The Mona Lisa...
Bewitching...
Seductive...
World-famous.
In the minds of millions, she is the ultimate work of art -
endlessly photographed and admired.
Yet, behind the enigmatic smile,
she remains a mystery.
Who was she?
Why was she painted?
And what has made her the world's most famous painting?
After 500 years in the spotlight
the Mona Lisa is finally giving up her secrets.
Centuries-old documents are at last revealing long-forgotten truths.
This is wonderful. Ooh! I've got a shiver down my spine.
State-of-the-art technology is taking us
beneath the painted surface
to decode astonishing new evidence.
That's extraordinary - wow!
That's quite a big discovery, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
This investigation -
the first full forensic examination
of the latest discoveries -
takes me round the world in the hunt
for the truth about Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece.
With exclusive access and some extraordinary encounters...
The first impression when I came in was...
I did well not to jump backwards in shock!
These revelations will change everything we thought we knew
about history's most enigmatic work of art...
That's great. So we just made a new discovery.
And unlock the secrets of the Mona Lisa.
All of this together marks an extraordinary moment
in the history of art, but more than that,
this is quite simply one of the stories of the century.
500 years ago a man painted a woman.
The man was Leonardo da Vinci -
artist, inventor, genius -
and the result of his work
was the inscrutable portrait we now know as the Mona Lisa.
It's a masterpiece.
But one of the few works he actually finished.
So what draws us to the Mona Lisa?
She's not a famous monarch or a legendary historical figure.
We know hardly anything about her.
So what is it about this picture that's gripped the human imagination
for so many centuries?
I want to begin my investigation
by comparing notes with a detective
who's been on the case for more than 30 years.
One of the world's leading experts on Leonardo da Vinci,
Oxford professor Martin Kemp has spent much of his life
obsessed by the mystery of the Mona Lisa.
What do you think is the key to the Mona Lisa's extraordinary
stature as without doubt
the world's most famous painting?
Well, there has to be something inherent in the picture.
Some things are famous for being famous.
We live in an age of celebrity
and lots of celebrities are famous for being famous,
but they're not going to last.
This has gone on for ages.
It is just extraordinary.
And you've got this sense
of something which is beyond pigment
and beyond a good likeness and being beyond a face,
and it just has that totally uncanny living presence.
It was very daring at the time
for a woman in a portrait to look at you.
You know, women's portraits simply didn't do that,
and I think the ambiguity, the... the tease - the visual tease -
is something that Leonardo absolutely cultivated.
Look at the Mona Lisa
and you can't help feeling there's more going on than meets the eye.
If her teasing smile's a question mark,
the painting's a riddle.
What makes a human being live and breathe?
What forces govern the world we live in?
Leonardo thought about these questions as deeply as anyone.
And behind this breathtakingly lifelike image,
lay years of investigation into spheres of knowledge
Iike geology and anatomy, some of which
were forbidden by the church.
Tantalising evidence for the research that went into the Mona Lisa
Iies hidden in Windsor Castle.
Amongst the gems of the Royal Collection
is an intriguing clue to the genesis of the portrait.
A page from what might be called the real da Vinci Code.
If you want to see, or have some sense of,
just how much work there was behind the surface of the picture
then this is a great place to start.
It's a sheet of drawings by Leonardo's own hand.
And what does it contain in faint outline?
Look here...
It's a bit like the Cheshire Cat,
it's the Mona Lisa's smile
without the Mona Lisa attached.
It may well have been Leonardo's first gropings towards his idea
for the painting.
It's a series of studies of the human mouth,
the motions of the mouth.
How the mouth puckers.
How the mouth...bares its teeth.
You have a very strong sense that for Leonardo
every picture is a kind of encyclopaedia entry
and this is just that part of it
dealing with the mouth.
It's just the tip of the iceberg.
The Mona Lisa is the work into which Leonardo poured everything he knew
about humanity and the world that surrounds us
with its ceaseless play of light and shade.
But there's a mystery there, too.
And it's staring us in the face.
Who is the woman with the enigmatic smile?
It's a question that has fuelled all kinds of speculation
ranging from the ingenious to the crackpot.
She's a pregnant mother-to-be.
She's a prostitute.
She's even a man in drag.
But if you look beyond the theories
there are clues to her true identity.
