Researchers Find Symbols in Mona Lisa’s Eyes: Mystery or Hoax?

Can you make out the “L” and “S” in her irises?


I’ve been following the story of Italian research team delving deep into Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

La Gioconda, as the painting is called in Italian, has always been a mystery. Still, I’m not so sure this find really sheds any new light on the 500-year-old masterpiece.

Silvano Vinceti and team claim to have spied the letters “L” and “S” in her eyes and the symbolic number “72” in the background.

Don’t get me wrong: I love using tech to pore over old paintings, whether its Leonardo’s “Last Supper“or Caravaggio’s “Bacchus.” (One editor, assigning yet another story on Leonardo, joked I was on the “Dan Brown beat.”)

When you look at something a few hundred years old with a level a detail previously unavailable, something interesting always turns up.

In this case, though, Vinceti and his team are working off high-definition scanned images from a company called Lumiere Technology in Paris, which specializes in digitizing artworks, and then processed by a lab in Rome.

The lack of transparency (pun intended) about the processing is what makes me skeptical.

When his colleague Stefania Romano sent me the press packet with the image, I couldn’t make anything out. Before writing back to her asking if they had another image, I looked at their website. In the image you see above,  the letters in her mysterious eyes are much clearer – making me wonder which one is the correct shot and whether they’ve been manipulated or not.

Vinceti told AP that a Roman lab “digitally excluded reflexes and other colors in the eyes in order to isolate the letters and make them stand out.”

The Leonardo experts they interviewed were also skeptical about this latest discovery.

If they’d only put the hi-res image online even temporarily – like art digitizer Hal9000 has done – or made a video of the stripping process, we could all see whether there’s really something behind those enigmatic eyes.

Caravaggio’s Bacchus Seduces in Hi-Res Imagery

By Nicole Martinelli Tourists have long crowded in museums to admire Caravaggio’s Bacchus, but a new 3.4 billion-pixel image of the painting allows for an amazingly detailed look at an old master’s work from your computer screen.

It’s the first in a series of super-high-resolution digital versions of masterpieces from Italy’s Uffizi Gallery, including Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and the Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci.

This image of Bacchus makes Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s revolutionary realism — as seen in the gritty fingernails of his reclining model in the sensual painting nicknamed “drunk Bacchus” — easy to zoom in on and linger over.

Minute details usually mulled over by art historians, such as the rumored self-portrait of the artist reflected in the wine decanter, are just a few clicks away. The Tuesday launch is a kind of love letter to the Baroque bad boy, believed born on this day in 1571.

It’s the latest project from HAL9000, a company specializing in art photography that captured a high-res version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper three years ago.

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