Mona Leo

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Lillian Feldman Schwartz

1988

10"x8"

Highlights

Description

Mona Leo sutures two halves of separate works by Leonardo da Vinci—the Mona Lisa (1503) and a late self-portrait of the Renaissance artist-engineer. This digital collage demonstrated similarities between the two figures’ facial features—a finding that its creator Lillian Schwartz then used to argue that da Vinci may have used himself as a model for his most famous painting. The distances between the inner corners of their eyes, which Schwartz described as one of the most individual characteristics of a face, are within 2 percent of one another.

Schwartz made the collage while in residence at Bell Labs. She was investigating the styles of great painters by using the early photo-editing software PICO to rotate, crop, and juxtapose scanned images of their work. The discovery generated by _Mona Leo _received widespread public attention. Schwartz was invited to the Louvre and interviewed by CBS Evening News. Researchers called for da Vinci’s body to be exhumed and measured against the Mona Lisa’s proportions. Schwartz produced a variety of other morphs and merges between _Mona Lisa _and self-portraits of da Vinci, hoping to substantiate her claim.