Florence, 1500.
After many years away
Leonardo da Vinci has returned
to the city of his youth.
He's come back to work on ambitious military projects
for powerful men.
He says he's too busy to paint portraits of wealthy aristocrats
who clamour after him.
Yet according to one writer
Leonardo somehow finds time to paint the portrait, not of a noblewoman,
but of a humble merchant's wife called Lisa.
It was here that Leonardo da Vinci
began the most famous painting
in the world...
And it was here that Giorgio Vasari -
the inventor of the very idea of the Renaissance,
the author of the very first book about the Renaissance -
produced Exhibit A in the case of the Mona Lisa.
The very first account of the painting.
Who was she?
She was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a rich merchant.
He commissioned Leonardo to create her portrait,
and Leonardo responded with a picture, says Vasari,
"So miraculously lifelike
"that it seems to be made of flesh, not paint."
"Leonardo," he says, "wanted to avoid the melancholy
"that dominates so many other portraits
"so he employed musicians, entertainers, buffoons
"to keep her amused."
So there you have it -
the wife of Francesco del Giocondo,
and the smile caused by
entertainers hired by the artist.
An open-and-shut case.
Or is it?
How can we be sure that Vasari was right,
and that Leonardo did indeed paint Lisa del Giocondo?
After all, Vasari wrote his account 30 years after Leonardo's death,
and although he did his homework here in Florence,
he never disclosed his sources.
So could it just be hearsay?
Some inaccurate local legend?
For centuries there was no way of telling.
Then suddenly new evidence emerged
from a completely unexpected source.
In 2006, a research scholar
working in the University Library of Heidelberg
turned up this.
What it is, is a page from a copy of Cicero,
the ancient Roman author,
a book that was once owned
here in Florence by a man called Agostino Vespucci.
And not only does it have Cicero's text,
but it's got Vespucci's commentaries
and this particular passage is crucial.
Because in it Cicero is discussing Apelles,
the ancient Greek artist,
and his remarks prompt Vespucci to make his own notes -
his marginal note -
and what he writes is a kind of bombshell
in the history of Leonardo studies.
He says "Apelles, ha!
"He did just the same thing as Leonardo
"in his portrait of Lisa del Giocondo."
And best of all, there's a date -
"October, 1503."
So this was written almost immediately after Vespucci
must have seen the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo
in Leonardo da Vinci's workshop.
This is gold dust, and it proves
that Vasari was definitely right in at least one sense all along.
Leonardo definitely did paint a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.
There you have it.
Independent testimony from a man in Florence in 1503
who probably saw the picture still wet on the artist's easel.
But now there's another question.
Why did Leonardo paint Lisa
when the great and powerful couldn't coax a picture from him?
Why agree to paint this obscure woman?
One man has made it his life's work to uncover forgotten
secrets about Lisa.
Giuseppe Pallanti has found new details in the city archive.
Historical dynamite,
beginning with the house where Lisa,
daughter of the Gherardinis, was born.
On this street, this is the street where the Mona Lisa once lived.
Yes, Lisa lived in the dark and narrow street of Florence.
What was her family background?
So they were small... as it were, labourers?
They never had their own house in Florence? No.
Giuseppe's discoveries have deepened the mystery.
If Lisa's origins were so humble why did the notoriously choosy
Leonardo consent to paint her?
In another part of town, Giuseppe believes he's found the answer.
The place is there.
It is important for another reason,
because in front of this building lived Ser Piero, Leonardo's father.
Wha...? Hang on, say that again.
Lisa Gherardini was living here, at the time... Yes.
Leonardo da Vinci's father was living there?
Yes.
How incredible!
So he was... You're saying that Francesco del Giocondo,
the merchant, he was actually a client of Leonardo's father?
Yes. Well, this is all new.
Yes. This is all new.
For the first time we have a concrete connection
between Leonardo and Lisa.
Not only were they neighbours,
their families did business together.
And there's more.
Giuseppe tells me that according to police records of the time,
Francesco had a bit of a reputation.
Described as "garoso" meaning swaggering -
he wasn't just a merchant on the rise
but an aggressive deal-maker
who'd stop at almost nothing to get his way.
Maybe this is the real reason
Leonardo agreed to paint his wife.
