WeSeePeople

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Go inside Monalisa and find the unknowns. Like the original color of the Painting.


What a painting can tell you if you look hard enough! with 3D scanner and bunch of history research, microscopic analysis and viola! here it is!
Mona Lisa was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine cloth merchant. Records suggest she wasn't pregnant when she posed for Leonardo, but that the painting was commissioned to celebrate the birth of her third child, says Bruno Mottin, curator in the research department of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France. Also known as C2RMF.The Painting was originally painted with Mona Lisa wearing a large transparent overdress made from gauze, they said. Under normal light, part of the garment is visible on the right-hand side of the painting, but appears simply to be part of the background.
"This type of gauze dress ... was typical of the kind worn in early 16th Century Italy by women who were pregnant or who had just given birth," “You can see it when you know what you’re looking for,” said Bruno Mottin, of C2RMF. He spoke at a news conference with researchers from the National Research Council of Canada.

NRC Scientists scanned the painting with a 3D scanner, which is a variation on equipment used by American astronauts earlier this month to check the space shuttle for damage before it returned to Earth. The Canadian research council, which has worked with museums around the world since the 1980’s and with the French for a decade, developed a model able to resolve fine details in artworks.

The NRC team of scientists has now created a 3-D digital model of the "Mona Lisa" — a highly detailed computer scan of what may be the most famous painting in history. They did it in a basement at the Louvre in Paris, where the painting is on display.They have been poring over the results for nearly two years, and reported their first findings today.

They found that the wooden board on which da Vinci painted the portrait is slightly warped, but in surprisingly good shape, considering that the work was done between 1503 and 1506. The oil paint is mottled with fine cracks, as happens to many old paintings, but the paint appears well-bonded to the wood beneath it. Parts of the scan, done in X-rays and other wavelengths, show damage near the top of the painting, and a repair made after a visitor threw a stone at it in 1956.

But if you thought that all mystries about Mona Lisa is resolved, you are wrong, she still holds some information to herself, like the method of Da Vinci's sfumato - or smoky - painting technique which continues to elude experts.

Now to the painting. Click on the link below to go inside the painting. Select the method based on your browser capability.

1. If you have flash capability this is the link for you.

2. Just plain old html link is here.

Enjoy and be amused!

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