Mama Lisa?!

Was Mona Lisa pregnant?

That's what the National Research Council of Canada are saying! They've been studying high-grade 3D scans taken of the painting (ergo the colour-coded elevation level contour map above, which provides an accurate record of the shape of the poplar panel on which Mona Lisa was painted) and have come up with evidence that she either was pregnant or had just given birth at the time she sat for the painting. Apparently the garment she wore on her shoulders is a fine, gauzy veil known as a guarnello, something women of the Italian Renaissance wore when they were expecting, similar to the one in Sandro Botticelli's "Portrait of A Lady".

As the painting aged, the veil darkened until it was hard to interpret the colour of her dress, much less the fabric around her shoulders. This would confirm art historians' theory that the circa 1503 painting of the Mona Lisa (or Madam Lisa) is that of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that Giocondo requested for a painting of his wife to celebrate the birth of their second son. In France, the painting which is on display at the Louvre Museum, is referred to as La Joconde, which is the French version of her married name. The scans also clearly show that Mona Lisa does not have her hair down, as it appears. Most of her tresses are pinned back into a chignon and covered with a veil.

“We know how the painting is painted with very thin layers,” Bruno Mottin told reporters in Ottawa, Canada. “That’s one of the things we couldn’t see by the naked eye, and that Canadian technology brought us.” John Taylor of Canada’s National Research Council said there were no signs of brush strokes. “That includes the very fine details of the embroidery on the dress, the hair,” he said. “This is the ‘je ne sais quoi’ of Leonardo. The genius. We don’t know how he applied it.”

Huh. Fascinating stuff=) Doesn't it just make you want to pop over to the Louvre and squint at the painting this way and that and convince yourselves to your heart's content? Too bad I'm all the way across the globe but Parisiennes or those close-by should go check it out. It seems La Joconde really has a reason for that secret smile;)

Psst...Read the article I read here.

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