Maybe Francesco made him an offer
he couldn't refuse.
In the parish church of San Lorenzo
there's another crucial piece of evidence.
until just a few years ago
when Giuseppe found it.
The record of Mona Lisa's death.
Wonderful thing.
The handwriting isn't very easy to follow
because the entries in these books weren't actually made
by notaries like Leonardo da Vinci's father,
they were actually made by the priests in the church,
but I think I have found her.
Here she is.
This is wonderful. Ooh! I've got a shiver down my spine.
"Lisa donna fu di Francesco del Giocondo..."
So Lisa the wife of Francesco del Giocondo...
Mori...
Died on the 15th of July...
1542.
Just... I think what I love about this is... this is truth.
What could be more true than the record of somebody's death?
She was a real person.
And there's one other sentence in this entry,
which my friend Pallanti didn't mention.
It says that she was buried in Saint Ursula - he told me that -
but what he didn't say is this last sentence
"dulsa tutto il capito"
Four words.
She took with her the whole "capito".
What that means is that her body
was followed by the whole body
of the church of San Lorenzo.
So what is conjured up by this, is a very, very grand funeral,
and for this brief moment in July, 1542,
she was a very, very important person in the life of the city.
Everybody in Florence would have known that Mona Lisa had passed away.
A spectacular funeral.
Dozens of canons, chaplains and clerics.
The whole del Giocondo clan walking with Lisa's coffin.
Francesco had died five years earlier
but he made sure he provided for all this pomp and ceremony in his will
where she is described as
"his beloved, faithful wife".
Lisa del Giocondo was laid to rest in the now ruined convent of Saint Ursula.
Beyond here we can't follow her
though we've learned a lot.
Leonardo definitely knew Lisa,
definitely painted her portrait.
But if one riddle's been answered,
there's still another mystery to solve.
How can we be certain that Leonardo's portrait of Lisa
and the portrait in the Louvre are one and the same?
So what are the facts?
According to Vasari,
Leonardo painted Lisa smiling in Florence.
Vespucci's marginal notes confirm that it happened in 1503.
The picture in the Louvre shows a woman smiling.
So far, so good.
But other things don't add up.
Vasari describes eyebrows
but the Louvre portrait
doesn't have eyebrows.
Vasari tells us Leonardo painted Lisa for Francesco del Giocondo.
But Francesco never owned the portrait we now call the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo had it with him when he died.
Most troubling of all is an eyewitness account
written by a man called Antonio de Beatis.
He was actually shown the picture that's now in the Louvre
by Leonardo himself at the end of his life.
Leonardo said he'd been asked to paint this portrait,
not by Francesco del Giocondo,
but by someone completely different.
A noble patron, Giuliano de' Medici.
It simply doesn't make sense.
It's almost as if we might be talking about different paintings.
So I'm beginning to wonder whether it's not possible Leonardo
did paint two versions of the same painting
on several occasions.
I'm beginning to wonder if it's not possible that he did indeed
finish his portrait of the Mona Lisa here in Florence,
that he did indeed give it to Francesco del Giocondo
and that the portrait of Mona Lisa in Paris is a second version.
Is it possible that there might be more than one Mona Lisa?
The idea is not as strange as you might think.
Leonardo did habitually revisit the same subject more than once.
I've come to Singapore to see for the first time a picture
that might actually be Leonardo's first version of the painting.
It's owned by an anonymous consortium of businessmen,
and is currently locked away
deep in the bowels of a state-of-the-art
high security storage facility.
So could THIS be the first Mona Lisa?
I've come 7,000 miles to see you.
Blimey.
The background's...
You might almost say a kind of roughing in.
But the face...
The face is really something.
She's younger. She's smiling.
I think there's a lot to be said for first impressions,
and the first impression when I came in was,
I did well not to jump backwards in shock.
It's too good, in my opinion,
for any of the other school of Leonardo painters.
Very dangerous, things like this.
Very dangerous to say
"This is definitely painted by Leonardo da Vinci."
Well, I can't say that, but...
I think it's not beyond the realms of possibility
that this is the picture that Francesco del Giocondo
took and then Leonardo goes off, paints another picture
based on the memory of this picture.
And that's the Mona Lisa we know in the Louvre.
