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How did conservators determine that the Prado Mona Lisa was painted while Leonardo da Vinci worked on the original?
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Mona Lisa
Mona Lisa, oil on wood panel by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503–19; in the Louvre, Paris.
Conservators determined that the Prado Museum version of the Mona Lisa was painted concurrently with Leonardo da Vinci’s original through a restoration process conducted in the early 2010s.
By utilizing infrared reflectology to examine the layers beneath the painting's surface, experts discovered that the copy contained underlying changes that mirrored those made to the original Mona Lisa. These findings indicated that the artist—likely one of Leonardo’s assistants—was working on the copy in the studio at the same time Leonardo was developing his own masterpiece. This revelation established the Prado version as the only known copy created during the lifetime of the master.1