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'Mona Lisa': Hidden portraits 'found underneath'

he subtle smile of the "Mona Lisa" has enchanted the art world for more than 500 years. But does it belong to an entirely different woman?

French scientist Pascal Cotte says he has revealed three hidden paintings beneath the surface of Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece -- one of which is likely to be the real portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the woman thought to be the subject of the painting.

He claims the earlier portrait lies hidden underneath the surface of Leonardo's most celebrated artwork.

The Louvre Museum has declined to comment on his claims because it "was not part of the scientific team".

It's perfectly common for an artist to overpaint an image as it is for a client who's commissioned that artist to ask for changes

Artemisia Gentileschi, the greatest female painter of the 17th century, painted herself several times. But only three self- ­portraits have survived that are indisputably by her, and this is the only one where she appears as herself. (The others were presented as allegories.)

“Self-Portrait as a Lute Player” was discovered in a private European collection in 1998 and purchased by the venerable Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn., in 2015.

Both father and daughter adopted Caravaggio’s “tenebrist” style: utmost physical realism within a stylized schema in which light picks out dramatic expressions and gestures from engulfing darkness.

So why the long face? You’re not the only one to ask that question. It’s been on the minds of experts for a long time, and more than a few Google searches are dedicated to the subject. If those sullen stares hid something, they took their secrets to the grave. 

But sometimes things don’t stay buried. Historians have unearthed several clues that could provide an answer. And as you might expect from the peculiar attitudes of centuries past, they’re not all mundane. The topic of old photographs strays from the unusual to the disturbing. So grab your shovel, because we’re going to dig into the past.

“selfie” to its word of the year in 2013. Well, while self portraits weren’t as common in older centuries, they did actually exist. 

About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic.

He has spoken to white parents trying to comprehend why the local schools aren’t more integrated, even as white people move in. “They say things like they don’t want to be guinea pigs,” he said. “The other day, one said, ‘I don’t want to be the only drop of cream in the coffee.’ ”

“The preponderance of evidence shows that attending schools that are diverse has positive effects on children throughout the grades, and it grows over time,” said Roslyn Mickelson, a professor of sociology and public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has reviewed hundreds of studies of integrated schooling. “To put it another way, the problems of segregation are accentuated over time,” she said.

In 46 percent of all two-parent households, both parents work full-time, according to Pew, up from 31 percent in 1970.

The share of households with a mother who stays home has declined to 26 percent from 46 percent.

working parents are the new norm. Sixty percent of children now live in households where all the parents at home work at least part time, up from 40 percent in 1965,

One of the talking points for some who support continued mass immigration is the notion that the places where immigration is least popular are the places with the fewest number of immigrants. That’s how irrational xenophobia is, they suggest

the Migration Policy Institute complicates the picture a bit. While it finds that the number of immigrants increased by 9 percent between 2010 and 2016, it also notes that it had risen by 15 percent or more in 15 states. And among those states, most are red ones: North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, Indiana, and Iowa among them.

, the total numbers are nowhere near where they are in, say, California, but the pace of change really has increased in those states where opposition — especially to immigrants who entered the country illegally — is high. I don’t find this surprising.

During a beautifully rendered scene, an elderly Communist Party apparatchik sits silently at a meeting of plant managers and local officials, all of whom are giving in to panic. He then rises and exhorts his comrades to gaze upon the portrait of the Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin on the wall, and to remember that Lenin would be proud of them—even though one of the reactors had already exploded and was, at that moment, on the verge of melting through the earth around them.

“Chernobyl,” Mazin tweeted to Bongino, “was a failure of humans whose loyalty to (or fear of) a broken governing party overruled their sense of decency and rationality. You’re the old man with the cane. You just worship a different man’s portrait.”

Once they captured a state, however, they were determined to keep it, and a regime founded by chance and based on a lie soon began to believe in its own infallibility. Socialism and communism were just words; the power and survival of the Soviet Communist Party were paramount. No one life was of any particular importance.

The Event Horizon Telescope collaboration, an international team of radio astronomers that has been staring down the throat of a giant black hole for years, on Wednesday published what it called the most intimate portrait yet of the forces that give rise to quasars

The black hole in question is a monster 6.5 billion times as massive as the sun, and lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.

Now, seen through the radio equivalent of polarized sunglasses, the M87 black hole appears as a finely whiskered vortex, like the spinning fan blades of a jet engine, pumping matter into the black hole and energy outward into space.

Every time you read someone extolling the dynamism of the modern economy, the virtues of risk-taking, declaring that everyone has to expect to have multiple jobs in his or her life and that you can never stop learning, etc,, etc., bear in mind that this is a portrait of an economy with no stability, no guarantees that hard work will provide a consistent living, and a constant possibility of being thrown aside simply because you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

isn’t this exactly the kind of economy that should have a strong welfare state? Isn’t it much better to have guaranteed health care and a basic pension from Social Security rather than simply hanker for the corporate safety net that no longer exists? Might one not even argue that a bit of basic economic security would make our dynamic economy work better, by reducing the fear factor?

Recorded by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, the image is a heat map of the cosmos as it appeared only 370,000 years after the Big Bang, showing space speckled with faint spots from which galaxies would grow over billions of years.

is in stunning agreement with the general view of the universe that has emerged over the past 20 years, of a cosmos dominated by mysterious dark energy that seems to be pushing space apart and the almost-as-mysterious dark matter that is pulling galaxies together. It also shows a universe that seems to have endured an explosive burp known as inflation, which was the dynamite in the Big Bang.

“The extraordinary quality of Planck’s portrait of the infant universe allows us to peel back its layers to the very foundations, revealing that our blueprint of the cosmos is far from complete.”

In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.

There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.

If families do not guarantee happiness, the relationships they create and cultivate nonetheless tend to be richer, more primal, and more permanent than purely voluntary forms of human community.

Thailand is now entering its third year under military dictatorship, a reign established when generals seized power from an elected government on May 22, 2014.

The army has vowed to use its sweeping powers to heal a nation torn by class resentment.

When the army seized power two years ago, it justified its takeover by promising a wave of grand reforms. Thailand, the generals said, would become a nation purged of corruption and of the recurring, sometimes bloody street protests that have convulsed the political order for nearly a decade

research indicates that young men with less than a four-year degree (according to virtually all data, that’s an increasing number) are spending their days unemployed and unmarried, but not un-amused. “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time,”

“Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of twelve, and sometimes upwards of thirty hours per week.”

Twenty- and thirtysomething men who are living at home, working part-time or not at all, are unlikely to be preparing for marriage. Hurst’s research says that these men are single, unoccupied, and fine with that—because their happiness doesn’t depend on whether they are growing up and living life.

“We want to collect one copy of every book,” said Brewster Kahle, who has spent $3 million to buy and operate this repository situated just north of San Francisco. “You can never tell what is going to paint the portrait of a culture.”

A Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made his fortune selling a data-mining company to Amazon.com in 1999, Mr. Kahle founded and runs the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving Web pages — 150 billion so far — and making texts more widely available.

“We must keep the past even as we’re inventing a new future,” he said. “If the Library of Alexandria had made a copy of every book and sent it to India or China, we’d have the other works of Aristotle, the other plays of Euripides. One copy in one institution is not good enough.”

As the head of the vast column reached Red Square, the marchers were joined by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who held a photograph of his late father in his naval uniform.

The march of the so-called Immortal Regiment was part of Saturday's commemorations of the 70th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

Earlier in the day, 16,500 troops took part in a military parade on Red Square.