It's very teasing that smile, isn't it?
Very teasing.
This version of the Mona Lisa
first hit the headlines in 1914.
British art dealer, Hugh Blaker,
bought it from a private family collection
and was convinced he'd stumbled across an early Leonardo.
He kept it in his Isleworth studios
and it became known as the Isleworth Mona Lisa.
One thing in its favour was its similarity
to this pencil sketch copy of the Mona Lisa,
done in Florence in 1504
by Leonardo's contemporary Raphael,
which seems to show how the painting looked in its original state.
Yet after a century of supporters, detractors
and different owners,
opinion on the Isleworth painting is still divided.
One man who is convinced that Leonardo painted two Mona Lisas
is Jean- Pierre Isbouts.
He was so impressed by the Isleworth portrait
he wrote a book about it.
So what would lead you to think
that the Isleworth picture
was indeed painted in 1503?
What is to say that it wasn't painted in 1553?
Well, I don't know about you, but when you talk about a copy
usually a copy tries to imitate the original.
This is not a copy.
There are so many different things about this particular Isleworth version
that do not appear in the Louvre version.
Let's take one example - the columns.
The portrait is framed by two robust Doric columns.
Why do we know that those columns existed in 1503 and not later on?
Because there is Raphael!
He makes a sketch.
And what do we have on both sides?
We have the columns that appear in the Isleworth,
they do not appear in the Louvre version.
Let's talk about the record written by De Beatis,
the secretary to Cardinal d'Aragon who visited Leonardo in 1516.
Which is seriously puzzling. Which is seriously puzzling.
But here is... Here we have an eyewitness account.
Here they are in the room with Leonardo and he says,
"Yeah, this was done at the request of Giuliano de' Medici.
Instigation - "istigazione."
Istigazione.
I think what he was doing at this time, is give Giuliano credit.
Giuliano bailed Leonardo out,
when Leonardo was without a mentor, penniless
and that's when Leonardo -
because of the patronage and the financial support of Giuliano -
finds the time to create this new meditation, if you will -
the Louvre version.
So your explanation would be,
"Well, here we are, two different explanations,
"but that's not so weird if you think there are two different pictures." Exactly.
Jean- Pierre firmly believes this could be Leonardo's first Mona Lisa
done for husband Francesco.
But, if so, why would it be unfinished?
Well, we know Leonardo was slow,
and Francesco was impatient.
So perhaps he just snatched it away from Leonardo,
once his beloved Lisa's face was complete.
A barrage of scientific tests
have been carried out on this tantalising picture.
The canvas was carbon dated to around the right period.
Multiple tiny paint samples are consistent
with the paints Leonardo used.
X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet scans
have found nothing to disprove it
as an early Mona Lisa.
But that's the problem.
All that conventional tests can do
is rule out a possible Leonardo.
What about positive confirmation?
An eminent scientist based in San Diego, California,
has been looking for a solution.
Hello.
Good to see you, Andrew.
Dr John Asmus is a well respected nuclear physicist,
'and a pioneer in the analysis of historic paintings.
He's one of very few who've been allowed to examine
the Louvre Mona Lisa,
and that's why the owners
of the Isleworth Mona Lisa,
tracked him down.
I started receiving phone calls
from a series of attorneys
in Switzerland
and they wanted me to look at a painting
and, finally, we found that I was going to be on a train
from Milan to Geneva
and they asked me to get off the train in Lausanne
and take a look at their painting
and so they met me at the train station
and they popped the bonnet
of an automobile
and there was a Mona Lisa in... in the trunk.
And the attorney asked me
"Do you think this Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo?"
And my exact words were,
"How would I know?"
So I got out my instamatic camera
and took a photograph of the painting in the trunk
and it was that image that I then compared
with the Louvre Mona Lisa.
A few years ago Dr Asmus developed a new test
to authenticate paintings by Rembrandt.
It compares the subtle distribution of light and shadow
measured as histograms
to isolate an artist's unique way of painting.
I think it's a way of trying to quantify the artist's eye.
Every artist has certain effects
that he's trying to accomplish,
and we used Rembrandt as a test case
and the results were rather encouraging.
We came up with some general rules
as to how Rembrandt
did his blending and his selection of pigments.
