Art Professor Witnesses a Da Vinci Restoration

Corey Lewis talking to her students.

      

     The Associated Press has recently reported that the Prado Museum in Spain has revealed a restored version of the Mona Lisa.

  

    The painting will be on display until March 13 and will then be moved to hang next to the original Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris.

    One University of Miss. Art Professor, Cory Lewis, would know a lot about restoration of the late Leonardo Da Vinci’s work.

“I actually saw the restoration of The Last Supper in progress,” Lewis said,“ watching the restorationist work is really a mind-boggling, amazing experience.”

   Lewis recalls being in Milan during the early 90’s and being able to see the restorationist work inch by inch, cleaning and repairing the paint.

“..Even though I have yet to see the restoration of the Mona Lisa, I expect it to be of the same quality,” Lewis said.

   Lewis said that if she could choose any other career it would be restoring old paintings because it’s a fascinating journey into the past and you are also able to see exactly how a painting was done.

    Many people who are not artist may not grasp the full concept of a restoration.

   These artist work day and night to make the painting look the same as it was the original day it was painted.

  “They simply, remove centuries worth of sut and grime”, Lewis said “…they brighten it up and you will actually be able to see a lot more detail.”

  Lewis also tells of time she traveled to the Opera Museum in Siena to see a certain painting by Cello and when she arrived there were grey curtains over the painting. This usually meant that something was going on.

    "So i was curious..", Lewis said. "And i looked behind the grey curtain and they had all their x-ray equipment set up. They had found a painting by Giotto that was done two hundred or three hundred years before, underneath the Cello.