Pascal Cotte, the French constructor of a multi-spectral camera, shows the results of the multi spectral digitalization of ‘The Lady with an Ermine’. Engineer and inventor Pascal Cotte virtually strips away centuries of sometimes sloppy restoration work to provide a digital image of a painting as it may have left the artist’s studio - an abiding question among art historians and art lovers about such masterpieces. Cotte was called in by the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow in southern Poland, which is home to a collection built up over the centuries by the eponymous Polish princely family. Though a major piece in the Czartoryski collection, nagging doubts persisted over how much of ‘Lady with an Ermine’ was da Vinci’s own hand and how much was that of his assistants’. But Cotte’s scan confirmed the existence of fingerprints which had fuelled Polish experts’ long-held belief that the majority of the work was da Vinci’s, she said. Franck and Cotte believe da Vinci may originally have painted the ferret-like animal lower down the portrait of the woman thought to be Cecilia Gallerani, who was the mistress of the Duke Lodovico Sforza of Milan. read more

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