So I tried that same technique on the Isleworth Mona Lisa,
comparing it with the Louvre Mona Lisa,
and I was... I was stunned.
The correlation between those two histograms...
Was 99%.
Stronger than it was between any histograms
of any of the Rembrandt self-portraits that we'd looked at.
How amazing.
This demonstrates that the technique for blending light and shade
in each face appears uncannily similar.
John plans to build a much bigger database
of Leonardo works with which to compare them.
His results are impressive.
But there's something still troubling me.
I would love to believe that
that softly emerging face coming out of darkness
really is young Mona Lisa.
I'd love to believe that.
But at the moment, for me, it's that too-good-to-be-true syndrome.
It's a little bit too good.
It's troubling.
When I look at that chart that they've done
of where they've taken the paint samples from.
They've the taken the paint samples from everywhere
except that beguiling face...
Which is the most compelling part of the whole picture.
It's the part that makes you think, "Yes!"
"This could be the young Mona Lisa."
I'm just wondering whether it's possible,
that some very skilful,
careful restorer,
some time before John Asmus saw it in the boot of that car...
Didn't just bring that face...
Up.
Didn't just make whatever ghost or trace of possibly a Mona Lisa copy
into something so much more compelling to the modern eye.
To me NOT to test THAT...
It's like a detective and his team
coming to investigate the scene of a crime,
the scene of a murder,
and fingerprinting every square inch of it
but forgetting to take fingerprints from
the knife on the bed covered with blood.
I could be wrong.
Maybe Leonardo did paint this face in 1503
while Lisa sat in front of him,
but until the face is tested, doubt remains,
and, to me, she just looks a bit too 20th-century.
But I'm still convinced that Leonardo did paint two Mona Lisas.
If the Isleworth painting isn't the earlier version,
then it's either lost
or still out there somewhere.
And believe it or not,
now there's a new lead.
The reported discovery
of another Mona Lisa in St Petersburg, Russia.
This really is a plunge into the unknown.
All we've been told is that a wealthy Russian art collector -
identity a secret -
recently acquired a painting
that might be the missing link to the mystery.
We haven't yet been told where it is,
and then, at the last minute,
we're given an address -
a place with a dubious past.
Certainly strange.
This building was created in the 19th century.
This room is a recreation
of an old Russian hunting lodge.
It survives because the KGB made it their headquarters
during the Communist years.
Here she is.
So what is this?
What is this?
All I know about this picture
is that it was purchased by a Russian art collector
from a very old and established American family,
who'd had it since the end of the 18th century,
and has hardly been seen since.
And what's the status of this picture?
Smaller.
The columns...
Are more complete,
than they are in the version in the Louvre.
You see, they've got me going!
Now, I'm saying "The version in the Louvre."
The version in the Louvre...
The Mona Lisa in the Louvre.
She's enigmatic.
She's removed.
She's distant.
Is she a copy?
Not sure.
This picture looks tantalisingly close to the picture in the Louvre,
so many details are the same.
But is this Leonardo's lost earlier version?
As with the Isleworth picture,
scientific tests have been done by Dr Chiara Matteucci
of the University of Bologna,
who's flown to Russia to share her results.
This is the radiocarbon dating of the canvas? Si.
Which shows a 95.4% probability
that the canvas is between 1490 and 1670.
So the canvas could well be correct.
Si. OK.
Rossa? Rossa.
Oh, that's the ground. Well, that's very clear.
But as far as I understand it...
Leonardo da Vinci himself,
worked on a classic Italian,
renaissance ground of white, is that right?
Si.
The presence of a red ground, the very first layer of paint,
seems to discount Leonardo's hand.
But it's Chiara's next discovery that really changes the picture.
A chemical not used before 1600.
I think Chiara's done all the research we need to know.
So the barium allows us to place this canvas very precisely,
1620 to 1680. And probably in Paris.
So all the painters around Paris got this ground from this one guy
and put it on their canvas.
So, more and more that I talk to you, I feel...
So this Mona Lisa isn't a Leonardo, but a mid-17th century French copy.
In fact, there are dozens of copies.
It's a real problem if you believe,
as I think you have to, given the conflicting evidence,
that Leonardo did paint two Mona Lisas.
