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When Leonardo da Vinci was creating his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, he could have experimented with lead oxide in his base layer, leading to hint quantities of a compound referred to as plumbonacrite. It types when lead oxides mix with oil, a standard combination to assist paint dry, utilized by later artists like Rembrandt. However the presence of plumbonacrite within the Mona Lisa is the primary time the compound has been detected in an Italian Renaissance portray, suggesting that da Vinci may have pioneered this system, in response to the authors of a current paper printed within the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Fewer than 20 of da Vinci’s work have survived, and the Mona Lisa is by far essentially the most well-known, inspiring a Fifties hit music by Nat King Cole and that includes prominently in final yr’s Glass Onion: a Knives Out Thriller, amongst different popular culture mentions. The portray is in remarkably good situation given its age, however artwork conservationists and da Vinci students alike are wanting to study as a lot as doable in regards to the supplies the Renaissance grasp used to create his works.
There have been some current scientific investigations of da Vinci’s works, which revealed that he different the supplies used for his work, particularly regarding the floor layers utilized between the wood panel floor and the next paint layers. As an illustration, for his Virgin and Baby with St. Anne (c. 1503–1519), he used a typical Italian Renaissance gesso for the bottom layer, adopted by a lead white priming layer. However for La Belle Ferronniere (c. 1495–1497), da Vinci used an oil-based floor layer product of white and purple lead.
For his giant wall portray, The Final Supper—his second most well-known work—he used an oil-based lead white priming layer relatively than the standard fresco approach. As for the Mona Lisa, varied X-ray analyses of the portray confirmed the presence of heavy parts inside the poplar wooden panel, which may imply that da Vinci used a lead-based pigment or an oil medium handled with lead through the grinding. The bottom layer seems to be a single layer of lead white with no gesso.
V. Gonzalez et al., 2023
In different phrases, da Vinci was always experimenting along with his inventive supplies. “From 1485 to 1490, every identified easel portray of Leonardo presents a special kind of floor layer,” Victor Gonzalez of Universite Paris-Salcay and his co-authors wrote of their paper. “Their solely frequent options are that they’re oil-based and that they include the lead white pigment referred to as biacca by Leonardo in his writings.”
Gonzalez et al. determined to take a better have a look at the Mona Lisa‘s floor layer with X-ray diffraction and infrared spectroscopy, analyzing a tiny microsample taken from a hidden nook of the portray again in 2007. They have been stunned to seek out plumbonacrite within the combine along with lead white and oil for the reason that compound has beforehand been detected solely in later work. These embrace a portray fragment by Vincent van Gogh—doubtless resulting from the degradation of a purple lead pigment on account of publicity to gentle—and within the thick lead white impasto utilized by Rembrandt in a number of of his work, most notably The Evening Watch.
