Scientists gain new insight into techniques that Leonardo da Vinci used to paint his groundbreaking portrait of the woman with the exquisitely enigmatic smile.
The researchers found a rare compound, plumbonacrite, in Leonardo's first layer of paint on the Mona Lisa. Photo: AFPUsing X-rays to peer into the chemical structure of a tiny speck of the celebrated work of art, scientists have gained new insight into the techniques that Leonardo da Vinci used to paint his groundbreaking portrait of the woman with the exquisitely enigmatic smile.
“He was someone who loved to experiment, and each of his paintings is completely different technically,” said Victor Gonzalez, the study's lead author and a chemist at France’s top research body, the CNRS. Gonzalez has studied the chemical compositions of dozens of works by Leonardo, Rembrandt and other artists.
Carmen Bambach, a specialist in Italian art and curator at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, who was not involved in the study, called the research “very exciting" and said any scientifically proven new insights into Leonardo's painting techniques are “extremely important news for the art world and our larger global society.”
The scientists peered into its atomic structure using X-rays in a synchrotron, a large machine that accelerates particles to almost the speed of light. That allowed them to unravel the speck’s chemical makeup. Plumbonacrite is a byproduct of lead oxide, allowing the researchers to say with more certainty that Leonardo likely used the powder in his paint recipe.
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