The Mona Lisa Was Reexamined With New Technology — Experts Were Shocked

[00:00:00]The Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting in the world and her future.

[00:00:04]The masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, painted in the early 1500s. The Mona Lisa was re-examined with new technology. And what [music] the experts found has rewritten five centuries of art history in ways the headlines never fully told you. The painting hanging behind bulletproof glass in the Louver is not a portrait. It is a sealed laboratory. Inside its [music] thin layers of oil on popular wood sits a hidden chemical recipe. Leonardo never wrote down.

[00:00:31]>> Mona Lisa has been moved back into [music] its original place at the Louv Museum. The famous Leonardo de Vinci artwork had been moved to another gallery in July. 16 years of buried decisions no human eye has ever seen and an engineered optical system 5 centuries old [music] that nobody knew existed until a French scientist pointed a 13wavelength camera at it one night in 2004.

[00:00:58]what the painting is. Before any of the imaging, before the chemistry, before the headlines, you have to understand what the Mona Lisa is as a physical object. Not as a cultural icon, not as the most reproduced image in human history. [music] A small oil painting on a popular wood panel, 77 cm tall, 53 cm wide, 8 kg. That is the entire thing.

[00:01:23]Smaller than the suitcase you took on your last flight.

[00:01:25]>> [music] >> It was painted by Leonardo da Vinci beginning in approximately 1503 in Florence. The commission according to the traditional identification came from a Florentine silk merchant named [music] Francesco Deljacondo. The sitter was his wife Lisa Geredini born in Florence in 1479, married to Deljondo at 15, mother of several children by the time Leonardo started the portrait at her age of about 24. a prosperous merchant's wife.

[00:01:56]Nothing extraordinary about the commission itself. Stop and think about that for a second. The most famous painting in the world began as a routine job. A wealthy merchant wanted a portrait of his wife. He hired a known artist. There is nothing in the documentary record from 1503 that suggests anyone, including Leonardo, [music] expected this painting to become anything more than another competent Florentine commission of the period. For centuries, even the identification of the sitter was disputed. Some scholars argued it was Leonardo's mother. Some argued it was a noble patron. A few argued it was a feminized self-portrait.

[00:02:32]The debate finally died in 2005. [music] And it died because of a single sentence written in the margin of a book 500 years earlier. Picture a small office in Florence, October 1503. A Florentine official named [music] Agugustino Vasbuchi is reading a 1477 edition of Cicero<unk>'s letters. [music] He knows Leonardo personally. He picks up his pen, leans into the margin of the printed page, and writes a brief note about what his friend Leonardo is currently working on. He mentions the portrait of Lisa Delioondo by [music] name. Then he closes the book and almost certainly never thinks about that sentence again. Vaspuchcci has no idea that he has just written the single most important footnote in the history of Western art. He is a clerk. He is making a personal annotation in his copy of a Roman writer. He is in his own mind doing nothing of consequence. That book sits on a shelf for the next 528 years.

[00:03:26]It moves between collections. It survives wars. It survives fires. It [music] survives the entire collapse of the Italian Renaissance. The entire arc of the enlightenment. [music] two world wars and the rise of every modern academic discipline that would eventually obsess over its margin. In 2005, a researcher at the H Highleberg University Library opens it, sees the marginal note, and recognizes what it is. The 500year argument over who the woman in the painting actually is collapses [music] in a single afternoon.

[00:03:58]The sitter is Lisa Geredini. That part is settled. But here is where the actual mystery [music] starts. Leonardo never delivered the painting. He kept it. He carried it with him through every relocation for the next 16 years through Milan, through Rome, all the way to the French royal court at Ambis where he died on May 2nd, 1519. The painting was in his [music] studio when he died. 16 years of continuous work on a single portrait of a merchant's wife. No letters explain it. No notebook entries explain it. Leonardo abandoned major commissions all the time. The adoration of the Magi, St. Jerome in the wilderness, half a dozen others left unfinished at various stages. This one he refused to let go of. And here's what should bother you about that. 16 years is not a phase. It is not a long final polish. It is longer than most artists spend on their entire major output.

