The Mona Lisa used to wear necklace — scientist

Press, 10 March 1987, Page 45

The Mona Lisa used to wear necklace — scientist

NZPA Chicago A computer analysis of the Mona Lisa shows that Leonardo Da Vinci originally painted her wearing a necklace and that an art restorer obliterated a distant mountain range beside her, a scientist says. Even her famous smile has been altered, said John Asmus, of the University of California, San Diego. "After more than 450 years of deterioration, the image of the lady is barely a soiled caricature of the original,” Asmus said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His analysis, in which a computer was used to reveal hidden details in a high-resolution photograph of the masterpiece, revealed a row of dots on Mona Lisa’s neck, suggesting she once wore £ neck-

lace. He also found evidence that a distant mountain range once located immediately to the left of Mona Lisa’s eyes had been removed by a restorer attempting to make mountains in the foreground more prominent. "The famous smile has also been worked on,” he said in an interview. Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile has been reshaped slightly by art restorers, whose efforts to grind layers of paint and varnish off the painting are made visible through Asmus’ analysis. A physician proposed recently that Mona Lisa may have suffered from Bell’s palsy, an uncommon condition resulting in paralysis of one side of the face — and perhaps the unusual smile. Asmus challenges that assertion.

“We don’t have the mouth Leonardo drew, so I don’t think you can say it’s Bell’s palsy,” he said. "I will continue looking for the real lips. I have been working 10 years on this and I will probably work another 10.” Asmus, a plasma physicist and laser expert who does research on “star wars” defensive weapons, began using technology to assist art historians in 1971, when he was asked to assist with the restoration of art works in Venice. He became interested in studying the Mona Lisa in the late 19705. He sought help from the United States space agency, which let him feed the photographs into a computer using the same scanners used to make high-resolution photographs of Saturn and Jupiter sent back by

spacecraft. He also obtained a small piece of varnish dating from about the time of the Mona Lisa. A computer analysis of the varnish allowed him to simulate the removal of layers of varnish from the painting. He found that a restorer had ground away paint behind a range of mountains on the picture’s left side. He also found the dots on Mona Lisa’s neck that he believes were once part of a necklace. “There were no restorations where the beads had been,” Asmus said, and early copies of the Mona Lisa, made about 1503, show her wearing beads. “So you deduce that the beads could have disappeared only by Leonardo’s own hand,” he sayi.