FLORENCE, Italy. The decoding of Leonardo da Vinci’s art is in the news again. Real life researchers at the University of Florence have been pouring over one of da Vinci’s paintings, not in search of hidden esoteric messages, but rather to learn more about his technique.   

Using a nuclear accelerator device that launches particles at high speed, da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder—one of his oil masterpieces—was bombarded with a narrow beam of ions that identified virtually every stroke the Renaissance master made.

"For the first time we have managed to reconstruct his work step by step, as if watching him while he painted," explains Cecilia Frosinini, an art historian at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure restoration lab in Florence. "We were able to examine as never before the layers of color, their thickness and how they were placed on the canvas."

The high tech analysis revealed that Leonardo did not mix colors on a painter's palette like his contemporaries, but rather mixed his colors directly on the canvas, applying thin layers of differently colored paint one on top of the other, creating a rich texture and an almost three dimensional effect.

According to Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where da Vinci was born, the research did little more than confirm, “from a scientific point of view, what scholars had already long known."

In his notes, da Vinci identified his painting technique as sfumato—from fumo, Italian for smoke. "Light and shade should blend without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke," he wrote.

"Color dilution was very important for Leonardo,” Vezzosi notes. “He put a lot of effort in preparing the colors, so he did not have to mix them on the palette. Often, he did not use the brush either. He applied the thin layer of colors using his thumb. He used this technique often in his later work, especially on the Mona Lisa."