Louvre and Prado Mona Lisas as stereoscopic image...

Four years ago, the Prado Museum in Madrid announced that a painting long thought to be a relatively unremarkable copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was actually painted contemporaneously with the original, likely by a student following the master as he drew and painted the portrait. Infrared reflectography found that the 18th century black overpaint obscured a hilly background almost the same as the original. When the black overpaint and varnish were removed from the Prado’s copy, further infrared and X-ray analysis found underdrawings and alterations from the tracing and all the way through the upper paint levels that matched those in 2004 scans of the Louvre Mona Lisa. That means from the initial sketches to the changes and corrections as painting progressed, the Prado copy followed along at each stage.

Mona Lisas: Left Prado, Right Louvre.

That’s not to say they’re identical, even underneath the cracked and yellowed varnish that darkens and discolors the original. Two German researchers studied both paintings, selecting landmark points (like the tip of her nose, say, or a particular feature in the mountains) and mapping the path from the landmarks to the observer’s sight line. These trajectories tracked perspective changes between the two versions.

They found that the background of the Prado painting, while virtually identical in shape, is 10% more zoomed in than the Louvre version’s. The expansion doesn’t follow a perspectival pattern you’d expect if the landscape were painted from life, which suggests the mountains in the background and the loggia right behind her were painted from a flat studio backdrop. The trajectories illustrated a number of perspective changes in the painting of the figure, particularly dense in Mona Lisa’s hands and head.

With the comparative perspective data, the researchers were able to calculate the positions of the canvases relative to the sitter and then they made a model of Leonardo’s studio during the painting of the Mona Lisawith Playmobil minifigs.

Studio setting

The original (labeled 1st) is further back and to the right of the Prado copy, and the horizontal distance between the versions is about 69.3 millimeters. The average distance between the eyes of Italian males is 64.1mm, a statistically insignificant difference which suggested to the researchers the possibility that the two paintings might have been deliberately positioned to be a stereoscopic pair which when viewed together give the impression of three dimensions

Carbon points out that Da Vinci “intensively worked on the 3D issue.” In addition, in inventory lists there were hints of the existence of two “Mona Lisa” paintings on his property at the same time, and that he owned colored spectacles, Carbon said.

Hands Prado color adjusted to hands Louvre red cyan anaglyph of both

This evidence “might indicate that he did not only [think] about the 3D issue theoretically but in a very practical sense in terms of experiments,” Carbon added. Also, when looking at the original colors of the two paintings the only real difference was in the sleeves, in which they are reddish in one version and greenish in the other. “This could be a hint to Leonardo’s approach to look at the two La Giocondas through red-green (red-cyan) spectacles,” he said, similar to those one might don to watch a 3D movie.

Linear trajectories between landmarks on Louvre and the Prado versions length of traj visualized as circle diameters

That’s a lot of speculation and there are significant counterpoints refuting this hypothesis. The hands work as a stereoscopic pair because the trajectory differences are horizontal. Most of the trajectories on the upper portion of Mona Lisa’s body like her face and hair have a vertical orientation. Still, Leonardo did write about binocular vision and depth perception, so it’s possible he had some idea there could be a dimensional payoff in the positioning of the two canvases.

You can read the whole paper here (pdf) to get the fully fleshed out argument with math and everything. It could all be pure imagination and it would be worth it for the minifig studio alone, as far as I’m concerned.

- The History Blog Team.

1. Close-up of face of the version of the 'Mona Lisa' (known as 'La Gioconda' in Spanish) held by the Prado Museum
2. Close-up of background of painting
3. Close-up of Mona Lisa's eyes
4. Wide of media filming painting
5. Close tilt up from "La Gioconda" plaque to painting
6. Wide of expert talking to press with painting in background
7. Close-up of video screen showing Mona Lisa painting
8. Wide of expert talking to media with painting in background
9. SOUNDBITE: (English) Gabriele Finaldi, Deputy Director, El Prado Museum in Madrid:
"The picture has recovered its original appearance. We didn't know that behind the black background that was painted all around the figure of Mona Lisa, it hid what is, in fact, a very well preserved landscape, very close to the one in the Louvre original. So the first thing we have been able to do is recover the original appearance of the picture. Secondly, it is tremendously well preserved so that gives us a lot of information about the Louvre original because we can see from various details that it is a rather faithful repetition of the Louvre picture."
10. Mid tilt up of Mona Lisa
11. Close-up of detail of shoulder
12. Close-up of hands
13. SOUNDBITE: (English) Gabriele Finaldi, Deputy Director, El Prado Museum in Madrid:
"The painter who paints this picture works in a more linear mode, one might say a more linear style. Leonardo's is characterised by this 'sfumato', this working in of very gradual transitions of tones. That is a very significant difference between the work by the great artist and the work by the faithful, competent, skilled artist who paints this one here."
14. Mid of media taking photographs of painting
15. Mid of entrance to Prado museum
16. Wide of museum
STORYLINE:
The "Spanish" Mona Lisa was re-introduced to the public on Tuesday, after major restoration work renewed interest in the copy owned by Madrid's Prado museum.
The copy of the famous La Gioconda painting by Leonardo da Vinci had been part of the Prado collection for years and was displayed occasionally.
But no one paid much attention to it because around the sitter in the painting was a stark black background, not the pretty landscape seen in the original.
Two years ago, tests were done as part of efforts to get the copy ready for a da Vinci exhibit later this year in Paris, where the original hangs in the Louvre.
This gave restorers at the Prado a hint that something was hidden under the black coat, which was added in the 18th century for reasons not fully understood.
When the black covering was removed, a Tuscan landscape very similar to the one in the original emerged.
X-ray tests allowed experts to peek under the painting's surface to see how it developed as it was composed.
They showed that changes made in the copy were similar to changes made to the original as it evolved.
Varnish was also removed from the face of the Prado Mona Lisa, making it look brighter and younger than the face coated with cracked, darkish varnish at the Louvre.
Besides the black background, one other difference from the original is the woman in the copy has eyebrows and the Mona Lisa in the real masterpiece does not.
Prado museum officials said their best guess was that their copy was done by a da Vinci apprentice named Francesco Melzi, because of the style observed in it.
The Louvre supports the Prado's new evaluation of the painting.
There are dozens of the surviving replicas of the masterpiece from the 16th and 17th centuries.
But the Prado museum says their copy of La Gioconda will give art lovers and experts a true idea of what the Mona Lisa looked like back in the 16th century.

Courtesy: The History Blog 

Ana González Mozo, researcher in the Museum’s Technical Documentation Section and Almudena Sánchez Martín, restorer at the Museo del Prado, comments the technical study and the restoration process of the Copy of La Gioconda.