Prado experts thought it was painted relatively early in the 16th century by an anonymous artist, but with its black painted background, bright red sleeves, and relatively flat shadowing compared to the velvety depth of da Vinci’s original, the Prado’s Mona Lisa didn’t get much attention. They also thought the wood was oak, which was used by northern European artists.

Last year curators took a closer look in anticipation of an upcoming loan to the Louvre. They found that the panel was actually walnut, a commonly used wood for oil paintings in 16th century Italy. Using infrared reflectography, they then found that underneath that dull black background was a beautiful Tuscan landscape almost identical to the one behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

IR also revealed the copy’s underdrawings, sketches that painters make before they start with the paint. The Louvre took IR images of the Mona Lisa in 2004. When the Prado curators compared the two sets of underdrawings, they found that they matched, suggesting that the copy was made contemporaneously with the original, following the changes to the composition as the master drew them before the final version was painted. There are documentary sources that attest to Leonardo having his students paint alongside him in the studio, but this is the first time we have IR evidence that strongly indicates contemporaneous painting.

Conservators have spent the past year removing the black overpaint — probably added in the 18th century to make it match other pieces with a black background in a gallery setting — and revealed the refreshed Mona Lisa copy in a presentation two weeks ago at London’s National Gallery.

The Prado’s technical specialist Ana González Mozo describes the Madrid replica as “a high quality work,” and in the paper she presented at the London conference, she provided evidence that the picture was done in Leonardo’s studio. The precise date of the original is uncertain, although the Louvre states it was between 1503 and 1506.

Bruno Mottin, the head conservator at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, believes that the most likely painter of the Prado copy was one of Leonardo’s two favourite pupils.

Mottin proposes that it was either Andrea Salai, who originally joined Leonardo’s studio in 1490 and probably became his lover, or Francesco Melzi, who joined around 1506. If the Prado replica is eventually attributed to Melzi, it suggests a late date for the original.

There is at least one other copy of Mona Lisa attributed to Salai and it doesn’t look as good as the Prado’s copy to my eye, although that could be the picture. He also painted Monna Vanna, a nude parody of Mona Lisa.

Salai’s reputation was more about his bad boy living than about the skill of his painting. Leonardo complained about Salai all the time in his notebooks, describing him as a “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto” (thief, liar, obstinate, glutton) whom Leonardo had to bail out of scrape after scrape. Still, he must have had something going for him since da Vinci lived with the youth from the time he was 10 years old until he was 35. Leonardo even left his enfant terrible property and paintings after his death in 1519, including the real Mona Lisa which Salai sold to King Francis I of France.

The Prado’s discovery might shed some light on details of the original. There are areas of the Prado Mona Lisa that are in much better condition than on the original — the spindles of the chair, for example, and the veil around her left arm — and Lisa herself looks considerably younger without that yellow cracked varnish that darkens and muddies her facial features in the original.

The copy is in the final stages of conservation. It will be displayed at the Prado in a few weeks, then it will go on loan to the Louvre for its exhibition with Leonardo’s Saint Anne (March 19 – June 25) where it will be back in the same room with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the first time in 500 years or so.

Captured live on November 8, 2011, LEONARDO LIVE provides a virtual walk-through of the exhibit, with exclusive commentary from scholars and curators. Hosted by highly respected art historian Tim Marlow and presenter Mariella Frostrup, the exhibition brings together the largest number of da Vinci’s rare surviving painting and some international loans. While numerous exhibitions have looked at da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first to be dedicated to his aims and techniques as a painter.

When I last blogged about this, the screening dates hadn’t been published yet. Now they have and you can buy your tickets in advance. It opens in 450 theaters around the country on February 16. Since most of the screenings are a one-night-one-showing-only event, I suggest you book early. You can plug your zip code into this site to get a listing and map of the theaters nearest to you that are showing the movie.

For some fascinating background on the Herculean effort it took to put together this unprecedented exhibit, read this article from the Telegraph. It took five years from idea to exhibition, and it would never have happened if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t agreed up front to allow Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, to offer loans of important Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection in return for loans of Leonardo paintings.

So Syson started by negotiating the loan of the Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Foundation in Cracow. Next he asked his colleagues at the Louvre for La Belle Ferronnière. With two such stunning portraits secured for the show, it would have been hard for Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to turn down his request for Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician, because with the addition of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it looked like every surviving picture painted by Leonardo in Milan would be in the show.

Every picture he painted in Milan (the frescoes in the Castello Sforzesco and The Last Supper excluded, of course, on account of they’re attached to walls) is fully half the total number of the Leonardo paintings known to survive.

Agnese Sabato and Alessandro Vezzosi of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci recently reassembled the design from the fragments. Vezzosi thinks Leonardo made several drawings of the same bag but they’ve been lost.

As a tribute to the city of Florence, a city that has long been famous for its exquisite leather work, fashion house Gherardini has brought Leonardo’s handbag to life. Designer Carla Braccialini designed the “Pretiosa” (meaning “precious” and yes, I am saying it like Gollum) bag based on Leonardo’s drawing, and artisans made it by hand using luxury materials like embroidered calf leather and an embossed brass handle.

Here is an all too short video of a craftsman making the “Pretiosa”:

Functional and beautiful, creative and provocative, the bag would have certainly stood out among Renaissance fashion.

“While the shape recalls the lectern in “The Annunciation,” painted by Leonardo in the workshop of Verrocchio, its patterns feature rotating spirals and floral motifs, scrolls and foliage in metamorphosis,” Vezzosi said.

Boasting a unique closing system, the bag was designed at the end of Leonardo’s first Milanese period, around 1497. At that time, the artist was painting the tapestries in the Last Supper and knots designs in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco.

