Leonardo da Vinci used toxic pigments when he painted the Mona Lisa

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 known as plumbonacrite. It kinds 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 method, based on the authors of a recent 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 desirous to study as a lot as doable concerning the supplies the Renaissance grasp used to create his works.

There have been some recent scientific investigations of da Vinci’s works, which revealed that he assorted the supplies used for his work, particularly in regards to the floor layers utilized between the wood panel floor and the following paint layers. For example, 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 manufactured from white and purple lead.

For his massive wall portray, The Last 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 components throughout 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.

In different phrases, da Vinci was continually experimenting together with his creative supplies. “From 1485 to 1490, every recognized easel portray of Leonardo presents a unique sort 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 known as biacca by Leonardo in his writings.”

Gonzalez et al. determined to take a better take 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 had been stunned to search out plumbonacrite within the combine along with lead white and oil because the compound has beforehand been detected solely in later work. These embody a portray fragment by Vincent van Gogh—probably because of the degradation of a purple lead pigment on account of publicity to gentle—and within the thick lead white impasto used by Rembrandt in several of his work, most notably The Night time Watch.