What we're looking for, then, is Leonardo's image of young Lisa,
as described by Vasari,
as sketched by Raphael,
which must predate the famous picture in the Louvre.
So, where can it be?
I still believe that I can get to the bottom of the mystery.
Because there's one very strong lead I haven't yet followed up.
One more destination.
Paris.
A scientist turned art detective
claims he can finally explain the discrepancies.
He believes the secrets of the Mona Lisa
lie not in other versions of the portrait...
But inside the Mona Lisa itself.
And he reckons he can prove it.
Pascal.
Welcome.
Pascal Cotte is one of the world's leading experts
in the analysis of paintings.
He's a man in Leonardo's own image.
A self-taught physicist,
the brilliant inventor of a new technique,
that's unlocked the secrets of paintings by Rubens,
Rembrandt, Picasso and many others.
His work on another Leonardo painting,
the Lady with an Ermine,
revealed earlier versions of the composition
hidden beneath its surface that rewrote art history.
But his great obsession is the Mona Lisa.
Faithfully reproduced here in his studio.
In 2004, Pascal was invited by the Louvre to scan the painting.
His task? Simply to identify the picture's original colours
hidden beneath the discolourations of time.
But Pascal's technique also revealed
that there was far more going on beneath the surface.
For the last decade, he's worked in secret,
decoding those discoveries.
And now he's ready to share them.
So our goal is to peel, like an onion, all the layer of paint,
to reconstruct the chronology of the construction of the painting.
So, is this new? Is this a new...?
This is a new technique, absolutely.
Pascal's secret weapon is his ground-breaking multispectral camera.
An invention truly worthy of Leonardo.
13 different wavelengths of colour are projected onto the picture.
Each penetrating the paint surface to a different depth.
The camera captures the reflections,
generating over three billion bits of data and thousands of images.
By analysing each image, shown in black and white,
Pascal can reveal a painting's secrets layer by layer.
His first discovery in the Mona Lisa is buried deep within the painting.
What we discover, we discover that the head... was bigger.
So you... you see a shadow of a bigger head. Yes, I can see.
Mm. You can see also that the nose... is double here.
Oh!
Wow!
So once, she had a larger head.
And I discovered this hand, much more bigger.
Pascal has pieced together several previously unknown details,
that lie beneath the Louvre portrait as we know it.
Marked in red, they seem to be elements of a larger first portrait,
that never got beyond a draft stage.
But that's just the beginning of Pascal's discoveries.
So now we continue with one other layer.
Ah. Here we are.
What on earth is that?
What is it?
This is a hairpin.
Like this one.
So, you found... Something like this. You found a...
With that little bit of your magic light camera,
you found a missing hairpin?
Now you know there is a hairpin, you can see it.
Hah!
Because you know.
But, yes... No, exactly. How fascinating!
And more than that, if you look around the head,
you discover 12 hairpins.
ANDREW LAUGHS
The hairpins with pearls make no sense on the first large portrait.
But Pascal has found something else that appears to be connected to them.
Tiny rows of dots, known as spolveri.
They seem to suggest an elaborate headdress.
Intriguingly, a type of headdress that, as far as we know,
was only ever shown on the heads of saints or Madonnas.
This is a painting of a headdress
that have nothing to do with Mona Lisa.
Nothing to do with Mona Lisa? Nothing to do with Mona Lisa.
'The spolveri hidden inside the Mona Lisa have never been seen before.
They're concrete proof of the way Leonardo constructed a picture.
He would have begun with a preparatory drawing.
Marked the lines on tracing paper with a sharp point,
then transferred those outlines on to the wood with coal dust.
But what happened to the headdress?
Pascal's next piece of evidence
suggests it was deliberately removed.
So now I discovered this hatching.
Do you see this hatching? This is another layer of your...?
Yeah, another... Of the onion.
So, this is Leonardo with his rubber? Yes.
You see, it's totally different from the cracks.
It's not craquelure, no.
You see, this is clearly to erase what is behind.
It's very important. Because that explains how Leonardo,
from one stage, goes to another stage.
Pascal's scans are crucial evidence of the way Leonardo worked.
Building up a painting stage by stage.
Above the scratchings, Pascal reveals
the first impression of yet another layer.
The ghostly imprint of a face.
Like a Leonardo Turin Shroud.
Is that another head? Yes.
