Photo 98668727 © aros muheddin | Dreamstime.com
The most famous smile in art history is also one of the most enigmatic. So far, experts have only uncovered the broad brushstrokes, and till today, they’re still landing on new revelations about the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece.
Inspecting a wee speck from the painting, a team of researchers from France and Britain, including lead author Victor Gonzalez and his team at France’s most prolific research institute CNRS, discovered a new material that pointed to the Renaissance polymath feeling extra experimental that day.
The sample, negligible to the human eye and being no wider than the diameter of a strand of hair, showed that Da Vinci composed and used a rare chemical compound called plumbonacrite on the base layer of the Mona Lisa. The fragment was extracted from the top right corner of the 520-year-old artwork and examined at an atomic level under X-rays in a synchrotron, a machine that accelerates charged particles at a speed close to that of light.
This mineral is a byproduct of lead oxide, and its emergence five centuries later confirms previous theories that the artist had applied lead oxide powder to the project to thicken and dry the paint in the work.
Experts deduce that Da Vinci must have mixed lead oxide powder, which is orange in color, with linseed or walnut oil and heated the material to produce a thick, quick-drying golden paste that “flows more like honey,” Gonzalez tells the Associated Press.
The ingredient has been seen in works by the likes of Rembrandt, suggesting that the secret recipe might have been passed down from generation to generation.
But plumbanocrite is not a material that Da Vinci was known to use. In fact, every one of his masterpieces is “completely different” in makeup, says Gonzalez. His team has published their findings about the discovery in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The unusual adoption of the compound reflects Da Vinci’s ever-fascinating instinct to innovate and experiment.
All told, even when art lovers think they’ve seen the Mona Lisa, they haven’t really seen it. Gonzalez notes that what experts have gleaned is only the tip of the iceberg, and that there are many more mysteries waiting to be unraveled.
[via Associated Press and ARTnews, cover photo 98668727 © aros muheddin | Dreamstime.com]
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