Topline
Nearly 125 years after Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of a sculptor friend, high-tech imaging tools have revealed another portrait hidden beneath it. The concealed image reveals a woman, the contours of her head and body clearly visible, and it represents the latest example of technology’s power to unravel old art mysteries.
Pablo Picasso’s painting “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto” has revealed a hidden secret.
Key Facts
The painting, titled “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto,” dates back to 1901, the beginning of Picasso’s famous Blue Period, which marked a pivotal juncture in his career.
Further analysis of the artwork could reveal more about the woman in the hidden portrait, but we may never know who she was.
Like many artists of his day and earlier, Picasso often reused canvases due to financial constraints.
The hidden Picasso portrait shows how science and technology make it possible to peer deep into an old painting’s layers, revealing secrets about both the art and the artist.
An infrared image of “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto” shows the hidden woman on he right.
Key Background
Art conservators have discovered a concealed portrait of a woman beneath a Pablo Picasso painting from 1901, the start of the artist’s Blue Period.
The researchers spotted the woman using advanced infrared and X-ray imaging technologies, which made clearly visible her fingers and curved shoulders and her hair tied back in a chignon, a fashionable women’s hairstyle in Paris in the early 20th century. The woman’s identity, for now at least, remains unknown, though she resembles women Picasso painted around the same time.
“She may have been a model, a friend or even a lover posing for one of Picasso’s colorful Impressionistic images of Parisian nightlife, or a melancholic woman seated in a bar,” The Courtauld Institute of Art, a University of London college that specializes in art history and conservation, said in a statement on Monday.
The institute analyzed the painting, titled “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto” after its subject, in advance of the work’s inclusion in the upcoming exhibit “Goya to Impressionism. Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection,” opening Feb. 14 at the Courtauld Gallery. The painting layered over the portrait depicts Picasso’s friend, a sculptor, working with his hands.
During Picasso’s Blue Period, the artist moved from colorful Impressionistic paintings to a more melancholy, monochromatic style characterized by shades of blue and blue-green. Picasso said the suicide of a friend, Carles Casagemas, prompted the shift to a more somber palette.
Picasso commonly reused canvases as a cost-saving measure. However, he typically avoided whitewashing previous images when painting over them, instead embracing the process of painting layer by layer.
“Picasso’s way of working to transform one image into another and to be a stylistic shapeshifter would become a defining feature of his art, which helped to make him one of the giant figures of art history,” said Barnaby Wright, deputy head of The Courtauld Gallery.
Tangent
Last week brought news of another long-hidden portrait by a famous artist coming to light through 21st century tools. In that case, researchers discovered a portrait of a man hidden beneath “Ecce Homo,” a 16th century painting by Italian Renaissance master Tiziano Vecellio, known in English as Titian, showing Jesus accompanied by Pontius Pilate and two of his captors. An exhibit currently on display in Limassol, Cyprus titled “Unseen Gaze – The Hidden Portrait under Titian’s Ecce Homo” details the discovery.
In 2023, technology helped reveal how Leonardo daVinci painted “Mona Lisa.” The same year, tech helped undress a female nude that had been painted over for centuries.
