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Art / Artist > Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting
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Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting
Featuring Pascal Cotte, Inventor of the Multispectral Camera
MC-854, 2008
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Format: DVD, NTSC, Region 0 (All), 
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US List Price: $US 19.99
European List Prices: £13.99 / 19.99€
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On October 19, 2007 the news circled the globe that photographer/inventor Pascal Cotte succeeded in photographing Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” at a resolution of 240 million pixels, 8 times higher than any professional camera to date. His breakthrough images brought to light never before seen elements that have forever altered our knowledge of the world's most famous painting.
With exclusive access to Cotte’s photographs and technique, as well as analysis from the world’s leading experts, we see for the first time that Leonardo may actually have painted his model with eyebrows and lashes - just one of 25 incredible secrets this fascinating documentary reveals. In English with optional French and Spanish subtitles.
Bonus Feature:
"The 26 Secrets of Mona Lisa" - all 25 secrets are revealed and ends with the announcement of the 26th secret revealed and only found on the DVD Special Feature: In 1911, an Italian house painter stole the painting from the Louvre Museum. Did he leave his mark on the Mona Lisa? Find out in this intriguing expose...
| Catalog Number: MC-854 |
Type: Feature |
Genre: Art / Artist |
| Copyright: 2008 |
Length: 56 minutes |
Format:
DVD Region: 0 (All) |
| TV System: NTSC |
ISBN: |
UPC: 880198085498 |
| Label: |
Notes: In English with optional French and Spanish subtitles.
This title is available in Europe for Wholesale - List Prices: £13.99 / 19.99€
This program is closed captioned
This is a Microcinema Exclusive title.
Wholesale Purchasing:
Program MC-854 is available for wholesale from Microcinema DVD. Contact info[at]microcinema.com or call at +1-415-447-9750
Exhibition:
Microcinema is not authorized to represent this title for exhibition. Write us for this contact information.
Films In Compilation
Mona Lisa Revealed directed by
Caroline
Cocciardi
USA,
Documentary,
2008,
00:56:00
"The 26 Secrets of Mona Lisa" - all 25 secrets are revealed and ends with the announcement of the 26th revealed and only found on the DVD Special Feature: In 1911 an Italian house painter stole the painting from the Louvre Museum. Did he leave his mark on the Mon Lisa? Find out in the intriguing Expose'....
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2010-07-06 goodnews.ws
If you have been puzzled by Mona Lisa’s smile – how she’s radiant one moment and serious the next instant – then your worries are over. It happens because our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain about her smile. Different cells in the retina transmit different categories of information or “channels” to the brain. These channels encode data about an object’s size, clarity, brightness and location in the visual field. “Sometimes one channel wins over the other, and you see the smile, sometimes others take over and you don’t see the smile,” says Luis Martinez Otero, a neuroscientist at Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, who conducted the study along with Diego Alonso Pablos. This isn’t the first time scientists have deconstructed Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. In 2000, Margaret Livingstone, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School with a side interest in art history, showed that Mona Lisa’s smile is more apparent in peripheral visionMovie Camera than dead-centre, or foveal, vision. And in 2005, an American team suggested that random noise in the path from retina to visual cortex determines whether we see a smile or not. Visual pathways. To get a fuller picture of the reasons behind Mona Lisa’s vanishing smile, Martinez Otero and Alonso Pablos varied different aspects of the Mona Lisa that are processed by different visual channels, and then asked volunteers whether they saw a smile or not. To start with, the duo asked volunteers to look at the painting in varying sizes from varying distances. When standing far away or when viewing a tiny reproduction of the portrait, the volunteers had trouble making out any facial expression. When they moved in closer, or viewed a larger copy of the painting, they began to see the smile – and the larger the picture more likely they were to see it. This suggests that retinal cells that process dead-centre vision convey information about the smile just as well as the cells that contribute to peripheral vision. Next, Martinez Otero’s team compared how light affects our judgement of Mona Lisa’s smile. Two kinds of cells determine the brightness of an object relative to its surroundings: “on-centre” cells, which are stimulated only when their centres are illuminated, and allow us to see a bright star in a dark night; and “off-centre” cells, which fired only when their centres are dark, and allow us to pick out words on a printed page. Light and darkness. Martinez Otero jammed these channels by showing another set of volunteers either a black or white screen for 30 seconds followed by a shot of the Mona Lisa. Volunteers were more likely to see Mona Lisa’s smile after they had been shown the dark screen.
