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Pascal Cotte presents his findings on Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Lady with an Ermine’. Cotte applied his multispectral photography to the painting, providing historians with a more accurate rendition

After unlocking the secrets of the Mona Lisa, French scientist Pascal Cotte has turned his all-seeing “multispectral” camera on a lesser-known Leonardo da Vinci muse in Poland: the “Lady with an Ermine.”

Cotte virtually strips away centuries of sometimes sloppy restoration work to provide a digital image of a painting as it may have left the artist’s studio.

Cotte’s unique 240-megapixel camera uncovers the true colours of a painting, literally: Cotte found that the late 15th century wood-panel portrait was not painted on the black background visible today.

“The background was deep blue, very lightly shaded with earth, and probably an azurite mixed with earth,” Cotte said.

“It’s far more beautiful than we thought,” said French art historian Jacques Franck, a da Vinci expert who worked alongside Cotte.

“Here we have a Leonardo da Vinci which has been masked by bad restoration work and which, as a result, has perhaps been seen as less important than it really is,” Franck said.

The camera gives insight into colours, pigments and strokes underneath a weathered surface.

“It enables us to break down the light spectrum three levels into the pictorial layer, from the ultraviolet to the infrared, and from the visible to the invisible,” he explained.

“Multispectral photography provides us with knowledge of the stratification of the successive layers painted by Leonardo and restorers, which enables historical understanding of the way the work was constructed and of subsequent actions,” he said.

In the ‘Lady with an Ermine’, he discovered hidden traces under the ermine’s left paw and muzzle, leading Franck to believe da Vinci may originally have painted the animal lower down the portrait of the woman – who was thought to be Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Duke Lodovico Sforza of Milan.

The technology also laid to rest doubts over how much was drawn by da Vinci and how much was that of his assistants.

Cotte’s conclusion, based on a virtual version he built as close as possible to the original, suggests it is da Vinci’s handiwork.

Cotte, who aims to help build a global archive of digital “originals,” has already gazed behind the layers of around 500 paintings, including da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and also works by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and others.