Abbastanza! Enough with the Mona Lisa already

Can't we move on to a new painting now?!



For centuries now, the "Mona Lisa" has beguiled art buffs unable to resist speculating on its origins and meaning. Now a (bored) French inventor claims to have some answers, including the fate of the enigmatic subject's famously missing eyebrows and lashes.


Move along, grandpa!

Parisian engineer Pascal Cotte says his ultra-detailed digital scans of the painting allow him to effectively burrow through layers of paint to "see" into the past of Leonardo Da Vinci's 16th-century portrait of a Florentine merchant's wife.

According to your boy Pascal, the world's most famous painting originally included both brows and lashes, obliterated by long-ago restoration efforts.

"With just one photo you go deeper into the construction of the painting and understand that Leonardo was a genius," Cotte said at the U.S. debut of an exhibit detailing his findings.

Leonardo was a genius before your discovery, bro. I don't need to know about Mona's eyebrows or eye lashes, OK?

Regardless the 49-year old French engineer estimates he has spent 3,000 hours analysing the data from the scans he made of the painting in the Louvre's laboratory three years ago. How does a job like that pay?


Rubes

Your boy Cotte says his research has lead him to these other findings:

Da Vinci changed his mind about the position of two fingers on the subject's left hand.

Her face was originally wider and the smile more expressive than Da Vinci ultimately painted them.



She holds a blanket that has all but faded from view today

Cotte said his analyses also revealed what he believes are the painting's colors as they looked on Da Vinci's easel.



Age, varnish and restorations performed by later conservators' hands have resulted in a painting that, in its permanent home behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre, appears saturated with heavy greens, yellows and browns.

Working with his 22-gigabyte digital nerd-o-photo, made using 13 different color filters rather than the typical three or four found in consumer-grade digital cameras, Cotte created a reproduction of the Mona Lisa with the light blues and brilliant whites he thinks represent the painting in its original form.


Th' fuck u lookin at?!