As you know there is a copy of the famous painting in Prado Museum in Spain. In 2010 they took the copy for restoration and discovered that the two paintings were sharing not only the same person but the same landscape as well (till then the copy’s background was black).
A lot of theories emmerged concerning the origin of the painting. Some say that it was drawn from Da Vinci to sell it to a second person for the same price, some that a student was following Da Vinci and making the same corrections or additions as him.
After a lot of fooling around with photoshop i tried merging these two paintings to see the resemblances, the differences and probably unfold some ancient secrets (i’m joking).
So this is what i saw…
This is the original painting from Leonardo Da Vinci in the Luvre Museum
This is the Prado copy after it’s 2012 restoration
Merging these two and adding an overlay blending (and reducing the opacity at 89%) gave this result. As you can see it’s a more realistic person sitting there, more thin on the jaw and with straight hair. I thought you would be interested in this “discovery”.
