French scientists have shone new light on the painting technique that allowed Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci to give the Mona Lisa such an extraordinary delicate charm.
Working with an X-ray scanner, academics at the Louvre were able to detect each layer of glaze, paint and pigment in seven of Leonardo’s masterpieces, and reconstruct his painstaking shading technique known as sfumato.
“Minute observations, optical measurements and reconstitutions have already described the sfumato, but new analysis can confirm the procedure of this technique,” a statement from the state CNRS research institute said.
One of the reasons why the Mona Lisa remains renowned to this day as a great portrait is the lifelike shadows and tones that give her enigmatically smiling face a sense of depth and reality.
Scientists who were able to study the layers of work that went into the paintings without damaging them by extracting actual samples said the shadows were built up by dozens of translucent layers of glaze.
Each layer was only one of two micrometers thick, but each contained a carefully dosed amount of pigmentation.
This was a new technique in the Renaissance, and part of the reason Leonardo and his contemporaries were able to make what had been the once flat images of the Middle Ages appear to leap from their frames into photo-like reality.
“The results obtained in this study help to understand Da Vinci’s search toward making his art look alive,” the statement said.
In addition to the Mona Lisa, the scientists studied Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, Saint John the Baptist, Annunciation, Bacchus, Belle Ferronniere, Saint Anne and The Virgin and the Child.
In each case, they were able to probe the 500-year-old masterworks without even taking them down from the walls of the famous Louvre Gallery in Paris, by beaming an X-ray fluorescence spectroscope at the canvas.
The research was published in the Angewandte Chemie International Edition.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of