“Pretiosa” was on display for just three days (January 11-13) at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the first art school in Europe which was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Giorgio Vasari in 1563. Gherardini has made only 99 Preciouses. They will theoretically be sold in Gherardini boutiques starting in March, but I highly doubt anybody walking in off the street will be able to get their mitts on one.

This wasn’t Leonardo’s only foray into fashion design. Several of his forays into clothing and accessory design have survived, as have his writings on the subject. He had strong opinions on the fashions of his era, condemning excessive ornamentation, overly tight clothes and shoes.

An appreciation for fashion is not Gherardini’s sole connection to the Renaissance genius. Lisa Gherardini, born to a decayed aristocratic Florentine family in 1479, married successful silk merchant Francesco Del Giocondo when she was 15. In 1503, Francesco commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of her. It took him so long to paint it that he officially gave up the commission in 1506, although he kept working on it for the rest of his life.

After his death in 1519, the painting was bought by King Francis I of France. Now Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, aka la Gioconda, aka Madonna Lisa, aka Monna Lisa, aka the Mona Lisa, smiles serenely at dense crowds of Louvre visitors. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, her relatives founded the Gherardini fashion house.

Legend has it that the tankard belonged to the abbots of Glastonbury, the last of whom, Abbot Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1539 during the Dissolution of Monasteries. Whiting had been a supporter of King Henry VIII, even signing the 1534 Act of Supremacy that made the king the head of the Church of England, but when Henry’s men showed up to loot Glastonbury Abbey and confiscate its lands, Whiting tried to stop them so they executed him as a traitor on the spot.

Grace Cup was smuggled out of the abbey and given for safekeeping to a Catholic branch of the Arundell family of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, according to Arundell family lore. A hundred years later the tankard had another brush with the pointy end of British history, this time narrowly avoiding destruction when Cromwell’s Parliamentarian forces set siege to Wardour Castle in 1643 during the English Civil War. It was Lady Blanche Arundell, left alone at the castle with only 25 men-at-arms while her husband was off fighting with King Charles, who fended off the attackers for nine days and was able to hide the cup before she finally surrendered.

We can’t know for sure that the tankard came from Glastonbury Abbey. The decoration on the cup suggests that it may have been carved in Germany or elsewhere central Europe. One theory is that the cup was brought to Wardour by Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, returned from fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II against the Ottoman Turks in 1595. Sir Thomas, nicknamed “the Valiant” for his bravery in taking down the Turkish standard and replacing it with the Imperial one during a battle in Gran, Hungary, could have picked it up during his travels.

However, Sir Thomas was in a shipwreck on his way home from the war and lost everything. He made it to shore with only the clothes on his back, so if the tankard was picked up by an Arundell on the continent rather than saved from the violence of the Dissolution, it probably wasn’t Sir Thomas after fighting the Turks.

Also, this kind of tankard is called a Grace Cup because it was traditionally shared around a table after a prayer of thanksgiving, aka saying grace. On the inside of the cup there are vertical rows of pegs that apportion an equal amount of beverage to each drinker. Add that to its religious decoration and it makes the abbey provenance plausible even setting aside the Arundell family stories.

The cup was tracked down and put on display in Glastonbury in 1886 to celebrate the founding of the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society. Now, to celebrate the society’s 125th birthday, Lord Talbot of Malahide, Arundell descendent and current owner of the cup, is loaning the Grace Cup to the abbey again. The exhibition opens December 14th and runs until January 31th.

The vast majority of the world won’t have the chance to see the exhibit in person during its all-too-short run (it opened November 9, 2011, and closes February 5, 2012) and the paintings are so fragile and, in some cases, politically fraught — it took an enormous diplomatic effort to get them all together in the first place — that there will no travelling exhibit. Once the show closes the first week of February, that will be the end of it. We’ll probably never see those pieces together again during our lifetimes.

Be not forlorn, though, because we will at least get to see some killer HD footage of the exhibit, accompanied by commentary from curators, da Vinci experts, and, randomly, actress Fiona Shaw fresh off her stint as a dissociative witch with an atrociously fake Southern accent on True Blood. (Loved her in Persuasion, though.)

Billed as the first-ever tour of a fine art exhibition created for movie theatre audiences, “Leonardo Live” will afford art lovers a two-dimensional look via satellite at the sold-out exhibition, which cannot tour due to the works’ fragility.

Beginning February 16 2012, the da Vinci film will be screened in U.S. venues as well as in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and Sweden, roughly through the end of the month.

The exhibition, which has drawn crowds and seen tickets scalped for hundreds of dollars each, was filmed on the eve of its opening in London this fall. The 100-minute production provides a high-definition walk-through of the landmark show, in-depth commentary about featured pieces and extra content.

There is no list of scheduled showings yet, so if you want to receive email updates on when you can catch the movie in your area, sign up on the Leonardo Live HD website.

In unrelated Leonardo news, Italian police raided the Palazzo Vecchio yesterday after 400 art scholars from around the world signed a petition asking them to intervene to stop Maurizio Seracini — the only living non-fictional person to make an appearance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code — from drilling holes in a Vasari fresco to find a Leonardo fresco he thinks might lie behind it.

It wasn’t much of a raid; the carabinieri questioned the team in the Salone dei Cinquecento and that was pretty much it. The aim of the investigation is to determine how this drilling plan was hatched (like, for instance, if National Geographic’s funding of the project in exchange for exclusive rights to broadcast any results might have placed undue pressure on the team to find something, anything, even at the cost of the Vasari) and whether the Vasari fresco was damaged or if there’s a risk that it will be damaged.