The Mona Lisa smiles. He knows the secrets that Leonardo da Vinci has hidden in the painting. Art and science are mixed, as the master of perspective, engineer, cartographer and painter wanted.
In 2004, at the request of the Louvre, engineer Pascal Cotte digitized the Mona Lisa.
Eighteen years later, analysis after analysis, Mona Lisa ended up speaking, under the multispectral camera invented and designed by the researcher, now established in Italy, in Ravenna, in the largest institute in the world for the analysis of Renaissance works. For Chiara Matteucci, director of the laboratory, it is a scientific treasure. The process reveals all layers of paint. This is how we discover three successive portraits of the Mona Lisa, but a landscape that has remained unchanged, as Pascal Cotte explains to us, who during the Vinci conference will guide us in the footsteps of the master, in particular on the Pisan mountains, from Monte della Verruca to the tower of Caprona, thanks also to the multispectral camera he invented, called L.A.M — Layer Amplification Method.
The study of the geographical maps drawn by Leonardo and two sketches with blood, published by Carlo Pedretti, have made it possible to prove this colossal discovery and to retrace Leonardo's passage on the Pisan mountains, from Vicopisano, Cascina, Calci.
In close collaboration with Pascal Cotte and the Ravenna laboratory, Sylvain Thieurmel, a scientific expert and researcher specialized in Leonardo da Vinci's painting, has carried out a series of researches in Tuscany that have led him to understand, without a doubt, the teacher's journey, most likely accompanied by his student and lover Salai, from the tower of Caprona to the Verruca. His research led him to the unprecedented discovery of a cave located in Uliveto Terme, at the foot of Mount Verruca. A majestic rock, “the ninth”, remained intact in a huge room open to the sky, a faithful representation of the landscape that Leonardo painted in the Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre. Sylvain Thieurmel then went to Vinci, accompanied by local history expert Nicola Baronti, more specifically to the Vincio Valley, San Pantaleo and Campo Zeppi, where Caterina, Leonardo's mother and Accatabriga's extended family, lived. Here the young genius probably grew up, with the view of the valleys and their vegetation, without forgetting that 'knot', which recently reappeared on the outer wall of the ancient chapel of San Pantaleone Martire, among the Places of the Heart of Tuscany 2020, with many stories and meanings still to be revealed about the origins of the Genius.