[00:04:53]Leonardo started this painting around the time Michelangelo was beginning the David. He was still working on it after Michelangelo finished the cyine chapel ceiling. He took it across the Alps.

[00:05:03][music] He took it through political upheaval. He took it through three different countries and at least four different patrons. He took it with him to die. When he died, it passed to his patron, King Francis I of France. It has remained in the French royal collection and then the Louver ever since. Whatever Leonardo was doing inside that small piece of popular wood for 16 years, he never wrote it down. Nobody asked the right question for five centuries. and the tools to actually look inside the panel and answer it did not exist until [music] 2004. So what was he doing in there? The 2015 headlines. Fast forward to December 2015. Pascal Coat has now spent 11 years analyzing the data he captured that one night in the Salesa.

[00:05:50]Coat is not a romantic figure in this story. He is an engineer. He founded a company called Lumiere Technology in Paris specifically to build imaging systems that could pull information out of paintings that no conservator's eye or conventional X-ray had ever been able to access. His 2004 session inside the Louver was formally authorized by the Saint Draer Edtor de Muse de France. It was not a stunt. It was the first comprehensive multisspectral [music] imaging analysis ever performed on the Mona Lisa. 11 years is the part of the timeline that gets lost. The night in 2004 makes the news. The announcement in 2015 makes the news. The 11 years in between caught alone with the data.

[00:06:34]Building visualization software, isolating specific wavelengths, separating layer from layer, learning what each band of the spectrum was actually telling him about what sat beneath the surface. That part is invisible. It is also where the actual work happened. And in December 2015, he stood up and announced what he had found. The announcement was sensational.

[00:06:56]K claimed the Dota showed a hidden portrait beneath the visible surface. A different face, a different composition, a different sitter underneath the woman the world had been looking at for five centuries. Within hours, the headlines were everywhere. A secret woman buried under the Mona Lisa. A face Leonardo had painted over. The mystery of the world's most famous painting finally cracked.

[00:07:20]The scholarly response was sharper than the headlines suggested. In Oxford, [music] an ameritus professor named Martin Kemp, who is widely regarded as the leading Leonardo scholar alive, pushed back hard. Kemp has spent his entire career on this painter. Decades of looking at the panels, the notebooks, the underd drawings, the documentary record. He looked at Coat's data and he disagreed with the framing, the underlying layers. Kemp argued did not necessarily represent a different sitter at all. They could just as easily represent progressive revisions of the same composition. Leonardo adjusting the pose, refining the features, modifying the expression, the same woman, painted and repainted over 16 years. Here's the thing about Kemp. When he objects to a Leonardo claim, the field listens. He is not contrarian for the sake of it. He has lived inside Leonardo's body of work for longer than most of his colleagues have been alive. So when he stood up against Colt's hidden portrait framing, the academic community paused. The press did not. The distinction sounds technical. It is not. It is enormous. If the lower layers show a different person, [music] the implications are seismic. The painting was fundamentally transformed at some point. The Lisa Gerardini commission was abandoned or repurposed mid-process. The face the world has been looking at is not the original subject. If the lower layers show the same sitter at different stages of revision, the implications are different and in some ways stranger. It would mean Leonardo's famous fumato, the soft hazy modeling that gives the painting its distinctive [music] atmosphere, was achieved through an accumulation of subtle adjustments stretching across 16 years. Each pass refining what was already there. Each layer modifying the layers beneath it.

[00:09:12]The 2015 news cycle ran with the first interpretation because it sold. A hidden woman. A buried secret. A face Leonardo erased. That story was on every front page in the world inside 48 hours. The actual finding, the one that turned out to matter, was almost completely missed in the noise. Before we get to it, here's the part I want you to do. If you've ever stood in front of a painting and wondered what was underneath the surface, what the artist actually did before they made it look easy, hit subscribe and stay with me. This channel is going inside the imaging room. We're not visiting the gift shop. The next part of this story is the part the 2015 headlines didn't tell you, and you'll want to be here for the next investigation when it drops. The 2023 bombshell.

