OT: Unmasking the Mona Lisa: Expert claims to have discovered da Vinci's technique
maff
technique
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article357000.ece
For five centuries, art historians have puzzled over how the Mona Lisa
was painted. Now a French artist says he has discovered the method
behind the genius. By John Lichfield
Published: 11 April 2006
A French artist and art historian claims to have cracked the real Da
Vinci code - the mystery of how Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa.
Jacques Franck - a controversial figure but an acknowledged authority
on Leonardo da Vinci - believes he has solved a conundrum which has
defeated art experts for almost 500 years. In The Da Vinci Code, the
best-selling thriller by Dan Brown, the Mona Lisa is said to contain
clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy to deny the real character of
Jesus Christ.
Leonardo da Vinci
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.atheism/msg/5c22b0617957e4f0
stoney
alt.atheism
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=686558
Unmasking the Mona Lisa
By John Lichfield
11 April 2006
A French artist and art historian claims to have cracked the real Da
Vinci code - the mystery of how Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa.
Jacques Franck - a controversial figure but an acknowledged authority on
Leonardo da Vinci - believes he has solved a conundrum which has
defeated art experts for almost 500 years. In The Da Vinci Code, the
best-selling thriller by Dan Brown, the Mona Lisa is said to contain
clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy to deny the real character of Jesus
Christ.
In real life, M. Franck believes that the painting does contain a code
of a different kind - the five-centuries old secrets of a genius whose
work has never been surpassed. "From the technical viewpoint, the Mona
Lisa has always defeated all understanding," M. Franck said. "How did
Leonardo da Vinci do it? I believe that I have the answer."
The Mona Lisa was painted in the early 16th century on a panel of poplar
wood. Much of the brushwork on her face and hands is so small that it
cannot be picked out by X-ray or microscope: a near-magical method of
painting that Leonardo called "sfumato" or "smoky finish". The colour
and shading melt into one another without visible joins or boundaries.
After years of study and personal experimentation, M. Franck believes he
has approximated Leonardo's method, if not the final result. His claims
have been rubbished in the past by other Leonardo scholars. They say
that he can produce no technical evidence to substantiate his claims.
From this month, however, M. Franck's approach has been given the
official backing - or at least an official showing - by one of the
leading art museums in the world, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. As
part of an exhibition on Leonardo which lasts until next January, the
Uffizi is displaying eight of M. Franck's works. They include six
tableaux which demonstrate his theories on the different stages in the
creation of one of the Mona Lisa's eyes. The Uffizi is also displaying
his re-creations of two other Da Vinci paintings, including Portrait of
Saint Anne from the National Gallery in London.
M. Franck, consultant scholar at the Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo
Studies in Los Angeles, believes that the Mona Lisa was painted in
hundreds of sessions with a technique of ultra-fine hatching - or
criss-crossing of brush strokes - some as tiny as one-fortieth of a
millimetre long. He says layers of extremely diluted oil paint were
piled up on one another over many years - using perhaps 30 "coats" of
paint in all. For his finer work, Leonardo probably painted with a brush
in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other. It was through this
method, M. Franck says, that Da Vinci achieved the sublime effects which
astonished and irritated fellow Italian painters at the time and have
puzzled art historians ever since.
Light and shadow on the enigmatic face and folded hands of the Mona Lisa
move from one colour to another, and from one gradation of light to
another, without perceptible "boundaries". Even the darkest shadows on
her flesh seem to glow with an inner light. Other Renaissance painters
went on to achieve something close to this effect. But Leonardo was the
first painter to abolish the impression of a painting as a "coloured-in"
drawing. His achievements in this area have been approached but never
surpassed.
Leonardo da Vinci wrote in one of his treatises on painting: "Although
the definition of boundaries is lost when a painting is viewed from
distance, the painter himself should not neglect to achieve a smoky
finish and not [leave] boundaries and profiles which are sharp and
harsh."
