leonardo da vinci paintings Early in 1503 he was back again in Florence, and set to work in earnest on the “Portrait of Mona Lisa” (Plate I.), now in the Louvre (No. 1601). Lisa di Anton Maria di Noldo Gherardini was the daughter of Antonio Gherardini. In 1495 she married Francesco di Bartolommeo de Zenobi del Giocondo. It is from the surname of her husband that she derives the name of “La Joconde,” by which her portrait is officially known in the Louvre. Vasari is probably inaccurate in saying that Leonardo “loitered over it for four years, and finally left it unfinished.” He may have begun it in the spring of 1501 and, probably owing to having taken service under Cesare Borgia in the following year, put it on one side, ultimately completing it after working on the “Battle of Anghiari” in 1504. Soon thereafter, Leonardo would become “first painter and engineer, and architect of the king.” for his final employer, Francis the 1st in France.
Researchers discover homes where Leonardo da Vinci family lived - Pravda. Five homes in Florence were identified as places of living of Leonardo da Vinci’s family. Leonardo was born in 1452, the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary and a peasant. After his birth, he was sent to live with his paternal grandfather in Vinci, about 35 kilometers (20 miles) from Florence, but would often visit his father in the city center. His father, Piero da Vinci, often conducted his notary business from his homes and researchers were able to identify them based on legal documentation from the time, said Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of the Ideal Museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci. read more
A French inventor claims his ultra-detailed digital scans of the painting have uncovered new secrets about the history of its color and composition- including the fate of the enigmatic woman’s famously missing eyebrows and lashes. Da Vinci’s 16th-century portrait of a Florentine merchant’s wife did originally include both brows and lashes, according to Parisian engineer Pascal Cotte- who says his 240-megapixel scans of the painting reveal traces of Mona Lisa’s left brow obliterated by long-ago restoration efforts. Da Vinci changed his mind about the position of two fingers on the subject’s left hand. Her face was originally wider and the smile more expressive than Da Vinci ultimately painted them. read more
SAN FRANCISCO – For centuries, Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” has beguiled art buffs unable to resist speculating on the origins and meaning of the world’s most famous artwork. Da Vinci’s 16th-century portrait of a Florentine merchant’s wife did originally include both brows and lashes, according to Parisian engineer Pascal Cotte, who says his 240-megapixel scans of the painting reveal traces of Mona Lisa’s left brow obliterated by long-ago restoration efforts. At least as important to Cotte as discovering details of the painting’s rough sketches is the painstaking work he undertook to reveal what he believes are the painting’s colors as they looked on Da Vinci’s easel. Working with his 22-gigabyte digital photo, made using 13 different color filters rather than the typical three or four found in consumer-grade digital cameras, Cotte created a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the light blues and brilliant whites he thinks represent the painting in its original form. Since scanning the “Mona Lisa,” Cotte has made super-high resolution photographs of paintings by Van Gogh, Brueghel, Courbet and other European masters – more than 500 paintings in all. read more
