ced one, an earthy yellow dress rather than brown, a landscape with subtle blues in the sky and the lake — Shouldn‘t we give La Giaconda back her true colours?“ asked the bimonthly Le Journal des Arts. The magazine created an instant furore in the art world by printing side-by-side colour photographs on its cover of the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece as it now appears in Paris‘s Louvre museum and a virtual restoration of the work as created by technicians at the Laboratorio Nicola in Turin. The two photographs are striking in their differences. The faintly smiling beauty in the enhanced version has rosy porcelain skin, limpid brown eyes and fine auburn hair while the painting in its current state shows the Mona Lisa peering through a murky yellow atmosphere. The magazine said it printed the two pictures to spur debate on whether a restoration was desirable or even feasible in the face of traditional opposition to such a move. The editors did not leave the matter there, however, going on to consult 10 world experts, seven of whom favoured restoring the work. The challenge of restoration would be to clean the painting without damaging da Vinci‘s extremely fine and microscopically tiny brush strokes which give the work its life and beauty. „I know they are very hesitant about this at the Louvre but I disagree,“ wrote Frederik Duparc, director of the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, in a typical comment, urging that a layer of varnish be removed from Mona Lisa‘s surface. One of the three naysayers, however, was Jean-Pierre Cuzin, the Louvre‘s chief curator for paintings. Cuzin, certainly the best-placed of the experts to block a restoration, sounded unalterably opposed. Jacques Franck, the world‘s leading expert on da Vinci‘s technique, strongly backed Cuzin, saying much of the painting‘s current dullness was due to the lighting and the thick slab of bullet-proof glass covering the work. In the eyes of some experts, a plan by the Louvre to give the Mona Lisa a room of her own has lended a new urgency to the question. The Louvre announced in March that Japan‘s NTV television had agreed to provide about 25 million francs ($4.2 million) to devote a gallery exclusively to the da Vinci work.