Apparently Leonardo da Vinci worked on Mona Lisa for several years. I can’t imagine he worked uninterrupted, but kept coming back, looking at the painting with fresh eyes now and then. And supposedly he added layers of light and dark colors to the canvas before he started painting the image. I returned to an image I have worked on several times years ago. I built a birch plywood “canvas” in the same dimensions as Leonardo’s Mona Lisa: 77 x 53 cm (30.25″ x 21″). Leonardo painted a very dramatic landscape behind Mona Lisa and I made a different landscape… I will rest now and come back to this with fresh eyes later. I am thinking of building a fairly large frame, but make it black as Rembrandt preferred. Glossy black.
