The Mona Lisa Foundation

Leonardo’s ‘Hidden Technique’


The Mona Lisa Foundation performed a graphic experiment, comparing the Earlier and Louvre Mona Lisas, and believes it has shown Leonardo’s unique and extraordinary mastery of proportion in both portraits, and has demonstrated the importance of geometry in his two compositions.

Comparison I

This combination of images displays the two portraits scaled to their relative sizes. This demonstrates that the support of the ‘Earlier Mona Lisa’ is significantly larger than that of the Louvre ‘Mona Lisa’. However, the subject in the Louvre painting is roughly 10% larger than that in the earlier version.

 

 

Comparison II

Even though both paintings and the subjects within them are of different sizes, when they are brought to the same dimensions, they align perfectly along horizontal lines. What makes this comparison so remarkable is that the two works display such exact proportional similarities despite the fact that the figures within them were not painted to the same size. This strongly suggests that the same artist would have executed both works.