The Mona Lisa might be history's first 3D image

Researchers Claus-Christian Carbon and Vera Hesslinger (experimental psychologists based in Germany) have reported that Leonardo Da Vinci's iconic masterpiece the Mona Lisa, may be the very first 3-D image in history.

The impressive evidence has been gathered from a variety of in-depth analysis and side-by-side comparison between Da Vinci's famous 'Mona Lisa' housed in Paris' Louvre and a similar version held at the Museo del Prado in Spain, which was introduced to the public in 2012.

However, based on the two researcher's documentation, they have established that the Prado rendition was actually painted by an apprentice or Leonardo Da Vinci himself at his workshop at exactly the same time as the original, from a slightly different position in the room. 

"We reconstructed the original studio setting and found evidence that the disparity between both paintings mimics human binocular disparity." Carbon and Hesslinger explained, "This points to the possibility that the two Gioconda's together might represent the first stereoscopic image in world history." 

A further study showed that the paintings' mountainous background was actually a flat canvas, hung behind 'La Gioconda', similar to a backdrop in a modern-day studio.

"By analyzing divergences between the Mona Lisa and her Prado double that was painted in parallel but from another perspective we found mathematical evidence for the motif- canvas hypothesis: the landscape in the Prado version is 10 percent increased but otherwise nearly identical with the Louvre one, which indicates both painters used the same plane motif-canvas as reference."