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Images: Museo Nacional del Prado
Conservators at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, discovered something fantastic when they cleaned up their replica copy of the Mona Lisa.
At first, they thought their Mona Lisa was made after Leonardo da Vinci's death, but it turned out the painting was made side by side by Leonardo's apprentice, and it revealed astonishing new details:
The final traces of overpaint are now being removed by Prado conservators, revealing the fine details of the delicate Tuscan landscape, which mirrors the background of Leonardo’s masterpiece. Darkened varnish is also being painstakingly stripped away from the face of the Mona Lisa, giving a much more vivid impression of her enticing eyes and enigmatic smile.
In the Louvre’s original, which will not be cleaned in the foreseeable future, Lisa’s face is obscured by old, cracked varnish, making her appear almost middle aged. In the Prado copy we see her as she would have looked at the time—as a radiant young woman in her early 20s.
The Art Newspaper has the story: Link
It's a cat, of course! Artfully done by Svetlana of Fat Cat Art: Link - Thanks Svetlana!
Previously on Neatorama (also by the same artist): Art with Cats
Mathematical crafters Pat Ashforth and Steve Plummer have lately been exploring ways to knit optical illusions. The results are amazing! They have other knitted illusions at the link, including ones showing characters from Doctor Who, Twilight, and Harry Potter.
Previously by these artists: Knitted Napier’s Bones
A Russian artist named Aleksandr Solomko works extensively with meat. Because, as you know, meat is awesome. He made a reproduction (more or less) of the Mona Lisa out of 20 kilograms of sliced sausage.
Link and More Information | Photo: Sergey
Looking to break the world’s record for most complex dot-to-dot drawing, Thomas Pavitte created a poster-sized image of the Mona Lisa with 6,239 dots! It took him over nine hours to connect all the dots which he captured on this time-lapse video. The entire project can be seen at Pavitte’s Behance page.
Link -via This is Colossal
Gary Andrew Clarke, a graphic designer from England, has designed this extremely pixelated and cool looking version of the famous “Mona Lisa” portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Mona Lisa’ reduced & remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.
Signed & dated. A beautiful archival Giclee print (unframed). Professional high quality 600pdi print on 190gsm silk white paper.
Link via kottke.org
A Queen’s University Classics professor may have found a reference that Dan Brown missed. Ross Kilpatrick believes the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, incorporates images inspired by the Roman poet Horace and Florentine poet Petrarch. The technique of taking a passage from literature and incorporating it into a work of art is known as ‘invention’ and was used by many Renaissance artists.
“The composition of the Mona Lisa is striking. Why does Leonardo have an attractive woman sitting on a balcony, while in the background there is an entirely different world that is vast and barren?” says Dr. Kilpatrick. “What is the artist trying to say?”
Dr. Kilpatrick believes Leonardo is alluding to Horace’s Ode 1. 22 (Integer vitae) and two sonnets by Petrarch (Canzoniere CXLV, CLIX). Like the Mona Lisa, those three poems celebrate a devotion to a smiling young woman, with vows to love and follow the woman anywhere in the world, from damp mountains to arid deserts. The regions mentioned by Horace and Petrarch are similar to the background of the Mona Lisa.
Both poets were read when Leonardo painted the picture in the early 1500s. Leonardo was familiar with the works of Petrarch and Horace, and the bridge seen in the background of the Mona Lisa has been identified as the same one from Petrarch’s hometown of Arezzo.
by Alice Shirrell Kaswell, Improbable Research staff
Leonardo da Vinci’s painted portrait of the Mona Lisa entices researchers of many kinds to spring into action of some sort. Alerted to the possible presence of a newsworthy mystery, quite a few people want to define and then solve it.
On December 15, 2005, the painting popped up in the news in the company of scientists — again. An Associated Press report explained that Harro Stokman, Nicu Sebe, and colleagues had gotten the Mona Lisa’s number. They did so with precision, though with little claim to accuracy:
The mysterious half-smile that has intrigued viewers of the Mona Lisa for centuries isn’t really that difficult to interpret, Dutch researchers said Thursday.
She was smiling because she was happy — 83 percent happy, to be exact, according to scientists from the University of Amsterdam.
In what they viewed as a fun demonstration of technology rather than a serious experiment, the researchers scanned a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and subjected it to cutting-edge “emotion recognition” software, developed in collaboration with the University of Illinois.
The result showed the painting’s famous subject was 83 percent happy, 9 percent disgusted, 6 percent fearful and 2 percent angry. She was less than 1 percent neutral, and not at all surprised.
The team has yet to publish a formal scientific report. If and when they do, it will join a growing heap of studies that are as difficult to categorize as the famous Mona Lisa smile. That smile, some scientists imply, may not really be a smile.
Here is a sampling of Mona Lisaean studies.
Mona, Ailing (1)
Much of the world celebrates Mona Lisa as an iconic perfect woman. But Dr. Joseph E. Borkowski of the Georgetown University School of Dentistry in Washington, D.C., put forth a disturbing conjecture. In his study “Mona Lisa: The Enigma of the Smile” (Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 37, no. 6, pp. 1706-11), he explains that:
The Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503, pictures a smile that has been long the subject of conjecture. It is believed, however, that the Mona Lisa does not smile; she wears an expression common to people who have lost their front teeth. A close-up of the lip area shows a scar that is not unlike that left by the application of blunt force. The changes evident in the perioral area are such that occur when the anterior teeth are lost. The scar under the lower lip of the Mona Lisa is similar to that created, when, as a result of force, the incisal edges of the teeth have pierced the face with a penetrating wound.
