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.

Link -via Craft

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

“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.

Link

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.

Mona, Ailing (3)

The truth may have been, or included, worse. J. Dequeker, E. Muls, and K. Leenders at the University Hospitals, Leuven, Belgium, say the lady was in deep trouble. Their report “Xanthelasma and Lipoma in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa” (Israeli Medical Association Journal, vol. 6, no. 8, August 2004, pp. 505-6) warned that:

The painting Mona Lisa in the Louvre, Paris, by Leonardo da Vinci (1503-1506), shows skin alterations at the inner end of the left upper eyelid similar to xanthelasma, and a swelling of the dorsum of the right hand suggestive of a subcutaneous lipoma. These findings in a 25-30 year old woman, who died at the age of 37, may be indicative of essential hyperlipidemia, a strong risk factor for ischemic heart disease in middle age. As far as is known, this portrait of Mona Lisa painted in 1506 is the first evidence that xanthelasma and lipoma were prevalent in the sixteenth century, long before the first description by Addison and Gall in 1851.

Mona, Mentally

Psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental specialists have tried to give the woman — and the artist who painted her — a good working over. Some go so far as to say that the woman is really a man, perhaps Leonardo’s depiction of himself as a transvestite. But little or none of that particular line of reasoning has appeared prominently in the scholarly literature. Instead, one can find more staid analyses such as H.P. Blum’s “Psychoanalysis and Art, Freud and Leonardo” (Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 49, no. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 1409-25). Blum dives deep into the psyche:

Freud was the first to apply psychoanalysis to art, choosing for his subject the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci. Observing Leonardo’s partly fused image of the Virgin and St. Anne, he inferred that the artist had depicted his two mothers, his biological mother and his stepmother. This very early analytic discourse on parent loss and adoption changed the course of the interpretation of art. Freud explored the psychology of art, the artist, and aesthetic appreciation. Confronting the age-old enigma of the Mona Lisa, he proposed a daring solution to the riddle of the sphinx like smile of this icon of art. His paper prefigures concepts of narcissism, homosexuality, parenting, and sublimation. Lacking modern methodology and theory, Freud’s pioneering insights overshadow his naive errors. In this fledgling inquiry, based on a childhood screen memory and limited knowledge of Leonardo’s artistic and scientific contributions, Freud identified with this Renaissance genius in his own self-analytic and creative endeavor.

Durward J. Markle of Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York City dives deeper still. His paper “Freud, Leonardo and the Lamb” (Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 57, no. 2, 1970, pp. 285-8) makes confident assertions:

In his study of Leonardo da Vinci, Freud states that the famous Mona Lisa smile is explainable in the light of Leonardo’s mother-child relationship, and represents Leonardo’s memory of the satisfaction he received as a child at his mother’s breast and the love he found in her smiling gaze. Further he attributes the retained childhood feelings toward the mouth as also evident in other paintings, e.g., “The Holy Family.” Freud’s analysis is critically reviewed in light of Leonardo’s childhood condition, with Leonardo being viewed as the child in “The Holy Family.”

These are dark waters.

Some psychoanalytic researchers aim for a shallower dip into the mind of Leonardo. Wayne Anderson, Professor Emeritus of History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published a journal article, and later a full book called “Freud, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Vulture’s Tail: A Refreshing Look at Leonardo’s Sexuality.” The book was published by Other Press, in 2001. The article appeared in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 50, no. 4, Fall 2002, pp. 1376-82.)

Attempting to rise far above surface level, Donald Capps, at the Princeton Theological Seminary, offers a study called “Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: Iconic Center of Male Melancholic Religion” (Pastoral Psychology, vol. 53, no. 2, November 2004, pp. 107-37). Capps speaks boldly:

In the present essay, I argue that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is the iconic center of the religion of male melancholia, and thus displaces the Virgin Mary of traditional Christianity in this regard. I provide evidence in support of this argument by focusing on Walter Pater’s essay on Leonardo da Vinci, and interpreting Vincent Peruggia’s theft, Hugo Villegas’s stoning, and Marcel Duchamp and others’ humorous assaults on the dignity of Mona Lisa as expressions of male melancholia. I conclude that the painting aids in the difficult task of transforming melancholia into mourning.

Physics and You, the Viewer

These matters may be only partially medical, mental, or mystical. Several scientists see the painting as an example of one or another pure physics effect.  Others see the mysteries, if mysteries there be, as being largely about physiology — the physiology of anyone who gazes at the painting.

