Lillian Schwartz — The Mona Lisa Identity — computational art-historical analysis

1987

Artists: Lillian Schwartz · Year: 1987 · Medium: Computational image analysis; essay with accompanying images published in art-historical journals · Substrate: Bell Labs image-processing software; photographic layering and alignment techniques · Place: Murray Hill, New Jersey, USA · Institution: Bell Telephone Laboratories In 1987, Lillian Schwartz published — in Art & Antiques and subsequently in Leonardo — an extraordinary claim: the Mona Lisa is a disguised self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci overlaid on a female model. She had arrived at the claim through computational image analysis. Using Bell Labs' image-processing tools, she aligned the Mona Lisa with Leonardo's known self-portrait and found that the facial structures matched at an improbably precise level — the eyes, the nose, the hairline, the jaw. Her conclusion: the sitter was female, but the face was Leonardo's. The claim was contested immediately by Leonardo scholars and has remained contested for four decades. Art historians have pointed out that Leonardo's known drawing techniques, his habit of reusing facial types, and the sheer gravitational attraction of his own features in his own drawings make Schwartz's alignment less conclusive than she argued. Partisans of Schwartz's reading point to the precision of the alignment, which exceeds what chance would produce. The dispute itself is, for the purposes of this archive, less important than what Schwartz's work demonstrated. She had taken a computational tool — developed at Bell Labs for scientific-imaging purposes — and used it to prosecute an art-historical argument. The method was legible to both scientific and art-historical readerships; the argument was testable; the dispute it generated happened in both of those readerships simultaneously. Schwartz was, in this respect, a pioneer of computational humanities before that phrase existed. She continued to publish computational art-historical analyses for decades. Her 1992 book The Computer Artist's Handbook is one of the field's best practical reference texts. Lore Lillian Schwartz's Mona/Leo (1987) — her famous claim that the Mona Lisa was a self-portrait of Leonardo — was produced at Bell Labs by Schwartz herself working alone at the lab's image-processing equipment, the lab where she had been an artist-in-residence since 1968. She prepared the image-overlay comparison after months of independent research into the Mona Lisa's possible self-portrait status; her son Laurens Schwartz, a critical-theory scholar, helped develop the underlying art-historical argument. The Mona/Leo claim was published in the Art and Antiques magazine in January 1988 and was widely covered in mainstream press worldwide. The art-history establishment was substantially divided on the claim's persuasiveness; Schwartz remained convinced of it for the rest of her life. Sources • Schwartz, Lillian — "The Mona Lisa Identity" (Art & Antiques, 1987) • Schwartz, Lillian — The Computer Artist's Handbook (W.W. Norton, 1992) • Leonardo — various essays on the Mona Lisa dispute