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

When Leonardo da Vinci was creating his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, he might have experimented with lead oxide in his base layer, leading to hint quantities of a compound known as plumbonacrite. It types when lead oxides mix with oil, a typical combination to assist paint dry, used by later artists like Rembrandt. But the presence of plumbonacrite in the Mona Lisa is the first time the compound has been detected in an Italian Renaissance portray, suggesting that da Vinci may have pioneered this system, in keeping with the authors of a current paper revealed in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Fewer than 20 of da Vinci’s work have survived, and the Mona Lisa is by far the most well-known, inspiring a Nineteen Fifties hit track by Nat King Cole and that includes prominently in final yr’s Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery, 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 attainable about 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 diversified the supplies used for his work, particularly regarding the floor layers utilized between the picket panel floor and the subsequent paint layers. For occasion, for his Virgin and Child with St. Anne (c. 1503–1519), he used a typical Italian Renaissance gesso for the floor layer, adopted by a lead white priming layer. But for La Belle Ferronniere (c. 1495–1497), da Vinci used an oil-based floor layer fabricated from white and purple lead.

For his giant wall portray, The Last Supper—his second most well-known work—he used an oil-based lead white priming layer moderately than the conventional fresco method. As for the Mona Lisa, numerous 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 throughout the grinding. The floor layer seems to be a single layer of lead white with no gesso.

In different phrases, da Vinci was consistently experimenting together with his creative supplies. “From 1485 to 1490, every recognized easel portray of Leonardo presents a distinct 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 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 have been stunned to seek out plumbonacrite in the combine along with lead white and oil since the compound has beforehand been detected solely in later work. These embrace a portray fragment by Vincent van Gogh—possible because of the degradation of a purple lead pigment because of publicity to gentle—and in the thick lead white impasto used by Rembrandt in a number of of his work, most notably The Night Watch.