Scientists have discovered a latest secret about how Leonardo da Vinci painted his enigmatic masterpiece, “The Mona Lisa.”
The progressive Renaissance painter invented a singular chemical formula for the oil paints he used when painting the famous gazing lady, in accordance with groundbreaking research published Wednesday within the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Leonardo used his own chemically distinctive recipe on the Mona Lisa’s base layer to arrange the panel of poplar wood, the team of scientists and art historians in France and Britain discovered.
“He was someone who loved to experiment, and every of his paintings is totally different technically,” Victor Gonzalez, the study’s lead writer and a chemist at France’s top research body, the CNRS, told The Associated Press.
Gonzalez has studied the chemical compositions of dozens of works by Leonardo, Rembrandt and other artists.
“On this case, it’s interesting to see that indeed there may be a selected technique for the bottom layer of ‘Mona Lisa,’” he said.
The researchers found a rare compound, plumbonacrite, in a fraction of the enduring work’s first layer, confirming art historians’ suspicions that Leonardo used lead oxide powder to thicken and help dry his paint.
The wisp of paint from the bottom layer of the “Mona Lisa,” that researchers analyzed was barely visible to the naked eye — just as wide as a human hair — and got here from the highest right-hand fringe of the painting, in accordance with the study.
Using a synchrotron, a big machine that accelerates particles to almost the speed of sunshine, researchers analyzed the fragment’s chemical composition at an atomic level.
The makeup revealed plumbonacrite, a byproduct of lead oxide, allowing the researchers to say with more certainty that Leonardo likely used the powder in his homemade paint brew.
“Plumbonacrite is admittedly a fingerprint of his recipe,” Gonzalez said. “It’s the primary time we will actually chemically confirm it.”
Gonzalez said that the chemical has also been present in Rembrandt’s works he accomplished within the Netherlands within the seventeenth century.
This discovery “tells us also that those recipes were passed on for hundreds of years,” he said. “It was a excellent recipe.”
Leonardo is believed to have dissolved lead oxide powder, which has an orange color, in linseed or walnut oil by heating the mixture to make a thicker, faster-drying paste.
“What you’ll obtain is an oil that has a really nice golden color,” Gonzalez said. “It flows more like honey.”
The “Mona Lisa” has for hundreds of years mystified those that’ve met the cool stare of its subject, believed to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, in accordance with the Louvre Museum in Paris where it has resided because the 18th century.
Even with this breakthrough, Gonzalez says there are more hidden secrets in Leonardo’s works to be found.
“We’re barely scratching the surface,” Gonzalez said. “What we’re saying is just a little bit brick more within the knowledge.”
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