Long overdue, but there it is. Apparently, the paintings done by Leonardo da Vinci cannot be faked by no artist of today. No matter how talented the artists of today are, not a single one of them is able to create a painting of the same quality. I am not even talking about making a copy of Mona Lisa here. None of the today's masters are capable of applying paint in a manner allegedly done by Mr. da Vinci.

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• Note: with a paint brush they can't.

You have to give TPTB some credit. They are so good with making stuff up, it's almost impossible to catch them at it. In its approach, this Sfumato thing is a carbon copy of the Olber's Paradox. Obviously these are two totally different areas, but the instrument of BS production is the same.

Anyways, what is Sfumato? Prepare for a load of baloney!

• Sfumato is a painting technique for softening the transition between colours, mimicking an area beyond what the human eye is focusing on, or the out-of-focus plane. Leonardo da Vinci was the most prominent practitioner of sfumato, based on his research in optics and human vision, and his experimentation with the camera obscura. ​
• The visual result of the technique is that there are no harsh outlines present (as in a coloring book). Instead, areas of dark and light blend into one another through miniscule brushstrokes, making for a rather hazy, albeit more realistic, depiction of light and color. ​
• According to the art historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), the technique was first invented by the Primitive Flemish school, including perhaps Jan Van Eyck and Rogier Van Der Weyden. ​
• According to the theory of the art historian Marcia B. Hall, which has gained considerable acceptance, sfumato is one of four modes of painting colours available to Italian High Renaissance painters, along with cangiante, chiaroscuro and unione.​
• The word 'sfumato' comes from the Italian language and is derived from 'fumo' (smoke, fume). 'Sfumato' translated into English means soft, vague or blurred. ​
• The technique is a fine shading meant to produce a soft transition between colours and tones, in order to achieve a more believable image. It is most often used by making subtle gradations that do not include lines or borders, from areas of light to areas of dark. The technique was used not only to give an elusive and illusionistic rendering of the human face but also to create rich atmospheric effects. ​
  • Leonardo da Vinci described the technique as blending colours, without the use of lines or borders 'in the manner of smoke'.​
• Besides Leonardo and his followers the Leonardeschi, who often used it heavily, other prominent practitioners of sfumato included Correggio, Raphael and Giorgione. Raphael's Madonna of the Meadow is a famous example, particularly around Mary's face. The Leonardeschi include Bernardino Luini and Funisi.
• What Is the Sfumato Painting Technique?​

Without the descriptive layers of the above BS explanation, this 'Sfumato' is just a magnificently creative way to cloud the readers judgement. The short and concise version of the above sounds like this - NO BRUSH STROKES CAN BE OBSERVED.

• And jumping ahead, I can tell you what does not have any brush strokes. That would be my color printer, or my paint sprayer.​

And while the above is a bit far-fetched, the paint application methods used by printers and sprayers are probably not far off, from what we see in these Sfumato paintings. Of course, TPTB can not say that there are no brush strokes. Therefore they had to introduce the following:

• M. Franck, consultant scholar at the Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo Studies in Los Angeles, believes that the Mona Lisa was painted in hundreds of sessions with a technique of ultra-fine hatching - or criss-crossing of brush strokes - some as tiny as one-fortieth of a millimetre long. ​
• He says layers of extremely diluted oil paint were piled up on one another over many years - using perhaps 30 'coats' of paint in all. ​
• For his finer work, Leonardo probably painted with a brush in one hand and a magnifying glass in the other.​
• It was through this method, M. Franck says, that Da Vinci achieved the sublime effects which astonished and irritated fellow Italian painters at the time and have puzzled art historians ever since. ​
• Unmasking the Mona Lisa: Expert claims to have discovered da Vinci's​

So there we have it: miniscule 1/40th of a millimeter brush strokes, magnifying glass and 30 coats of paint.
So, what exactly is 1/40th of a millimeter aka 0.025 mm, or 25 micrometers? Not like we are dealing with sizes like this in our everyday life. Let's translate this into something we are familiar with - a human hair.

