FILE - Journalists walk past Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa during a visit of the Louvre museum Tuesday, June 23, 2020. Using X-rays to peer into the chemical structure of a tiny speck of the celebrated work of art, scientists have gained new insight into the techniques that Leonardo da Vinci used to paint his groundbreaking portrait of the woman with the exquisitely enigmatic smile. PARIS - The “Mona Lisa” has given up another secret.
The oil-paint recipe that Leonardo used as his base layer to prepare the panel of poplar wood appears to have been different for the “Mona Lisa,” with its own distinctive chemical signature, the team of scientists and art historians in France and Britain discovered. Specifically, the researchers found a rare compound, plumbonacrite, in Leonardo's first layer of paint. The discovery, Gonzalez said, confirmed for the first time what art historians had previously only hypothesized: that Leonardo most likely used lead oxide powder to thicken and help dry his paint as he began working on the portrait that now stares out from behind protective glass in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The paint fragment from the base layer of the “Mona Lisa” that was analyzed was barely visible to the naked eye, no larger than the diameter of a human hair, and came from the top right-hand edge of the painting. After Leonardo, Dutch master Rembrandt may have used a similar recipe when he was painting in the 17th century; Gonzalez and other researchers have previously found plumbonacrite in his work, too.
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