How many heads is that so far?
Er... this is the number three.
So the big head... The big head...
The pearl head. The pearl head.
And then there's another head. Yes.
Now the... the eyes.
So it's a wonderful proof.
I discovered two crosses just here.
Oh!
That's extraordinary!
And these crosses do not match with Mona Lisa's...glance.
No. No.
The crosses clearly mark a different set of pupils
looking in a different direction.
The face behind Mona Lisa... Mm.
The face is turned 14 degrees in the right direction.
So there she is, she's looking like that.
So she should be like that. Yeah. More like that.
Also, eyebrows. This...
Can I just see this? Because this is an important point.
Because Vasari says specifically, you know,
that the eyebrowsare beautifully painted.
Yes. These eyebrows...
And the Mona Lisa, as we see her, doesn't have eyebrows.
So, have you found...? You can see it. Yeah, look, here.
So there are the eyebrows!
And here, you have another mouth.
Look at this mouth. Nothing to do with Mona Lisa.
Absolutely amazing.
She's barely smiling.
Do you see? Because she...she turns the head on the left,
the mouth is a little smaller.
You see? Quite a lot smaller. Yeah.
So, Pascal, you've found a complete face.
Yes. Inside... Inside.
The Mona Lisa. Yes.
Wow!
That's quite a big discovery, isn't it?
Yes, it is.
Yes, it is. Yes, it is.
Pascal's work has revealed for the first time in 500 years,
a detailed earlier portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.
It's the same size as the face we see now,
but turned by 14 degrees.
There's clear evidence of a different, swept-back hairstyle.
Elaborate ties at the top of an earlier sleeve are clearly visible.
There's even a suggestion that she once held a blanket in her lap.
Is this the portrait of Lisa I've been looking for?
So throughout my journey, I thought,
well, it seems as though
they're talking about two different pictures.
You seem to be saying to me that, yes, there are two Mona Lisas,
but they happen to be on the same piece of wood. Yes.
So this must surely be... Lisa del Giocondo.
Of course. Francesco's wife.
I agree with you. It's...
This is a real portrait of Mrs Lisa Gherardini.
Pascal's pioneering work
marks an extraordinary moment in the history of art.
By piecing together all the details, then decoding the data
to identify the original pigments used by Leonardo,
Pascal has been able to construct a digital Photofit of the image.
It's a perfect match with the historical record.
But if this computer image represents the original portrait of Mona Lisa,
it's a portrait her husband never received.
Instead, Leonardo went on to paint
the world's most famous picture over the top.
So there were two Mona Lisa's all along.
But how do we make sense of these discoveries?
And what are we now to make of Leonardo's masterpiece?
In search of the final piece to the puzzle,
I'm meeting a woman who's spent years reconstructing the scene
of that day back in 1503
when Leonardo started to paint Lisa.
Leading expert on renaissance hairstyles and costumes,
Elisabetta Gnignera,
has based her work closely on Pascal's findings.
Every Renaissance fashion can be precisely pinpointed.
Whether to Rome in 1512, or Florence in 1503.
So by recreating the costume Pascal found
in the painting beneath the painting,
Elisabetta can place and date it very precisely.
Her results are a revelation.
Looking at the fashions shown in these other contemporary portraits,
this lady perfectly fits with the historical image
of a wealthy Florentine lady
of the early years of the 16th century.
I cannot see any inconsistencies.
So, this must be Lisa del Giocondo as Raphael painted her?
Yes, this is very close.
The closest version we know to the Raphael sketch.
It's like a Polaroid.
It's like a Polaroid? Yeah.
Raphael had actually seen Leonardo's portrait of Lisa
when he drew this copy in 1504.
Apart from one slight difference, the veil over the bodice,
it's identical to Elisabetta's reconstruction
and Pascal's Photofit.
It's compelling evidence that Pascal has indeed found the first version,
Leonardo's original Lisa,
Iurking beneath the finished work.
But where does all this leave the picture we see today?
So, when you look at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, as she is now,
from the point of view of costume, what do you see?
To me, she is not a real person
because there are so many details which go in this sense.
Mm. Can you give me an example?
Yeah. The long hair worn on her shoulder.
This wouldn't be conceivable,
unless you were the very high ranks,
or it was a posthumous portrait.
