Restoring Depth to Leonardo's Mona Lisa

By Claus-Christian Carbon, Vera M. Hesslinger

Was La Gioconda the model for one of the world’s earliest attempts at three-dimensional imaging?

Art Computer Technology Aesthetics

This Article From Issue

November-December 2015

Volume 103, Number 6

Page 404

DOI: 10.1511/2015.117.404

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Smiling serenely behind bulletproof glass, the painting titled La Gioconda, or the Mona Lisa, receives about 6 million visitors per year at its alcove at the Louvre Museum in Paris. More popular than ever at 500 years of age, the portrait depicts a young woman of uncertain identity—most likely the wife of a wealthy silk merchant—seated before a somewhat idealized Italian landscape. Despite its singular fame, the Mona Lisa is not one of a kind. In fact, another Gioconda graces the permanent collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid.

The portrait formally titled La Gioconda but known the world over as the Mona Lisa (left) bears a yellow tinge, owing to five centuries of aging of the varnish on the painting’s surface. In the Prado Museum in Madrid hangs a portrait that was restored only recently (right); although strikingly similar in composition, this version shows a very different color spectrum.

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