Some reports take one or another ophthalmological approach. L.L. Kontsevich and C.W. Tyler of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, do just that in “What Makes Mona Lisa Smile?” (Vision Research, vol. 44, no. 13, 2004, pp. 1493-8.) They explain that:

To study the ability of humans to read subtle changes in facial expression, we applied reverse correlation technique to reveal visual features that mediate understanding of emotion expressed by the face. Surprising findings were that (1) the noise added to a test face image had profound effect on the facial expression and (2) in almost every instance the new expression was meaningful. To quantify the effect, we asked naive observers to rank the face of Mona Lisa superimposed with noise, based on their perception of her emotional state along the sad/happy dimension. Typically, a hundred trials (with 10 or more samples for each rank category) were sufficient to reveal areas altering the facial expression, which is about two orders of magnitude less than in the other reverse correlation studies. Moreover, the perception of smiling in the eyes was solely attributable to a configurational effect projecting from the mouth region.

Margaret S. Livingstone of Harvard Medical School published a brief article called  “Is it Warm? Is it Real? Or Just Low Spatial Frequency?” (Science, vol. 290, no. 5495, November 2000, p. 1299) . She writes that:

The spatial resolution of the human visual system changes dramatically with distance from the center of gaze (1), due to the fact that both the retina and the visual cortex devote disproportionately more neuronal machinery to the fovea….

[I]f you look at the painting so that your gaze falls on the background or on Mona Lisa’s hands, your perception of her mouth would be dominated by low spatial frequencies, so it would appear much more cheerful than when you look directly at her mouth….

[H]er smile is more apparent in the low spatial frequency range, and therefore more apparent to peripheral vision than to central vision. Hence the elusive quality — you can’t catch her smile by looking at her mouth. She smiles until you look at her mouth, and then it fades, like a dim star that disappears when you look directly at it.

Mona, Sfumato

Diogo Queiros-Conde, a physicist at the Ecole des Mines de Paris, offers up both physics and a keen, discovering eye in his paper “The Turbulent Structure of Sfumato within Mona Lisa,” published in MIT’s journal called Leonardo (vol. 37, no. 3, June 2004, pp. 223-8.) The early pages bring to bear several kinds of knowledge:

The author describes a particular way of looking at the Mona Lisa whereby evidence of a turbulent structure (based on underlying sfumato) that reveals an infinity of hidden faces behind the famous figure can be seen. When light is progressively reduced by a “squinting process,” the effect is especially striking in the last face on the edge of the painting’s dark areas. The author interprets this visual phenomenon in the context of entropic skins geometry, which he has developed to describe the geometry and statistics of turbulent flows.

But Queiros-Conde’s report includes, about two-thirds of the way through, a most curious passage, one likely to inspire visits to see the original painting for a good, careful look:

I advise the reader to pay attention to the luminous form just under Mona Lisa’s left shoulder and to look at it (again, due to the Claparède effect, it helps to close one eye) from the upper right almost tangentially to the surface painting and from an angle corresponding to 45° in relation to the vertical. Redressed by this new angle of vision, one should recognize a form that can be interpreted as a human skull.

Mona and Quantum Mechanics

But for advanced physics, the field seems dominated by Slobodan Prvanovic of the Institute of Physics in Belgrade, Serbia. His recent study is so very advanced that it leaves many physicists perplexed. Here is the full citation, and a tantalizing excerpt:

“Mona Lisa — Ineffable Smile of Quantum Mechanics,” arXiv:physics/0302089, vol. 1, February 2003, Institute of Physics, P.O. Box 57, 11080 Belgrade, Serbia The author explains:

The portrait of Mona Lisa is scrutinized with reference to quantum mechanics. The elements of different expressions are firstly recognized on her face. The contradictory details are then classified in two pictures that, undoubtedly representing distinct moods, confirm dichotomous character of the original. Consecutive discussion has lead to conclusion that the mysterious state Mona Lisa is in actually is coherent mixture — superposition, of cheerfulness and sadness.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the  March-April 2006 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Link

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.

Link

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.

Photo: flickr user Sifter

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

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.

Link

He didn’t just do this for fun, though… it’s actually an Arby’s ad.

Link via Slashfood

Previously on Neatorama: Bruce Lee Speed Painting | Phil Hansen’s Influence: a Body Paint Art

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.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.

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

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:

• Album Covers Made of Food
• Carl Warner’s Foodscapes