Today, neither eyelashes nor eyebrows are visible on the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo da Vinci dedicated himself to creating precise paintings that reproduced nature perfectly. It’s hard to imagine that he intentionally left them out.
Could Mona Lisa have plucked her eyebrows? Perhaps, but this doesn’t explain the absence of eyelashes.
Most publications on the Mona Lisa either avoid the topic of the missing eyebrows and eyelashes, or try to justify it with arguments that stand in contravention of the most fundamental principle of Leonardo’s work: to reproduce nature perfectly.
In October 2004, Pascal Cotte photographed the Mona Lisa in the Louvre with his patented 240-megapixel multispectral camera. In addition to the images he obtained of the painting in its entirety, he took a series of images focusing solely on the face. The resolution of these photos was an unprecedented 1,500 dpi, revealing even the minutest details with incredible definition.
In September 2007, Cotte also had the privilege of photographing Lady with an Ermine in Kraków, Poland. After painstakingly comparing Lady with an Ermine with Mona Lisa, Cotte could identify eyebrow hairs on Mona Lisa similar to those on Lady with an Ermine. With this groundbreaking discovery, we now have irrefutable proof that Leonardo did, in fact, paint eyebrows on the Mona Lisa.
Look carefully at Mona Lisa’s eyes and expression. See for yourself what lay hidden for centuries.
What became of Mona Lisa’s eyelashes and eyebrows?
Cotte’s opinion there are three hypotheses:
1. The extremely fine paint used for the eyelashes and eyebrows – probably earth mixed with oil – blended together with the undercoat.
2. The oil and its associated pigment have become transparent over time. This process has already been proven to occur elsewhere in the painting, including in the right column.
The paint of the eyelashes has disappeared through cleaning of the varnish. The reduced appearance of cracks around the eyes and mouth supports this hypothesis.