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French scientist Pascal Cotte has astounded art historians with a major discovery about Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Lady With an Ermine (1489-90), the BBC reports. Until now, it had been assumed that da Vinci’s composition had always included the white ermine, but Cotte’s three year-long investigation has revealed that the Italian artist actually painted the work not in one, but in three clearly differentiated stages. His first version was ... [snip]

Born in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo died in 1519, age 67, and was buried in Amboise, southwest of Paris. His creative imagination foresaw and described innovations hundreds of years before their invention, such as the helicopter and armored tank. His artistic legacy includes the iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. The idea behind the Project, founded in 2014, has inspired and united anthropologists, art historians, genealogists, microbiologists, and other experts from leading universities and institutes in France, Italy, Spain, Canada and the USA, including specialists from the J. Craig Venter Institute of California, which pioneered the sequencing of the human...

Maybe Vasari fresco refers to presence of greater art behind it ROME -- "Cerca trova" ("Seek and you shall find") is the tantalizing 5-century-old message painted on a fresco in the council hall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Researchers now believe these cryptic words could be a clue to the location of a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting and are pressing local authorities to allow them to search for the masterpiece of Renaissance art. Maurizio Seracini, an Italian art researcher, first noticed the message during a survey of the hall 30 years ago, but his team lacked the technology then to...

Forget the Da Vinci Code. Dr Seracini thinks he's cracked art's biggest mystery Step by patient step, one man is drawing ever closer to the real Da Vinci mystery: tracking down the master’s greatest painting, lost for four and a half centuries. And it is hidden, he believes, in a room at the heart of political power since the Middle Ages in Florence. For art historians, finding Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari is in the same league as finding the Titanic or the still lost tomb of the Ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep — as big as you can get. The...

Maybe this is yet another reason to say “God save the Queen”: dozens of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings, so far reserved for those who visited Buckingham Palace, have been carefully digitalized and made available for you, lucky internaut. But besides this collection of the beautiful, intricate and detailed drawings and sketches of the Italian Renaissance master, along with his notes and observations, the Royal Collection Trust has also launched an iPad application that compiles the whole 268 pages of the da Vinci notebooks. This is no coloring book, but you might enjoy trying to copy some of these! 

Jihad in Los Angeles? The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has arrested a suspect, Dawud Abdulwali, 56, on arson charges connected with the massive downtown fire last December that consumed the Da Vinci apartment complex. The Los Angeles Times reports that Abdulwali was arrested Tuesday morning during a traffic stop, and after a lengthy investigation. Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the arrest Wednesday, saying: “This arrest illustrates that crime will not be tolerated in Los Angeles.” Abdulwadi’s alleged motive has not been revealed. He was arrested by the LAPD’s anti-terrorism unit, though officials say that there is no reason to suspect...

Dawud Abdulwali was taken into custody Tuesday by members of the Los Angeles Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Los Angeles Fire Department, LAPD Officer Tony Im confirmed to KTLA. Abdulwali was arrested at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday and was booked less than two hours later at the LAPD’s 77th Street station, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department online inmate records. No other details of the arrest were immediately available. The suspect’s bail was set at $1,036,925, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Officials from the arresting agencies and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office...

A long-lost painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was confiscated from a bank vault in Switzerland after Italian police said it had been exported illegally and was in danger of being sold for up to £90 million. Swiss police, acting on a request by their Italian counterparts, seized the portrait of Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, from a private bank vault in Lugano on Tuesday. After being lost for centuries, the painting was rediscovered in 2013 in a collection of 400 artworks kept in a Swiss vault. The authorities then were alerted to the existence of the painting, but it...

Archaeologists say they have found a complete skeleton buried beneath the floor of an abandoned nunnery in Florence, Italy, which might belong to Lisa Gherardini, the woman believed to have inspired Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The bones were found beneath the remains of an altar in the church of the now derelict Convent of St. Orsola. "That altar was certainly in use at Lisa Gherardini's time," said Valeria D'Aquino, an archaeologist at the Tuscan Superintendency

MADRID—Spain’s Prado art museum said Wednesday it had discovered an unusual copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Gioconda,” painted by one of the master’s pupils at the same time that the original was being completed. The copy had been on display at the Madrid art museum for years without experts being aware of its importance. A routine restoration led experts to discover that the dark background behind the female figure popularly known as Mona Lisa had been added afterward and that it covered an Italian landscape similar to that in da Vinci’s original.

