit and distribute the moving image arts. I noticed you are a fan of "Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting." I just wanted to let you know that "Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting" is EXCLUSIVELY DISTRIBUTED by Microcinema DVD. To order this DVD and/or other Microcinema titles, go to: www.microcinemadvd.com. Warmest Regards, Microcinema International www.microcinemadvd.com Please check out and join Microcinema on other social networking sites: Facebook: facebook.com/microcinema or facebook.com/monalisarevealed MySpace: www.myspace.com/microcinemainternational Youtube: www.youtube.com/microcinema Twitter: twitter.com/microcinema

victoriazinn

at 19:22 on February 4th, 2010

from studying da vinici comapred to van gogh, both has a self reflection in their works, davinci has it disguised and van gogh has it obviuos, in starry night if we measure our aknowledgment at the subject its 10-20% the rest is van gogh's. in davicni's case he had it hard to detect unless familiar with the claim that it may resemble him. just becasue davinci's style is more realisitc, its un-intentional by him to mark his work in slight self relfection, some where.to me i see more of monalisa in almost all of his females subjects works, rather than what they want see us doing, try to detect davinci, harder. then why is he great if he is to be narcissistic, this is what i get from all that claim that every other famous painting some how a self portrait, is this what they are trying to tell us, davinci was narcissistic or short on funds and clients!