Engineer and inventor Pascal Cotte virtually strips away centuries of sometimes sloppy restoration work to provide a digital image of a painting as it may have left the artist's studio — an abiding question among art historians and art lovers about such masterpieces. Though a major piece in the Czartoryski collection, nagging doubts persisted over how much of "Lady with an Ermine" was da Vinci's own hand and how much was that of his assistants. Cotte's conclusion, based on a virtual version he built as close as possible to the original, suggests it is nearly 100 percent da Vinci's handiwork. But Cotte's scan confirmed the existence of fingerprints which had fuelled Polish experts' long-held belief that the majority of the work was da Vinci's, she said. He recently took part in an international study of what is arguably the world's most famous painting, da Vinci's Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Louvre museum in Paris. Franck and Cotte believe da Vinci may originally have painted the ferret-like animal lower down the portrait of the woman thought to be Cecilia Gallerani, who was the mistress of the Duke Lodovico Sforza of Milan. read more

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