ShareThisBy ANNE McILROY
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Mona Lisa had recently given birth, a team of Canadian and French scientists announced this week, so her mysterious smile may have expressed the weary joy of a mother with a newborn.
Using infrared technology that allowed them to see beneath a layer of varnish, the researchers found that Leonardo da Vinci's model had a gauzy layer over her dress they say was typically worn by pregnant women of the time, or mothers who had recently given birth. The filmy robe was called a "guarnello."
Mona Lisa was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine cloth merchant. Records suggest she wasn't pregnant when she posed for da Vinci, but that the painting was commissioned to celebrate the birth of her third child, says Bruno Mottin, a curator in the research department of the French Museums' Center for Research and Restoration.
The infant was a boy, says Mottin, born before da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa in the early 1500s.
It was the second son for the Italian couple. She had also given birth to a girl, her second child, who died as an infant.
For the artist, the Mona Lisa was more than a portrait of woman or a mother. Da Vinci was trying to capture life in all its subtleties in the painting, says Mottin, and never gave it to the cloth merchant who commissioned it.
The researchers said Tuesday that they carried out the most in-depth scientific study ever done on one of the most famous paintings in the world, using a number of high-tech tools.
The scientists carried out their work in a laboratory in the basement of the Louvre in Paris. They had to work at night, when the museum was closed.
They found that in addition to a veil that is visible on her head, Mona Lisa was wearing a dark bonnet that is quite hard to see under the layer of varnish applied long after da Vinci died, Mottin says.
In his book about the painting, British historian Donald Sassoon notes that Giorgio Vasari, a da Vinci biographer, wrote in 1586 that Mona Lisa was entertained by clowns and musicians to make her smile.
But over the years, her smile has come to be seen as enigmatic, and dozens of theories have been put forward to explain it. Some experts said she was pregnant. Others suggested she suffered from facial paralysis, and smiled her particular smile because she had lost her two front teeth.
The findings announced at a press conference in Ottawa on Tuesday could change the way both art experts and millions of tourists see the painting when they visit the Louvre. If you know what to look for, you can see the gauzy garment that says Mona Lisa had recently had a baby, Mottin says.
The dark bonnet, however, is much harder to see.
The results of the study have been published in a book called "Mona Lisa: Inside the Painting."
