Mona Lisa, Smoke and Mirrors

Now that the experts from Canada’s Research Council have scanned the Mona Lisa with their 3D Laser camera we have a deeper measure of the picture. A thin gauze veil typically worn by pregnant women or new mothers, becomes visible for the first time in generations. Changes in the initial drawing also become visible, the position of the hands, for example, were at once in a more active position. Bruno Mottin, a curator in the research department of the Center of Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, known as C2RMF said: “It was as if she was going to get up from a chair”.  And there is mounting evidence that Mona Lisa did actually leave the painting for several months and Leonardo, fed up, was turning it into a landscape.

Mona Lisa eventually returned, probably after maternity leave, and there are signs that an irritated Leonardo may have retaliated against his recalcitrant sitter by giving her, if only temporarily, a big red nose. Thus, like many of his innovations, it began a sub-species of the portrait genre known as ‘Clown paintings’. Apart from the peculiar appearance, and subsequent erasure, among the background rocks of vulgar graffiti – including smutty references to Mary Magdalene, and ‘shemales’, perhaps the thing that has most intrigued art historians and curators is Leonardo’s painting technique known as Sfumato. Literally – smoking while you paint. Normally a two pack a day man Leonardo was known to go to three even four packs a day while working on a particularly tricky subject. It was the nicotine high that afforded him the patience to smooth on layer after layer of almost translucent paint. It was also the origins of a philosophy of art which was to flourish in subsequent centuries known as ‘smoke and mirrors’.

Other paintings subjected to the Laser camera have produced equally fascinating results. Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist, also used the ‘smoke’ business – in his case Lucky Strikes. Examination of his pictures with the naked eye has found old butts, crushed packs, the odd discount carton and an occasional bottle of Jack Daniels. With the camera a deeper more tortured self is revealed. Multiple attempts to draw faces and hands are visible in the initial sketches, which are then scribbled over with ever mounting frustration in the strokes. Even, in some cases, with angry declarations: “I can never get these damn fingers to look right!” These are then covered with heavy impasto splotches of paint.  The paint drips for which he so justly renowned were probably the cause of another message, scrawled on one painting in a different hand – most likely Lee Krasner, the painter’s wife. ‘Your mother doesn’t live here, Jackson’. It too was submerged beneath a heavy flood of French ultramarine.

Perennial ‘bad boy’ Pablo Picasso on the other hand revealed a surprising fixation beneath the cover of the final coats of paint. A polarized obsession between Gertrude Stein and what appears to be the Collective Will of the People. Beginning with a dainty, almost Pre-Raphaelite,  vision of a Madonna-like Stein adorned with delicate pastel hues, he suddenly unleashes, like spurned lover disdained too long, an uprising from the gutters of the world, an overwhelming revolution. Heads on pikes. Defiant gestures and ribald mockery fly at the elitist Stein, turning her into two faced demigods,  four-eyed devils and bulls. You can almost hear the “take that”, “and that!” Hollered at the passing tumbril. “I’d like to see Matisse top that!”

Perhaps the most surprising though is the great master Rembrandt van Rijn. His beloved self portraits with their exquisite painterly touch have been revealed largely as fakes. But in an odd ‘double-take’ twist fakes painted by himself. It appears that Rembrandt, after his initial success, hit a couple of bad patches, and simply could not find work as a middle-aged painter. At first, as can be seen in the under painting, it appears he tried making knock-offs of established contemporaries such as Rubens and Hals. But he discovered, in the vein of the ‘unreliable narrator’, that by making knock-offs of his own, earlier, work he could create a market centered in doubt that lasts to this day. The under painting of many of his works in the great museums of the world show his astonishing ability to mimic the style of others as well as his younger self. In fact the under painting of a Rembrandt sold at a recent auction for many millions showed, when put under the lens of the Canadian camera, an absolutely stunning portrait of Gertrude Stein.