There are many layers to great art — sometimes literally.
We are reminded of this fact by researchers at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts, who have revealed hidden details lurking beneath the Pablo Picasso masterpiece “La miséreuse accroupie.”
SEE ALSO: This app tells you which museum art you look like and it’s way too real
While the presence of another artwork — specifically, a painting of the Catalan countryside by a different artist — below Picasso’s “Crouching Beggar” has been known about since the 1990s, Science reports that we now are able to see previously hidden elements of Picasso’s work.
Using a technique known as macro x-ray fluorescence imaging, scientists determined that Picasso painted a woman’s hand holding a piece of bread before later covering it up with a cloak.
Image: US Public Domain
In other words, the canvas on which “Crouching Beggar” rests doesn’t just contain the two paintings, but it also has various iterations of Picasso’s work. This shows that, for whatever reason, the artist had a change of heart and did away with a specific element of his own painting.
“Picasso had no qualms about changing things during the painting process,” explained Marc Walton, a research professor at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, in a press release.
“Our international team — consisting of scientists, a curator and a conservator — has begun to tease apart the complexity of ‘La Miséreuse accroupie,’ uncovering subtle changes made by Picasso as he worked toward his final vision.”
Pretty cool.
That discovery helps art historians better understand the working style of one of the world’s most respected artists.
“We now are able to develop a chronology within the painting structure to tell a story about the artist’s developing style and possible influences,” Sandra Webster-Cook, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s senior conservator of paintings, observed in the same press release.
That the story is being told roughly 45 years after the artist’s death reminds us that nothing is static about great art, even when it comes to something as seemingly frozen in time as a painting.