Mona Lisa Gives Up the Secret of Her Smile

摘要

Mona Lisa's mystical smile still puts viewers under a spell. Leonardo da Vinci attained the precision and finesse of his paintings with a technique he himself perfected-sfumato (from the Italian for "foggy"). In this method, several layers of color are applied over each other. The colors meld together and lend the face a mysterious glow. Philippe Walter and his team at the Louvre in Paris have examined the faces of seven paintings signed by the master with a new noninvasive X-ray fluorescence spec-troscopy technique.