This would have muted the off-centre cells, leading Martinez Otero to conclude that it is these the on-centre cells that sense the Mona Lisa’s smile. Eye gaze also affects how volunteers see the smile, Martinez Otero says. His team used software to track where in the painting 20 volunteers gazed while they rated whether or not Mona Lisa’s smile became more or less apparent. With a minute to gaze at the painting, volunteers tended to focus on the left side of her mouth when judging her as smiling – further evidence that dead-centre vision picks out the smile. That can’t be the whole story, though, because when volunteers had only a fraction of a second to discern her smile, their eyes tended to focus on her left cheek, hinting that peripheral vision plays a role, too. So did Leonardo intend to sow so much confusion in the brains of viewers, not to mention scientists? Absolutely, Martinez Otero contends. “He wrote in one of his notebooks that he was trying to paint dynamic expressions because that’s what he saw in the street.” The research was presented at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting in Chicago this week. news from newscientist.com – Mona Lisa Revealed. This film documents photographer-inventor Pascal Cotte who succeeded in photographing Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” at a resolution of 240 million pixels, 8 times higher than any professional camera to date. His breakthrough images uncovered five centuries of secrets which are about to be Revealed….The Mona Lisa images in this film have never been seen before in high definition video quality. “Mona Lisa Revealed-Secrets of the Painting” will take you deep into her facial cracks; you will see the delicacy of her many veils; the paintings colors will astound you.Audiences will have the rare privilege of seeing her as very few people in the world have ever seen her– Cotte’s cutting edge technology virtually removes the Mona Lisa from her bulletproof case, so we can see her true beauty at last. The documentary, filmed on 3 continents and 6 countries interviews many Leonardo da Vinci experts. Heres where you find out the answers to what happened to Mona Lisa’s Eyebrows and Eyelashes…The Mona Lisa images in this film have never been seen before in high definition video quality. This film takes you deep below the surface of the painting where you’ll see the exquisite delicacy of her veils and the true colors will astound you! Be the first to have the rare privilege of seeing this portrait as very few people in the world have ever seen it. Cotte’s cutting edge technology removes the Mona Lisa from the bulletproof case, so you can see her true beauty at last.
| 2009-08-25 Video Librarian
By F. Swietek
It may be the most famous painting in the world, but the Mona Lisa still has secrets to be revealed. Happily, an instrument exists to help uncover the mysteries lying behind La Gioconda’s enigmatic smile: the multispectral camera, invented by French photographer Pascal Cotte. After Cotte scanned da Vinci’s masterpiece with his 240-megapixel camera, he discovered 25 unknown facts. Among them: the original portrait sported eyebrows and eyelashes (not discernable to the naked eye today); the unusual position of the subject’s hands is explained by the fact that she’s holding a blanket or shawl; and the famous smile was initially more emphatically rendered than it appears now. Interviewed experts, often quoting from contemporary sources, verify or question Cotte’s findings, while a virtual computer reconstruction of the painting suggests how it might have looked in the 16th century. Mona Lisa Revealed is an interesting documentary, but one marred by a heavily-accented English overdubbing of Cotte’s French dialogue, as well as the absurd decision to have it “narrated” by the Mona Lisa herself, who gives an account of the painting’s travels in a giggly girlish tone. DVD extras include a bonus featurette offering a thumbnail sketch countdown of Cotte’s 25 discoveries, along with the story behind a 26th—a tiny spot of paint perhaps tied to the Mona Lisa’s theft from the Louvre in 1911 (it was recovered in 1913). A strong optional purchase.
| 2009-05-21 Educational Media Reviews Online
By Sebastian Derry
Lisa di Antonio Giocondo was immortalized by the Florentine artist Leonardo da Vinci. His painting of her is the beloved Mona Lisa, and it is quite simply the most famous piece of art in the known universe. Painted sometime during the years 1503-1506, she can still generate front page news 500 years on, as Mona Lisa Revealed promulgates.
There are really two stars in this film—Mona Lisa, and the French engineer Pascal Cotte. Enthralled by the painting from a young age, and dreaming of one day seeing inside it, Cotte grows up to design a new kind of multi-spectral scanning camera. Capable of taking 13 photographs of the painting from across the light spectrum (from ultraviolet to infrared) at a heretofore unimaginable resolution of 240 million pixels, the camera projects a ray of white light across the painting, creating a computerized image of the Mona Lisa.
The upshot of all this technology means that it is possible now to look at different layers of the painting, to literally go beneath the surface of the paint. As a result, many secrets are revealed, and the age-old question of “Why was Mona Lisa painted without eyebrows or eyelashes?” is finally answered.
The film achieves just the right balance of providing historical background for both the painting and da Vinci’s artistic process with following Cotte’s process at work with his scanning camera and computers.
On the disc’s bonus feature, all 25 secrets of the painting are revealed, with a special 26th secret thrown in for good measure. Mona Lisa’s been holding out on us. Who knew?
