Mona Lisa’s smile demystified

For centuries people have been trying to find the magic behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. Now, a new study has suggested that it may be due to a technique as old as the ancient Romans.

Jacques Franck, a consultant at the Armand Hammer Centre for Da Vinci Studies at the University of California, said the great artist used a technique called "sfumato", taken from the Italian word "fumato" meaning smoke, that consists of countless of dot layers applied with a technique of micro-divided brushstrokes.

"Examples of this micro-division of tones exist since the ancient Romans. Leonardo took an existing techniques, but used it to the extreme, like nobody else," Discovery News quoted him, as saying.

According to Franck, the painting technique that is the result of the delicate brushwork that blends light, shadow, and contours, produces an almost three-dimensional effect.

Franck said Leonardo Da Vinci used the same technique in another of his works titled ‘Drapery study for a seated figure’ which hangs in the Louvre in Paris.

"The technique is visible, as he used tempera. On the contrary, in oil painting traces would have been masked by a delicate velatura or glaze," he said.

And, the process is so painstaking, that Franck thinks that it may have taken Da Vinci 10 years to complete the Mona Lisa.

"He may have made one sq mm a day. This means it might have taken Leonardo about 10 years to complete the Mona Lisa," he added.

However, not all art historians agree with Franck’s theory, Martin Kemp, a Da Vinci scholar and UK professor of art history from the University of Oxford, said though Da Vinci did use the sfumato technique, there were no dots visible in the Mona Lisa.

"I find it absolutely untrue. Leonardo did use the sfumato, but his painting technique is also very firm. I have seen the Mona Lisa under a magnifying glass and really, I could not see any dot," he said. — ANI

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