Hidden portrait painted beneath Mona Lisa, French scientist claims



This was published 5 years ago

Hidden portrait painted beneath Mona Lisa, French scientist claims

By Megan Levy

A French scientist claims to have discovered a hidden portrait beneath Leonardo Da Vinci's most celebrated masterpiece, the Mona Lisa.

Pascal Cotte, the co-founder of Lumiere Technology in Paris, says he has used reflective light technology to uncover an image of another woman, who is looking off to the side and not smiling, in contrast to the Mona Lisa's direct and enigmatic gaze.

Enigmatic gaze: The Mona Lisa.

Enigmatic gaze: The Mona Lisa.

The change in the woman posing for the painting could be the key to a totally different history behind the portrait, he says.

"The results shatter many myths and alter our vision of Leonardo's masterpiece forever," Mr Cotte said in a new documentary, due to air on the BBC this week.

Andrew Graham-Dixon, who made the BBC documentary, said he had no doubt that "this is definitely one of the stories of the century".


The Louvre Museum, where the Mona Lisa hangs, has declined to comment on the claims, while some art historians are skeptical about the Mr Cotte's discovery.

"It's perfectly common for an artist to overpaint an image as it is for a client who's commissioned that artist to ask for changes. So it's not surprising that there are those underpaintings on the Mona Lisa," said Will Gompertz, the BBC's Arts Editor, who claimed that the "data that the technology generates is open to interpretation".


The Louvre Museum granted Mr Cotte access to the Mona Lisa in 2004, and he said he used a technique called Layer Amplification Method to analyse the painting.

Mr Cotte told the BBC his technique worked by "projecting a series of intense lights" on to the painting. A camera then took measurements of the lights' reflections and, from those measurements, Mr Cotte said he was able to reconstruct what had happened between the layers of the paint.


Mona Lisa's identity has been a mystery for centuries, but it was widely believed that she was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant.

But Mr Cotte claims his discoveries challenge that theory. He believes the image he has reconstructed underneath the surface of the painting is Da Vinci's original Lisa, and that the portrait named Mona Lisa for more than 500 years is a different woman.

"When I finished the reconstruction of Lisa Gherardini, I was in front of the portrait and she is totally different to Mona Lisa today. This is not the same woman," he told the BBC.

He also claims to have found two more images under the surface of the painting - a shadowy outline of a portrait with a larger head and nose, bigger hands but smaller lips, and another Madonna-style image with Da Vinci's etchings of a pearl headdress.

The Louvre Museum declined to comment on his claims because it "was not part of the scientific team".

Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, told the BBC that he was not convinced.



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