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seawaters:

For years, art historians thought a second version of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous painting was a copy created years after the original. But now that the painting has been restored, it appears it may have been painted at the same time — and in the same room — as its more famous sibling.

This junior Mona Lisa lives at the Prado in Madrid. After comparing infrared images of the Prado Mona Lisa with similar images of the painting at the Louvre, the paintings’ underdrawings were discovered to be strikingly similar, indicating that the Prado Mona Lisa was likely composed at the same time as Da Vinci’s by a student carefully studying his master’s great work in progress.

Da Vinci’s original work has been obscured over the centuries, and some of its details are difficult to make out. The restored copy has already offered historians insights into the original composition, giving us a better sense of how the original painting might have looked when it was fresh off the easel.

(Source: aclockworkorange, via propa-gandhi)