Scientist claims to have found hidden image under Mona Lisa
Scientist claims to have found hidden image under Mona Lisa
A French scientist claims to have discovered a hidden image under the Mona Lisa, adding further mystery to the enigmatic Da Vinci masterpiece.
Pascal Cotte has spent 10 years analysing the painting and made the discovery by using a multispectral camera which projects a series of intense lights onto the canvas, BBC News reports.
“We can now analyse exactly what is happening inside the layers of the paint and we can peel like an onion all the layers of the painting. We can reconstruct all the chronology of the creation of the painting,” Mr Cotte said.
He said that an earlier portrait of another woman sitting lies hidden beneath the surface of perhaps the most famous painting in the world.
Unlike the Mona Lisa, with its trademark gaze that appears to follow viewers wherever they move, the new image shows a woman staring off to the side.
Mr Cotte said the woman underneath does not appear to be Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, who is widely believed to be the woman in the 16th century painting.
The image on the left is a digital reconstruction of what what is claimed to be behind the Mona Lisa. (Photo: Brinkworth Films)
The scientist said his work shatters “many myths” about the Mona Lisa and will change the way the painting is viewed forever.
“When I finished the reconstruction of Lisa Gherardini, I was in front of the portrait and she is totally different to Mona Lisa today,” he said.
“This is not the same woman.”.
However, many art experts reject Mr Cotte’s findings.
The BBC’s Arts Editor Will Gompertz said it was “perfectly common” for artists to paint over an image, often to accommodate client’s requests for changes.
The Mona Lisa. (AAP)
He said Mr Cotte’s work is “open to interpretation” and “needs to be analysed and corroborated by the academic and curatorial community, and not just an individual”.
The Louvre Museum has declined to comment on Mr Cotte’s claims
A new material is so black scientists can’t even measure it
A new material is so black scientists can’t even measure it
British company Surrey NanoSystems has outdone itself.
Researchers there made the blackest material ever back in 2014, called Vantablack, and now they’ve made a material that’s even blacker.
In a YouTube video the researchers posted March 4 (and we found via ScienceAlert), they run a red laser across the solid material to show just how black it is.
You can see how the material absorbs almost all of the light, reflecting nothing detectable back to our eyes:
They make Vantablack by tightly packing carbon nanotubes — rods of carbon that are much, much thinner than any human hair — so close together that light gets trapped inside, ScienceAlert reports.
Researchers say their new material is so black that even their spectrometers (machines that record colors and light) can’t measure its darkness. It’s likely higher than the original Vantablack, which could absorbed 99.96% of the light that hit it.
To be clear, Vantablack isn’t paint and is unlikely to be as durable, too. Even a little bit of water can mess up other ultra-black materials made of nanomaterials — though the original Vantablack seems to hold up pretty well to dunking in water as well as liquid nitrogen.
Surrey NanoSystems isn’t just making blacker and blacker materials to set records. They’ve tested Vantablack to see if it could withstand going into space. There, it could be used to calibrate NASA’s powerful cameras to take more accurate photos of our universe. (Artists are also interested in using the black material.)
Maybe the blackest material could help us see through the darkness.
Watch the company’s video below:
Egypt says scan of King Tut’s burial tomb shows hidden rooms
Egypt says scan of King Tut’s burial tomb shows hidden rooms
SCANS of King Tut’s burial chamber have confirmed two hidden rooms, Egypt’s antiquities minister announced overnight — a discovery that could intensify speculation that the chambers contain the remains of the famed Queen Nefertiti.
Mamdouh el-Damaty told reporters that the secret chambers may contain metal or organic material, but he declined to comment on whether royal treasure or mummies could be inside.
Analysis of the ground-penetrating radar scans made by a Japanese team showed chambers that would be scanned again at the end of the month to get a better idea of what may lay inside, he said.
“It means a rediscovery of Tutankhamun … for Egypt it is a very big discovery, it could be the discovery of the century,” el-Damaty said.
“It is very important for Egyptian history and for all of the world.”
The raw data from the scan of the walls in Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, above, with a diagram showing the extrapolated locations of organic and metallic materials. Source: Egypt’s antiquities ministry
El-Damaty said it was too early to tell what the metal and organic material could be, saying only that he thinks the new chambers could contain the tomb of a member of Tutankhamun’s family.
At the Cairo news conference, el-Damaty highlighted radar scans that showed anomalies in the walls of the tomb, indicating a possible hidden door and the chambers, which lay behind walls that were covered up and painted over with hieroglyphics.
“We can say more than 90 percent that the chambers are there,” said Mamdouh Eldamaty, an egyptologist who is the country’s antiquities minister.
“But I never start the next step until I’m 100 percent.”
3D scanning Tut’s tomb
British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves speculates that Tutankhamun, who died at the age of 19, may have been rushed into an outer chamber of what was originally Nefertiti’s tomb, which archaeologists have yet to find.
Reeves reached his theory after high-resolution images discovered what he said were straight lines in King Tut’s tomb. These lines, previously hidden by colour and the stones’ texture, indicate the presence of a sealed chamber, he said. The images were broadcast live on national television last September.
The golden sarcophagus of King Tutankhamun in his burial chamber at the Valley of the Kings. Radar scans of the tomb have revealed two previously undiscovered chambers, possibly containing organic material.
The discovery could shine new light on one of ancient Egypt’s most turbulent times, and one prominent researcher has theorised that the heretic queen Nefertiti’s remains could be inside.
The tomb lies in Luxor, in southern Egypt, which served as the Pharaonic capital in ancient times, and is home to sprawling temples and several highly decorated ancient tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
The discovery of King Tut’s nearly-intact tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 sparked a renewed interest in Egyptology and yielded unprecedented Pharaonic treasures, including the boy king’s sarcophagus and iconic golden burial mask.
Famed for her beauty, Nefertiti was the subject of a famous 3300-year-old bust. She was the chief wife of Tutankhamun’s father, the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, who attempted to impose a monotheistic religion upon his kingdom.
Akhenaten was succeeded by a pharaoh referred to as Smenkhare and then Tut, who was proved by genetic testing to have been Akhenaten’s son.
Tut, Nefertiti, and Akhenaten’s family ruled Egypt during one of its most turbulent times, which ended with a military takeover by Egypt’s top general at the time, Horemheb. The family’s names were later erased from official records.
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