Queen’s University Classics professor emeritus Ross Kilpatrick believes the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, incorporates images inspired by the Roman poet Horace and Florentine poet Petrarch. The technique of taking a passage from literature and incorporating it into a work of art is known as ‘invention’ and was used by many Renaissance artists. “The composition of the Mona Lisa is striking. Why does Leonardo have an attractive woman sitting on a balcony, while in the background there is an entirely different world that is vast and barren?” says Dr. Kilpatrick. “What is the artist trying to say?”

BBC reports that Dr. Vito Franco from Palermo University believes that Mona Lisa has a build-up of fatty acids under the skin of her eyes. That is supposed to be a sign of high cholesterol. The news is so absurd I decided to join the fray and come up with few matching thoughts of nonsense.... There was no McDonald’s back in the 1507 when Lisa Del Gioconda posed for Leonardo. I wonder what Mona Lisa’s diet was back then. What we know for sure is that Mrs. Gioconda did not eat French fries because the potatoes were imported from the...

For centuries, Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" and her enigmatic smile have inspired as much speculation as admiration. Now she's ready to answer questions -- in Mandarin. A digital, interactive version of the renowned 16th century painting is one of 61 high-tech replicas breathing life into classical and ancient art works in the "World Classic Interactive Arts Exhibition" which opened in Beijing last week.

Words cannot describe how powerful this video is, just as its pedecessors have been. Live Action, as part of its Mona Lisa Project, have now visited Planned Parenthood clinics in Indiana, Arizona, California, and Tennessee. The story remains the same: young teenage girl, pregnant by her much-older boyfriend seeks help at a Planned Parenthood clinic. Clinic ignores the story and instructs her on how to obtain an abortion, often by lying to a judge (to avoid parental consent) or by crossing state lines (to take advantage of more liberal abortion access laws). By doing so, these clinics are repeatedly violating...

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) -- The "Mona Lisa" has long been shrouded in mystery, including one long-standing question about the famous lady: What happened to her eyebrows and eyelashes? Now, a French engineer and inventor says he's uncovered part of the enigma.

The woman behind Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting may be buried near a now derelict building in the heart of Florence, according to archival documents. The exact location of Mona Lisa's burial site, the convent of Sant'Orsola, was just a about 900 feet away from the house of the artist's father, according to the historian, Giuseppe Pallanti. "The mystery of Mona Lisa's identity is over. My study shows that she did exist indeed," Pallanti told Florence's daily La Nazione. he author of two books on the Mona Lisa, Pallanti has identified her as Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the...

Researchers using three-dimensional technology to study the "Mona Lisa" say the woman depicted in Leonardo da Vinci's 16th century masterpiece was either pregnant or had recently given birth when she sat for the painting. ADVERTISEMENT That was one of many discoveries found by French and Canadian researchers during one of the most extensive physical examinations ever carried out on the artwork. "Thanks to laser scanning, we were able to uncover the very fine gauze veil Mona Lisa was wearing on her dress. This was something typical for either soon-to-be or new mothers at the time," Michel Menu, research director of...

After four centuries in which historians have debated the identity of the artist's subject - with theories ranging from his mother to a Florentine prostitute - new research has supported the claim first made in 1550: that she was Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant.

PARIS: Four years and almost 5 million euros later, Leonard da Vinci's Mona Lisa has moved into spacious new digs at the Louvre Museum in Paris but her famous smile remains as enigmatic as ever. From Wednesday, visitors will find the 500-year-old painting in the Salle des Etats, a large gallery that served as a parliamentary debating chamber until 1870 and which has undergone a 4.8 million euro makeover since 2001. Peruvian architect Lorenzo Piqueras said he wanted to make it easier for six million annual visitors to find what is arguably the world's most celebrated smile, and to prevent...

Art historians are probing a real life Da Vinci Code style mystery after discovering tiny numbers and letters painted into the eyes of the artist's enigmatic Mona Lisa painting. The numbers and letters are not visible to the human eye but have to be viewed under a microscope Leonardo Da Vinci's 500-year-old Renaissance masterpiece has long been steeped in mystery, and even today the true identity of the woman with the alluring smile still far from certain. Now members of Italy's National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa's eyes letters...