Sfumato is the latest discovery science was able to crack from the most famous painting in the world, Mona Lisa.

Sfumato is a technique using successive ultra-thin layers of paint and glaze to achieve a dream-like quality and give a painting depth and shadow.

Much as this technique takes a long time for any painting to be finished it is said that Leonardo da Vinci didn’t spend just four years doing Mona Lisa.  Some reports are even saying that this painting was almost left undone because Leonardo lingered on this for four years before working on it for three more years before he died.

It had been only been recently discovered that da Vinci used 30 layers of paint to achieve the iconic effect of Mona Lisa.  Such no. of layers of paint using sfumato only amounted to half the thickness of human hair.

For this generation nothing is more scientific in revealing the secrets of Mona Lisa than using the X-ray (XRF) spectrometry which scientists recently used.  Much as this x-ray can find out more actual sample from the painting is still needed.

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