Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, claimed to have found Mona Lisa's eyebrows, using an extremely sophisticated scanner built by himself.
Pascal Cotte announced at a press conference Wednesday that he has found definitive proof that when Leonardo da Vinci painted the original portrait he included "Mona Lisa's" lashes and brows.
Cotte examined the world's most famous painting using a high-definition camera of his own design.
The device scanned a 240-million pixel image using 13 light spectrums, including ultra-violet and infrared.
The resulting ultra-high resolution photograph of 150,000 dots per inch yielded a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa's" face magnified 24 times. And there Cotte found the evidence he sought -- a single brushstroke of a single hair above the left brow.
Pascal Cotte's other finding includes:
- Under-drawings show a change in the position of the left index and middle finger.
- The elbow was altered when the painting was restored in 1956, after someone threw at rock at it.
- The blanket covering Mona Lisa's knees also covers her stomach.
- The left finger was not completely finished.
Sources: High resolution image hints at 'Mona Lisa's' eyebrows @ CNN
New Technique Shows Mona Lisa Had Eyebrows But Incomplete Left Hand @ CityNew.ca
Link to Lumiere-Tecnhnology.com where detailed Pascal Cotte's scanning works.