• Our genetic make-up decides whether we have thick or thin hair. Europeans considerhair with a diameter of:​
  • 0.06 and 0.08 mm as normal - 60 to 80 micrometers​
• da Vinci's brush strokes:
  • 0.025 mm - 25 micrometers​

The smallest particles we can see with our eyes are those that are larger than 50 micrometers, such as the larger specks of dust collected on our furniture. To give you an idea of how small micrometer-sized particles are, waste matter from dust mites is about 5 micrometers in size, while a strand of hair is about 100 to 150 micrometers wide.

By the way, did you know a single dust mite produces about 20 waste droppings each day? For us it means the below:

• 5 dust mite shit piles placed in a row = 1 brush stroke of Leonardo da Vinci​

How did Leonardo Da Vinci manage to paint such perfect faces? For the first time a quantitative chemical analysis has been done on seven paintings from the Louvre Museum (including the Mona Lisa) without extracting any samples.

• This shows the composition and thickness of each layer of material laid down by the painter. The results reveal that, in the case of glazes, thin layers of 1 to 2 micrometers have been applied.​

Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair.

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• 30 layers of paint 40 micrometers thick. That is 1.33 micrometers per layer.​
• Well, it also means that the paint layers of Leonardo's were approximately 4 times smaller than a dust mite dropping. ​
• Mona Lisa examination reveals layers of paint for dreamy quality​

This is an extreme closeup scan of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park. The fragment is about 10 millimeters thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint.

• For a sense of scale, note the ridges of a fingerprint in the lower right.
• 10 millimeters =10,000 micrometers
• da Vinci could fit 7,500 layers into 10 millimeters
• da Vinci's 200 layers would be 266 micrometers aka 0.266 millimeters thick

• ~1/4 of a dust mite shit pile width = 1 paint layer of Leonardo da Vinci​

Leonardo da Vinci

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typically painted with oil paint that he made by hand from ground pigments; later in his career, he worked with tempera made from egg whites. There it says it - 'oil paint made by hand'. What did they use in between 1452 and 1519 to grind things? Yup, they used mortars and pestles. Let's

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google image search for those 16th century mortar and pestles. We end up with something like this.
Oil paints are made up of pigment that has been ground into an oil base, called the vehicle or binder. The most commonly used vehicle is cold-pressed linseed oil, however, it can be made with walnut oil, poppy seed oil, safflower oil or other less popular oils.

• The pigment is where paint gets its color. A paint color gets its name from the pigment that is used. We first got our pigments from the earth in the form of rocks or powder, but now it is also manufactured from synthetic materials. Some of the oldest pigments known to man are made from colored earth like Yellow Ochre, Sienna and Umber. Other pigments are derived from mineral salts such as White Oxide. ​
• Oil Paint Ingredients | Teresa Bernard Oil Paintings​

In other words, to achieve a layer sickness of 1.33 micrometers, not a single particle can be larger that these 1.33 micrometers. Let us see what 21st century automated grinding machine can offer.

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The MP-1000 is an automatic mortar & pestle grinder that is used to grind and homogenize a wide range of samples in a dry or wet state. It is highly effective for samples that are oily or pasty and offers good flexibility with respect to batch size, accommodating small or large sample quantities. The MP-1000 is especially well suited for applications with temperature sensitive samples, as it generates very little heat.

• Sample feed size < 10 millimeters
• Final particle < 5 micrometers
• Leonardo's layer thickness < 1.33 micrometers

Pretty sure it could be possible to grind random pigment particles to a pretty small size, but to suggest that every single one of those would be under the required standard... highly questionable to say the least. Imho, it's just impossible with hand tools and whatever other tools traditionally available in the early 1600s.

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KD:

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Remember, the technique was first invented by the Primitive Flemish school, and it was used by quite a few artists of the same generation. TPTB can label stuff all day long with catchy things like 'Primitive Flemish' and 'Sfumato'. I think it is fairly obvious, that certain things are impossible to create by hand and eyesight only. It appears that we are talking about the lost technology here, which has nothing to do with micro-brushes, and minuscule strokes.

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