[00:10:03]The quieter truth came first and it came from inside the louver itself. Vincent Deuvena is the louver's senior curator for 16th century Italian painting.

[00:10:13][music] He has spent more time in front of the actual Mona Lisa than almost any human being alive. When Cot's data became available, Deleivvon sat down with it and compared it against his own deep study of the surface. His conclusion lined up with Kemp's not with the headlines. The underlying layers were not a concealed earlier portrait of someone else. They were Leonardo's working process. 16 years of revision preserved inside the paint itself. Think about what that actually means. The Mona Lisa contains [music] inside thin layers of oil paint on a popppler panel a complete record of Leonardo's thinking.

[00:10:49]16 years of decisions, [music] 16 years of changes. The hands were not always positioned where you see them now. The hairline was different at an earlier stage. The veil over her hair was added at one point and partially modified at another. The background landscape behind her shoulders went through multiple revisions [music] with elements that were painted in, partially erased under new layers and then reinccorporated in modified form. Even the famous expression, the slight upward turn at the corner of her mouth sits on top of earlier passes where the mouth was modeled differently. The smile you see is the last smile in a series.

[00:11:26]Here's the part nobody saw coming. The hidden portrait framing made better headlines, but the working process framing is the more disturbing finding.

[00:11:34]Because a hidden portrait is a single event, a moment of erasure, a different woman replaced by Lisa Geredini. That you can explain that fits inside a normal art history sentence. A 16-year continuous process of layered revision is not a single event. It is a way of working that has no real precedent in the Renaissance record. [music] Other painters revised, other painters changed their minds. Nobody else carried a portrait through three countries and four patrons across two decades, repainting it, modifying it, refusing to release it, [music] and dying with it still in their studio. That is not how portraiture works. That is not even how Leonardo's other portraits work. That was the quieter truth. The painting was not a portrait. It was a process frozen at the moment Leonardo died. And [music] then in October 2023, the story got bigger. Picture a laboratory at the center national de la Reserant, [music] the French National Research Institute.

[00:12:33]Victor Gonzalez is a researcher there.

[00:12:35]He specializes in the chemistry of historical pigments and painting materials. He is not working from the painting itself. He is working from micro samples, [music] tiny fragments of paint and ground layer that had been collected from the Mona Lisa during previous conservation interventions and stored for years, waiting for someone with the right instrument to ask the right question. Gonzalez is running X-ray defraction on the priming layer.

[00:13:00]The ground preparation Leonardo applied to the popular panel before he started painting and the spectrum comes back wrong. Or rather, it comes back with a peak that should not be there. A signature for a rare lead-based compound called plumbonocrit. Chemical formula PB5 open parenthesis CO 3 close parenthesis 3 open parenthesis O H close parenthesis 2. For most people that formula is just letters and numbers. For Gonzalez sitting in that lab in front of that spectrum it stopped him because plum bonrite is not a pigment. An artist would not add it for color. It is a compound that forms when lead oxide is dissolved into oil. When an artist deliberately mixes lead based material [music] into the oil medium to change how the paint behaves, drying time, transparency, [music] the way the brush moves through it, the way light enters and exits it. The compound has no business sitting in the priming layer of a Renaissance painting unless the painter put it there on purpose. and nobody had ever found it in a confirmed Leonardo work before.

[00:14:08]Gonzalez and his team cross-cheed the result. They ran the test again. They eliminated contamination. They eliminated later restoration. Then they did something that took the finding from interesting to extraordinary. They ran the same analysis against samples taken from Leonardo's Last Supper in Milan.

