Secret Image Revealed Beneath Mural at Famed French Museum

"...we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear."

Thanks to modern technology, scientists, historians and others have a new-found fascination with old works of art. Not because of what can be discovered from the images on the surface, but what might be found underneath.

Such was the case with a fresco at the Louvre Museum in Paris called "Trois Hommes Armés de Lances."

At the American Chemical Society's annual meeting, which concluded last week in New Orleans, art historians and scientists presented their findings. What they found was the hidden face of a Roman man in the fresco, which is like a mural except the painting is done as fresh plaster is drying.

(Image: J. Bianca Jackson, Ph.D. and Dominique
Martos-Levif via ACS)

According to the ACS press release about the research, researchers first suspected there might be more to the fresco than meets the eye because the previous owner of the 19th century work was known to restore or rework pieces he acquired. Owned by Italian collector Giampietro Campana, historians believed that he might have done something to the artwork when it was removed from its original wall.

Their hunch was confirmed when terahertz technology was used to evaluate the piece. The NYPD recently announced it was testing similar technology -- a T-ray -- to see if people were carrying concealed weapons under clothing.

“Terahertz technology has been in use for some time, especially in quality control in the pharmaceutical industry to assure the integrity of pills and capsules, in biomedical imaging and even in homeland security with those whole-body scanners that see beneath clothing at airport security check points,” Dr. J. Bianca Jackson with the University of Rochester said in a statement. “But its use in examining artifacts and artworks is relatively new.”

The History Blog included this color image (below), showing the section of the artwork that revealed some of the original fresco underneath.

(Image via TheHistoryBlog.com)

Although Campana's painting is valuable by itself, Jackson said the original Roman artwork underneath might serve to only increase its value.

Using the technology to evaluate such a large piece takes time. The press release stated that analyzing a section the size of a piece of paper could take hours. Jackson told the Huffington Post they had scanned about 10 different sections and that it wasn't until evaluating the ninth and tenth sections that anything was spotted underneath.

“We were amazed, and we were delighted,” Jackson said. “We could not believe our eyes as the image materialized on the screen. Underneath the top painting of the folds of a man’s tunic, we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear. We were seeing what likely was part of an ancient Roman fresco, thousands of years old.”

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