Recommended for all libraries.
| 2009-04-15 DVD Verdict
By James A. Stewart
The eyebrows in question, along with eyelashes, belong to Mona Lisa, Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting—or rather don't belong. The lady in the picture just doesn't have any eyebrows or eyelashes. Pascal Cotte, who invented a multispectral camera, says that wasn't always so, and his photographs of the painting prove it.
Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting concentrates on the brows and lashes, but looks at more than twenty other details uncovered by Cotte and others attempting the virtual restoration of Mona Lisa.
While I'm not an expert myself, the experts presented all appear credible and their theories are presented well enough that I could follow them. The documentary uses one annoying gimmick: narration that's supposedly the voice of the painting herself (Cinzia Mandati Li Bassi).
The program is mostly talking heads, so the picture quality isn't a big concern, but I didn't notice any problems with video or audio. A short bonus feature, "26 Secrets," sums up all the discoveries mentioned during the film and adds one that didn't make the cut, with additional footage.
What importance does the research and theorizing have? From what I gleaned here, they'll help with a virtual recreation of Da Vinci's original painting, free from the effects of time. The experts' ideas could also at some point help the Louvre decide whether to restore or clean Mona Lisa.
Mona Lisa's voice aside, Mona Lisa Restored takes its subject seriously. That's good if you're a serious student of the painting or art restoration, but probably not for the casual viewer.
| 2009-03-19 dvdtalk.com
By Nick Hartel
Arguably the world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa capture's the imagination and wonder of art lovers and the casually interested alike. Pascal Cotte would fall into the latter. As a boy, he became enamored with the painting and sought to know all of its secrets. In 2007, he would finally live his dream through the invention of his 240 million pixel multispectral camera. Cotte was given exclusive access to the painting, outside of all protective barriers, at the Louvre and his results are quite fascinating.
"Mona Lisa Revealed: Secrets of the Painting" is a brief (50 minutes) documentary that focuses both on an abridged history of the painting and Cotte's findings, specifically the confirmation that the original painting had eyebrows and eyelashes. Cotte's museum presentation runs as a companion piece to another museum exhibit on DaVinci and is highly recommended. The highlight of the Cotte exhibit is a high-resolution reproduction of the Mona Lisa. Having been to this exhibit personally, this program is a great supplement; for those who have not the program might frustrate as it mentions other findings that are discussed and shown in greater detail at the exhibit itself.
The documentary itself never talks down to the viewer; the explanations are a good balance between technical language and layman's terms. Cotte's multispectral camera is well explained and the explanations are accompanied by the photographs from the Mona Lisa shoot. AS mentioned above, Cotte focuses on the revelation that the painting originally had eyebrows and while this may seem like a boring topic, it is actually quite fascinating as the evidence he provides is from images of the painting in the IR range, a range not visible to the human eye. His findings are supported by historians who had argued the same fact for years, citing other paintings of the time and historical evidence of popular women's fashion.
The only failings of the documentary are its short running time. I'd have love to have spent another 30 minutes talking about one or two of Cotte's other findings and had a slightly more in depth look at the multispectral camera. The average viewer however, will find the program more than adequate, but only worth watching once. For art fans and fans of DaVinci or the Mona Lisa, this will most likely have higher replay value. At the end of the day, I think the program is even more appreciated if the viewer has had a chance to see the exhibit personally.
Presented in 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen, the video quality is all over the place. The primary footage of Cotte and the interviews of historians are adequate, but don't do the paintings shown justice. There is evidence of digital grain and some artifacting. As is the case with many documentaries, additional footage is used and the aspect ratios vary from 1.85:1 to 1.33:1. Some of this footage is less than stellar and a few pieces show a high level of compression artifacts.
The audio is presented in an English surround track with the rear channels only getting use during background music. The main narration track suffers from semi-regular clipping for the first half of the program. It doesn't result in the loss of information, but is a minor annoyance. Cotte's dialogue sounds like he may have rerecorded his lines in the studio and is a bit distracting at first as it's not entirely in sync with the video. The other interviews all feature quality audio and no clipping problems. English, French, and Spanish subtitles are also present. I would recommend watching with English subtitles as Cotte's accent can be hard to understand at times.
The disc has one lone, five minute extra featurette entitled "The 26 Secrets of Mona Lisa." This piece lists the 25 "secrets" revealed by Cotte's findings and concludes with what is supposedly an exclusive 26th secret, revealed only on this DVD. It's definitely worth watching as some of the findings are quite amazing and only possible with Cotte's camera. The featurettes concludes with a tease of a possible second DVD, regarding the digital reproduction of the Mona Lisa as it originally looked when DaVinci painted it, including the original colors (which have faded and changed over the years). Interested parties will definitely be inspired to seek out more information after watching this short featureette.
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