[00:14:25]The plumite was there, too. Stop on that for a second. the same unusual lead-based compound in unusually high concentration [music] sitting in the priming layer of two of Leonardo's most important works. That is not a contamination. That is not a later restoer's mistake. That is a recipe. The Mona Lisa and the Last Supper share an experimental ground formulation that Leonardo was deliberately preparing, [music] carrying with him across decades, applying to his most ambitious paintings and never writing down anywhere we have found. [music] And this matters beyond the chemistry.

[00:15:00]It means there was a hidden method behind these works that Leonardo kept to himself. The notebooks are exhaustive about hydraulics, anatomy, [music] flight, optics, engineering, and silent about this. Whatever recipe he was using for the ground layer, he did not commit it to paper. It existed only in his hands, and it died with him in 1519. The 2023 finding is in a real [music] sense the first time anyone has been able to read a part of his method that Leonardo himself chose not to record. [music] The team published in the journal of the American Chemical Society in October 2023. [music] And here is the line that the scholarly community is still absorbing. Leonardo wasn't painting. He was engineering.

[00:15:44]What fumato actually is.

[00:15:48]The fumato that makes the Mona Lisa famous. The imperceptible transitions [music] between light and shadow, the soft modeling that gives the face its strange depth, has been described for five centuries as a brush work miracle.

[00:16:00]It is not, [music] or at least it is not only that, it is chemistry. The ground layer was formulated to create specific optical effects. [music] The oil medium was modified with lead compounds that changed how light moved through the paint above. Dozens of translucent layers were applied on top. Each one slightly modifying the optical properties of the layers beneath. Each one calibrated against the engineered primer underneath. Each one applied with knowledge of how the modified oil would dry. The famous glow of the Mona Lisa's skin is the cumulative output of a designed optical system. Leonardo was not waving a brush around and hoping.

[00:16:38][music] He was reasoning about light, about how light would enter the upper paint, scatter through the translucent layers, reflect off the engineered ground, and come back out to the viewer's eye. That is what an optical engineer thinks about. That is what a material scientist thinks about. 500 years before either of those disciplines existed as formal fields, Leonardo was already inside them, working from first principles in a studio by candle light with materials he was modifying by hand.

[00:17:06]And this is where it gets stranger. The notebooks Leonardo left behind document obsessive engagement with optics, anatomy, hydraulics, engineering, geology, and a dozen other fields. We have always known he was that kind of mind. What we did not know until the imaging and the chemistry was that the painting itself was an application of that program, not a representational object, an experimental object. He was using the panel the way a modern researcher uses a test bed. The painting was a laboratory. The 16 years were not refinement. They were experiments. He was applying a layer, watching how the light behaved when it [music] dried, modifying his approach, applying the next layer, watching again. The painting was teaching him as he made it. And he refused to release it because he wasn't done learning. Now look at the Mona Lisa in your head. The face you have seen on coffee mugs and postcards your entire life. [music] The face that has been printed more times than any other image in human history. Five centuries of viewers have been looking at the output of a system without knowing the system existed.

[00:18:10]A door opens.

[00:18:13]If Leonardo was running an optical laboratory inside a single painting, he was almost certainly running it inside others. The Virgin of the Rocks, St. John the Baptist, the enunciation.

[00:18:26]The imaging and chemical methodologies that have now been applied to the Mona Lisa can be turned on any of them. And every panel might contain [music] its own version of the same buried evidence, but the door that actually opens here is bigger than Leonardo. Over the past two decades, the same imaging technologies have been quietly turned on the work of every major figure in western painting.

[00:18:48]Rembrandt, Vermeere, Caravagio, Velasquez, and the findings have been consistent [music] across painters and across centuries. Vermeir was painting over earlier compositions. Rembrandt was scraping back into wet paint to manipulate light. Caravajio was moving figures midcanvas, sometimes more than once. The traditional image of the old master, the figure who saw the finished painting in his head and laid it down on the surface in a single steady act of genius, turns out to be largely a myth invented by people who could only see the final layer. Think about what that myth has cost us. For 500 years, we have been telling students of art that the great painters worked from inspiration, from a kind of divine certainty, that the canvases came out of their heads finished. That the difference between a master and a journeyman was the master's vision, not the master's process. And the imaging is showing us that this is the opposite of the truth. The masters were not the ones who [music] skipped the experiments. They were the ones who ran more of them. The surface that looks effortless is the surface that took the most labor to get to. The mystery of the great paintings is not that they came from a single act of vision. The mystery is how much trial, error, and revision they actually contain [music] and how completely the final surface has hidden it. The real masters were closer to scientists than to mystics. They [music] were running experiments. They were learning from their own surfaces.

