Leonardo da Vinci was, to put it mildly, a smart guy. He was an inventor and scientist as well as an artist, and he took a special interest in finding ways to realistically render three-dimensional forms on a flat canvas. And now, a pair of researchers say that in the early 1500s he might have created the world’s first 3-D image.
Even more surprising: It’s the Mona Lisa.
Or to be more exact, it’s both the Mona Lisa you know, in the Louvre, and a copy housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid. Researchers in Germany argue that the Prado version was painted in da Vinci’s studio at the same time, from a slightly different position. The distance between the two perspectives is very close to the distance between a person’s eyes, creating a stereoscopic 3-D effect when the two are combined.
“This points to the possibility that the two [paintings] together might represent the first stereoscopic image in world history,” the researchers wrote in their initial report on the phenomenon last year in Perception.
The team has followed up with further study of the paintings, to be published in the journal Leonardo, that uses the perspective shift to suggest that the paintings’ mountainous background was painted on a flat canvas and hung behind the subject, like a background in a modern portrait studio.