To explore Leonardo's methods, M. Franck has resorted to a form of
artistic retro-engineering. After studying the painter's descriptions of
his own work, and the painting itself, he set out to try to recreate
sfumato. He says that it took him 3,000 hours to complete his copy of
Saint Anne. The world's most famous painting may have taken Leonardo far
longer than that.
Leonardo da Vinci began the Mona Lisa in 1503. He was still working on
her when he emigrated to France in 1516. He is believed to have finished
the painting just before his death in 1519. In other words, he took
almost two decades to paint the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, née
Gherardini, a Florentine gentlewoman. The Mona Lisa (an English-language
spelling mistake for Monna, or "My Lady", Lisa) is believed to be the
only painting which Leonardo finished to his own satisfaction.
The sfumato method is not the only revolutionary aspect of the Mona
Lisa. Leonardo was an early pioneer of the use of slow-drying oil
paints. The Lady Lisa's pose - staring back defiantly and superciliously
at the viewer, not averting her eyes - was unorthodox in the early 1500s
and much copied. By having her look slightly away from centre and
displaying her hands, Leonardo achieved an impression of movement and
three-dimensional presence, which had rarely been attempted before.
In his Mona Lisa: the history of the world's most famous painting,
published in 2001, the British historian Donald Sassoon traces the
origins of the Mona Lisa mystique through five centuries. He concludes
that the revolutionary techniques and the beauty of the painting alone
cannot explain the Mona Lisa's fame. Her status as "the one painting
everyone knows" is, he says, the "product of a long history of political
and geographical accident, fantasies conjured up, connections made,
images manufactured, and luck..."
In the mid-19th century, she was re-discovered by British and French
writers in the Louvre in Paris and turned into an object of mystery and
almost of lust. In 1869, in a passage later made into poetry by W B
Yeats, the British critic Walter Pater promoted the Mona Lisa as a kind
of elemental mother-temptress and madonna-femme fatale, uniting the
age-old male fantasies and myths of womanhood.
In recent years, the image of the Mona Lisa has been hijacked to
advertise everything from condoms to horsehair corsets, from oranges to
inter-uterine devices, to The Da Vinci Code.
Through all the vicissitudes of the Mona Lisa's fame, Leonardo's
technique has continued to fascinate and baffle art historians. M.
Franck - without claiming to know all the answers and certainly without
claiming to have emulated Leonardo's talent - believes that he has
finally cracked the real Da Vinci code.
He believes that Leonardo began with a sketch. But what happened after
that? "The fundamental problem of sfumato is to know how shadow and
light were joined invisibly," he says. "I believe that Leonardo used a
technique which I call micro-division. Over a base coat - called the
imprimatura - in pale yellow, Leonardo da Vinci started by creating
contrasts by using very diluted, reddish tones. Then he went over the
shadows very finely with a system of hatching." Leonardo then, M. Franck
believes, "veiled" each stage of the hatching with another coat of
imprimatura to "mask or abolish the sharp outlines of her form".
All of this was achieved by using brushstrokes which became finer and
finer, using diluted paint. Each stage or layer was painstakingly
covered with another "veil" of pale yellow.
The brushstrokes never exceeded one or two millimetres in length. "When
it came to Mona Lisa's face," he said, "I believe that Leonardo must
have applied 30 layers. He must have worked with a magnifying glass,
getting down to brushstrokes no longer than one-thirtieth or
one-fortieth of a millimetre." In other words, the smallest
brush-strokes are smaller by far than the head of a pin.
Using hatching techniques was not new, M. Franck says. They had been
used since Roman times to give an impression of relief. The use of oils
allowed painters to give an even deeper sense of contours. He says:
"What Leonardo did was to bring both the methods together in his
determination to give an extraordinary sense of depth."
Leonardo may have had to wait for several days for each small area of
hatching to dry before adding the next layer (magnifying glass in hand).
He was therefore also proof of the adage that "genius is an infinite
capacity to take pains".
