Eyebrows and Eyelashes
One long-standing mystery of the painting is why Mona Lisa has only very faint eyebrows and apparently does not have any eyelashes. Pascal Cotte, a French engineer and inventor, says he discovered with a high-definition camera that Leonardo da Vinci originally did paint eyebrows and eyelashes, in October 2007. Creating an ultra-high resolution close-up that magnified Mona Lisa's face 24 times, Cotte says he found a single brushstroke of a single hair above the left eye. "One day I say, if I can find only one hair, only one hair of the eyebrow, I will have definitively the proof that originally Leonardo da Vinci had painted eyelash and eyebrow," said Cotte. The engineer claims that other eyebrow hairs that potentially could have appeared on the painting may have faded or been inadvertently erased by a poor attempt to clean the painting. In addition, Cotte says his work uncovered proof that her hands were originally painted in a slightly different position than in the final portrait.
Giorgio Vasari's Lives of Artists describes the painting as having thick eyebrows; however, while this may mean that the eyebrows and lashes were accidentally removed, it could also mean that Vasari did not have first-hand knowledge of the work.
Read more about this topic: Speculation About Mona Lisa