Monday, February 8, 2010

Tea With Mona Lisa

click for larger
Recognize this fresh face?

Hint: She didn't get a bath, regardless of what you might have read in that tea-throwing article.*
*Daily Mail: ''Woman in hot water after attacking the Mona Lisa with a mug of English Breakfast tea...'' (Wait, does this mean she would've gotten away with it if only she'd chosen a different type of tea?...)
Anyway, I'm getting off track here. There was no tea involved, instead Lumiere Tech discovered her true colors by multi-spectrally scanning 'her' in 12 levels, from ultra-violet to infra-red. Then the spectral response of varnish & dirt were subtracted from the digital file. This revealed the surface just as it looked when freshly painted. That's the digital image above.

Remember, this is how she looks now:
current

But now that we have these new brighter details...

Q: Should the Louvre re-restore her?

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