Technology Sheds Light on 6 Great Art Mysteries

Beneath the familiar faces of hundreds of paintings lining the walls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., a host of secrets sit, waiting to be discovered.

 

Whether a Picasso or Da Vinci, every canvas holds brushstrokes that might conceal something else: a secondary painting, perhaps, or a mystery waiting to be untangled by John Delaney, the museum's senior imaging scientist.

 

On a typical day, he patiently places a painting in front of a specialized camera and completes a scan, which will reveal not just what's under the paint, but also what is happening at each layer of paint that lies under the surface.

 

Delaney is part of a community of scientists, curators, and art historians who have assembled a toolbox of high-precision x-rays, lasers, microscopes, and software to unveil some of art's greatest mysteries. These technologies have helped unlock groundbreaking information about both art and artist alike.

 

Here are some of these technologies and the mysteries that they've helped uncover.

 

#1 Picasso Under the Paint

 

 

One of Picasso's most distinctive pieces from his Blue Period, "Le Gourmet," depicts a child scraping his bowl for the last morsels of food. But underneath the azures and cobalts on the canvas, there's a hidden portrait—of a veiled woman gazing serenely out into the distance. This hidden portrait, which Picasso worked on before his Blue Period, uses bolder dabs of  white paint and may contain other unknown pigments.

 

The ability to view early sketches and paintings hidden underneath the surface has been around for decades, thanks to infrared reflectography, which was used to uncover the veiled woman at the National Gallery in the mid-1990s.

 

But Delaney's technology goes far beyond seeing a concealed drawing. His infrared imaging method takes pictures of Picasso's mysterious woman at a range of infrared exposures. Delaney then turns these images into a flipbook of sorts, allowing viewers to see the little boy fading as the woman emerges from the canvas.

 

The two images are a boon for Picasso enthusiasts, who are interested in how Picasso painted throughout various periods of his life.

 

"It points closer to [the artist's] methods and techniques and how they evolve," Delaney said.

 

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