M. Franck's approach has been rejected by some academic specialists.
They say that his work is based on guesswork and surmise rather than
scholarly research. Precisely because Leonardo's brush work is
"invisible", they say, it is impossible to say for sure how he did it.
M. Franck says that the effects achieved by his own tableaux and
paintings prove that he is, at the very least, moving in the right
direction. Little by little the academic barriers to M. Franck's
theories are breaking down.
The French national art laboratory C2RMF has also been using modern
techniques to explore and analyse Leonardo's methods in painting the
Mona Lisa. The results will be published this June in a book called Au
coeur de La Joconde, Léonard de Vinci Décodé. La Joconde is the name
given to the Mona Lisa in France. The book isexpected to reveal that
Leonardo began with a sketch, as M. Franck suggests. The outlines of the
sketch have been discovered under the painting by experts at the Louvre.
Jean-Pierre Mohen, in charge of the project at C2RMF, said M. Franck's
other theories are matched by some of his team's own discoveries, but
from a different perspective.
"He has moved knowledge forward, not in an analytical way, but
experimentally," he said. "The Mona Lisa was a work which was
accomplished slowly, meticulously, with enormous power of thought and
experience of life. And all that to re-create a smile which must
originally have lasted for only a quarter of a second."
© 2006 Independent News and Media (NI)
--
Fundies and trolls are cordially invited to
shove a wooden cross up their arses and rotate
at a high rate of speed. I trust you'll
be 'blessed' with a plethora of splinters.
stoney
alt.atheism
>Unmasking the Mona Lisa: Expert claims to have discovered da Vinci's
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=686558
Unmasking the Mona Lisa
By John Lichfield
11 April 2006
A French artist and art historian claims to have cracked the real Da
Vinci code - the mystery of how Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa.
Jacques Franck - a controversial figure but an acknowledged authority on
Leonardo da Vinci - believes he has solved a conundrum which has
defeated art experts for almost 500 years. In The Da Vinci Code, the
best-selling thriller by Dan Brown, the Mona Lisa is said to contain
clues to a 2,000-year-old conspiracy to deny the real character of Jesus
Christ.
In real life, M. Franck believes that the painting does contain a code
Mindfucked
"stoney" <sto...@the.net> wrote in message
news:34uv32142meqj2jv4...@4ax.com...
> On 11 Apr 2006 02:35:39 -0700, "maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in
> alt.atheism
>
>>Unmasking the Mona Lisa: Expert claims to have discovered da Vinci's
>>technique
>>http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article357000.ece
Wasn't da Vinci an idiot theist?
; - )
maff
Maybe he was. Maybe he wasn't. You'll never know . At that time, any
body who called themselves atheist, would have been murdered or
imprisoned.
Mindfucked
"maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1145181810.0...@v46g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...
So despite the widespread belief that he was a genius, the truth is that
nobody knows whether he was a genius or an idiot?
maff
Don't be stupid.
Mindfucked
I wouldn't dream of it - I know that's your job...
maff
That's why you'll be executed for religious terrorism.
Mindfucked
>> > Don't be stupid.
>>
>> I wouldn't dream of it - I know that's your job...
>
> That's why you'll be executed for religious terrorism.
Meanwhile you'll enter an insanity plea and it'll be accepted without
question.
maff
But it won't be me who'll execute you.
Mindfucked
Who'll it be dude?
maff
Mindfucked wrote:
> "maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1145303607.2...@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> >
> > Mindfucked wrote:
> > > "maff" <maf...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> > > news:1145222022....@u72g2000cwu.googlegroups.com...
> > >
> > > >> > Don't be stupid.
> > > >>
> > > >> I wouldn't dream of it - I know that's your job...
> > > >
> > > > That's why you'll be executed for religious terrorism.
> > >
> > > Meanwhile you'll enter an insanity plea and it'll be accepted without
> > > question.
> >
> > But it won't be me who'll execute you.
>
> Who'll it be dude?
Who knows? In a Civil War, it can be anyone.