[00:20:12]They were revising for years. The Mona Lisa is just the [music] most famous case. It is also the most extreme. 16 years inside a single panel, a custom engineered ground layer, a modified oil medium, dozens of translucent paint layers carrying the cumulative record of every decision he made along the way. A panel that is visited by millions of people every year, sealed behind bulletproof glass to protect it from the next attacker. And let's name them because they belong in this story, too.

[00:20:43]Vincenzo Peruja, who walked it out of the Louver under his coat in 1911. Hugo Unaga Viegas who threw acid at it in 1956.

[00:20:53]The Tokyo attacker in 1974 [music] with red paint. The Russian woman with the ceramic mug in 2009. The man disguised as an elderly woman in a wheelchair in May 2022 who smeared cake across the protective glass as a climate protest.

[00:21:09]The painting has survived all of them.

[00:21:11]The bulletproof case has done its job.

[00:21:14]But the bulletproof case is also why almost no one ever gets to look inside.

[00:21:19]The 2004 caught [music] session was a rare exception, a single night. 20 years of analysis later, that one data set is still being read. [music] The 2023 chemistry work didn't even use direct access. Gonzalez was working from samples that had been collected years earlier and waiting on a shelf for the right instrument to arrive. Think about that gap. The painting is the most reproduced object in human history. It is studied by the most credentialed art historians and conservation [music] scientists in the world. And the actual physical opportunities to gather new evidence from it can be counted on one hand, the 2004 session. A handful of conservation interventions across the 20th century. Each one limited and tightly supervised. A small stockpile of micro samples. Each one priceless, sitting in CNRS storage, waiting for someone to ask a question [music] precise enough to be worth using one up.

[00:22:15]Every finding is paid for in access that almost no other painting in the world demands so much to grant. Every finding has to be extracted from limited evidence. Every conclusion has to be defended against the difficulty of gathering more. [music] And still, the Mona Lisa keeps yielding new information. aspects of Leonardo's methodology that five centuries of scholarship had no way to detect [music] because the instruments to detect them did not exist until now. The painting is real, [music] the imaging is real, the chemistry is real. What they have placed in front of the modern field, the engineered primer, the modified oil, the dozens of translucent optical layers, the 16 years of revision, the laboratory hidden inside a portrait is the part of the story that five centuries of writing about this painting had been circling without ever quite seeing. And here is what is strange to sit with. Every reproduction of the Mona Lisa you have ever seen. Every postcard, every textbook image, every airport poster, every billboard, every screenshot is a flat image of a surface, a single layer, the one Leonardo finished with. None of those reproductions can show you what is underneath. None of them can show you the 16 years of decisions. None of them can show you the engineered ground or the modified oil or the optical system Leonardo built into the panel. They can only show you the final answer. [music] The imaging is the only thing that has ever shown the work. The reproduction industry that built the painting's modern fame [music] has by its nature hidden the more interesting half of what the painting actually is. So what stays with you about all this? Is it that the Mona Lisa is a process rather than a portrait? Is it that Leonardo was running a chemistry laboratory inside a wooden panel four centuries before chemistry [music] existed as a formal science? Is it the marginal note Vespuchi wrote in 1503 and forgot? Is it the night in 2004 when Pascal Kot stood in the Sales Zeta with a camera and pulled 500 years of buried decisions back into visible [music] light? Tell me which one rewrites the painting for you.

[00:24:22]Drop it in the comments. [music] I want to know which part you cannot stop thinking about.