What about this sort of sash of drapery that comes over her shoulder?
The twist. The twist. Yeah.
This is the most interesting element in Louvre's Giocondo.
Because Greco- Roman classical art devoted such detail
only on one shoulder only.
To Venus, Venus,
and virtues like purity, chastity, faith.
So that...that beautiful strand of drapery
that seems to continue the flow of the river
and the landscape behind... Yeah.
That is not something that a real woman would have worn?
Not at all, even if it was a...
So, it's more like an attribute of a goddess? Yes.
So the Louvre painting shows an idealised woman,
maybe a posthumous portrait.
Surely, then, she can no longer be Mona Lisa.
Because Mona Lisa outlived Leonardo.
Wow! Heh-heh!
'Now, for Elisabetta, the moment of truth.
As the results of years of research and hard work finally come together,
we can at last see how Lisa del Giocondo,
the original Mona Lisa, might have looked.
So, Elisabetta... Yeah?
You have made the sleeves that Pascal found. Yeah.
And this is the line, you've recreated the line. Yeah, exactly.
It's been an elaborate process.
But it leads to a genuine insight
into Leonardo's obsessive relationship with this painting.
The key is in the colours,
which have been exactly matched to Pascal's calculations.
The dress for the bodice, he found a...
A greenish-grey pigment. Mm.
And also, there's leaves.
We know how Leonardo would call this colour,
which was called Leonato.
That is, the colours of the lion's fur.
Leonato colour. I never knew that, I never knew that.
You know what that makes me think? It makes me think, when you say that,
that this is... this is Leonardo...
Because, of course, he didn't sign pictures.
But this is Leonardo's way of signing the painting.
Exactly. He loved to play games with words. Exactly. So the colour...
That's great. The colour, Leonato,
and the knot pattern, Vinceri. Yeah.
Leonato da Vinci. Yeah.
It could be, no? We are not joking. I agree with you totally.
You agree with me? Yeah, exactly. Because...
For me, the presence of a hidden signature
would answer a nagging question.
Why didn't he finish his first version
and give it to Francesco?
Knotting his name into her bodice, it's like an act of possession.
As if Leonardo knew this was always destined to be more than a portrait.
No-one's painting but his own.
If we go one, two, three,
uno, due, tre, you look at me.
Uno, due, tre.
Our investigation has revealed for the first time
what Leonardo's hidden earlier portrait might have looked like.
The portrait, surely, of the Florentine merchant's wife,
Lisa del Giocondo.
We found a solution to the historic inconsistencies
that have long baffled experts.
And, it seems, we've discovered that the portrait in the Louvre
may not be the Mona Lisa after all.
So we're left with the million-dollar question.
Who is she?
The one piece of evidence that still stands out
is the eyewitness account of de Beatis,
who had it from Leonardo himself
that the woman we now see was painted at the behest of Giuliano de' Medici.
So, who replaced Mona Lisa in Leonardo's painting?
Did Giuliano commission a posthumous portrait?
Perhaps of a lost love idealised like a goddess?
For me, there's only one candidate.
A woman with whom Giuliano had a brief, passionate affair.
A woman who tragically died giving birth to their son.
A little boy who was still calling for her
when Giuliano commissioned the picture.
Her name was Pacifica Brandano.
Could this be her?
It's a romantic notion.
But just as Leonardo never gave the picture to Francesco,
he never gave it to Giuliano either.
Instead, he kept the image of the woman he'd signed in code
and made her more his own than ever.
At the end of Leonardo's life,
the Mona Lisa, this shape-shifting picture
that had begun as the portrait of one woman
and then metamorphosed into another,
became something else again.
Namely, a work of art that transcended portraiture
and turned into an expression of all his knowledge, all his philosophy.
The painting's like a shimmering mosaic
in which Leonardo has pieced together all that he knows about nature
and about human nature.
And I think the key to it is that famous smile.
Leonardo's way of saying that while we might strive to understand
this vast cosmos that surrounds us,
in the end, it's our destiny to pass through life
as swiftly as the smile that flickers across a human face.
So the Mona Lisa really isn't Mona Lisa after all,
but something much more than that.
It's a painting of life itself,
as Leonardo had come to think of it.
His way of painting us all.