(Thanks to Mark Benecke for bringing Dr. Borkowski to our attention.)
(Image credit: gilad at Worth1000)
Mona, Ailing (2)
K.K. Adour, at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland, California, diagnoses a more debilitating ailment: Bell’s palsy. Adour’s study, “Mona Lisa Syndrome: Solving the Enigma of the Gioconda Smile” (Annals of Otology, Rhinology, and Laryngology, vol. 89, no. 3, March 1989, pp. 196-9) reports that:
The Mona Lisa smile is presented as a possible example of facial muscle contracture that develops after Bell’s palsy when the facial nerve has undergone partial wallerian degeneration and has regenerated. The accompanying synkinesis would explain many of the known facts surrounding the painting and is a classic example of Leonardo da Vinci as the compulsive anatomist who combined art and science.
High magnification techniques have recently revealed tiny letters and numbers in the eyes of the Mona Lisa that were not visible to the naked eye. The symbols were likely placed there by LeonardoDa Vinci. Investigators were drawn to the figures by information discovered in a book in an antique shop. After 500 years the symbols are not as clear as they once were and deciphering their meaning presents a real challenge for the experts.
Not believing that Dan Brown has unlocked the ultimate secret of the Mona Lisa, French researchers used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study the famous painting and discovered something amazing:
Da Vinci used a renaissance painting technique called "sfumato," mixing thin layers of pigment, glaze and oil intricately to yield the appearance of lifelike shadows and light. The technique is well known and has been employed by other artists over the years. But only now have scientists been able to analyze just how intricate da Vinci’s layers are.
They believe da Vinci used up to 30 layers of paint on his works. But altogether they only add up to a thickness of less than 40 micrometers of paint — about half the width of a human hair.
Last year, organizers at the Rocks Aroma Festival in Sydney, Australia, made an enormous image of the Mona Lisa using thousands of cups of coffee lightened with milk (to varying quantities) in order to create different shades:
The different colours were created by adding no, little or lots of milk to each cup of black coffee.
It measures an impressive 20 feet high and 13 feet wide and took a team of eight people three hours to complete.
Link via Digg | Photo: EpicFTW | Previously on Neatorama: Mona Lisa in Coffee (as a Paint)
Take 3,074 paint chips in 36 colours, a few glue guns and a bit of elbow grease. And what do you get? A cool mural, that’s what. Oh, and glue all over your clothes.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by spav.
This Mona Lisa made out of motherboards decorates the headquarters of the computer maker Asus in Taipei. It serves as an expression of that company’s desire to retake its position as the world’s largest motherboard manufacturer. More pictures at the link.
Link via Make | PBS news report
Under the direction of artist Katy Webster, children painted an enormous copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa at a shopping mall in Wales:
Dozens of adults from community groups and youngsters from Wrexham schools coloured 82 vinyl tiles to make the paint-by-numbers portrait.
It is on show at Eagles Meadow, and will be used to raise money for the children’s hospice charity Hope House.
At 17.5m across, and covering 240 sqm, it is some 50 times the original.
Video at the link (preceded by a commercial).
Link via GearFuse | Image: My Modern MET
Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude version of the Mona Lisa? Maybe so, according to a newly revealed painting, hidden for a century within the walls of a private library:
The lady in the portrait does not exactly resemble the original Mona Lisa, but there is little doubt it has parallels with the painting hanging at the Louvre museum in Paris.
"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa’s iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.
Fast food grease as art? Yep. Watch as artist Phil Hansen creates a huge replica of the Mona Lisa using nothing but grease squeezed from hamburger patties – and it only took him 10 double burgers to do it.
He didn’t just do this for fun, though… it’s actually an Arby’s ad.
Previously on Neatorama: Bruce Lee Speed Painting | Phil Hansen’s Influence: a Body Paint Art
A parody, spoof or useful seating device – you choose. The Mona Lisa chair is certainly humorous, particularly as you will find yourself sitting right on the famous woman herself.
The frame becomes the framework for the chair – and the possibilities of adapting and customizing the classic image are endless. Next up: Van Gogh benches?
The Shakers used to hang their chairs on the wall to get them out of the way when they needed to shake. We have also previously shown Dror Benshetrit’s neat cantilevered chair that flattened out and hung on the wall. Now Korean designer Kwang Hoo Lee does them one better by turning the chair into a work of art.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
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Aviary artist Meowza Katz, here are various Mona Lisas, as drawn by artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Matt Groening (the creator of The Simpsons and Futurama), Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol … and even Jackson Pollock: Link – via AQFL
By the way, Aviary is a free suite of online image editors, created by the people who also founded Worth1000 and Plime
Mona Tofu by Ju Duoqi
Chinese artist Ju Duoqi, 35, specializes in a unique art medium: vegetables! (well, technically digital veggies – but who cares?). Behold her masterpiece above, the veggie Mona Lisa ("Mona Tofu") made out of rice, sea kelp, and tofu.
In The Vegetable Museum series, she revisits in a stunning way some masterpieces of the western painting. Making use of vegetables and food of China’s everyday life – tofu, cabbage, ginger, lotus roots, coriander, sweet potato… – and through digital manipulation, she presents a puzzling series of vegetable compositions representing world famous paintings like Mona Lisa, The Cene by Leonard Da Vinci, The Dream by Pablo Picasso or Marilyn Monroe by Warhol.
Here are a few more:
Napoleon on Potatoes by Ju Duoqi
Van Gogh made of Leek by Ju Duoqi
See many more at Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery: Link – via Compass WebWorks
Previously on Neatorama:
