New images uncover 25 secrets about the Mona Lisa, including proof that Leonardo da Vinci gave her eyebrows, solving a long-held mystery.

The images are part of an exhibition, "Mona Lisa Secrets Revealed," which will feature new research by French engineer Pascal Cotte and debut in the United States at the Metreon in San Francisco. The Mona Lisa showcase is part of a larger exhibition called "Da Vinci: An Exhibition of Genius."

Cotte, founder of Lumiere Technology, scanned the painting with a 240-megapixel Multi-spectral Imaging Camera he invented, which uses 13 wavelengths from ultraviolet light to infrared. The resulting images peel away centuries of varnish and other alterations, shedding light on how the artist brought the painted figure to life and how she appeared to da Vinci and his contemporaries.

Click [on the SOURCE link] to read a slide-show essay about the history of the American snapshot.

[HNN Editor: To watch the slide show look for the link at the top left of your screen. Don't hit the "play" button. That brings up the advertisement.]

Immigration is the big, unavoidable issue not just in the United States but across Europe now, and nowhere more obviously than here in France. The latest proof arrived last week in the form of a new museum, the National Center of the History of Immigration. On the edge of the city’s Bois de Vincennes, in a comfortable neighborhood, it has opened far from the poor suburbs where Muslim youths rioted a couple of summers ago, burning thousands of cars partly in protest against Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, now president.

Mr. Sarkozy guaranteed that the museum, a pet project of his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, would make headlines when he conspicuously did not show up for its inauguration.

Nor did many other people when I stopped by the other day. I am told that thousands showed up the first few days, but only a small crowd milled around on the museum’s first Saturday afternoon. There’s no charge for admission. There’s no fancy gift shop or cafe, either,...

Putting anti-pollution face masks on two 2,000-year-old Chinese terra cotta warriors on view at the British Museum, a father of two young girls sought on Sunday to draw attention to China’s role in carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, Reuters reported. Hustled out of the exhibition by guards, the father, Martin Wyness, said he was protesting the lack of international action. “Nothing was damaged,” he said. “It was all very respectful.”

Making History is not a big exhibition. It takes up only three-and-a-bit of the Royal Academy’s main rooms. But it is full of charm and its catalogue burns with enthusiasm, more so than many a self-styled blockbuster that takes a period or style and smothers it in philistine commentary about the consumption patterns of a new leisured class. There are some beautiful objects on show that antiquaries have dug up or got hold of: the Roman legionary’s cavalry parade helmet, found in 1796 by a clogmaker’s son playing on waste ground at Ribchester, Lancs; the garnet-and-gold brooch found in the Kingston Barrow by the son of the Revd Bryan Faussett, the greatest of eighteenth-century barrow-diggers, who was himself sitting in his carriage at the time, suffering from a severe attack of gout; the big bronze shield found in an Ayrshire bog, along with five or six others which have all disappeared. There are also objects here whose historical associations must stir the most sluggish blood: the...

A kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy, “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” tells, if more often shouts, the story of the bastard monarch who ruled England with an iron grip and two tightly closed legs. It’s the story of a woman, who, as played by the irresistibly watchable Cate Blanchett as David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust period, sublimated her libidinal energies through court intrigue until she found sweet relief by violently bringing the Spanish Empire to its knees.

But that’s getting ahead of this story, which begins in 1585 when Queen Elizabeth hit 52, though the film seems to put her closer to 38, Ms. Blanchett’s actual age. The blurring of fact and fancy is, of course, routine with this kind of opulent big-screen production, in which the finer points of history largely take a back seat to personal melodrama and lavish details of production design and costumes. In this regard “The Golden Age” may set a standard for such an...

Doris Lessing, author of dozens of works from short stories to science fiction, including the classic “The Golden Notebook,” won the Nobel Prize for literature Thursday. She was praised by the judges for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.”

The Swedish academy’s announcement was stunning even by the standards of Nobel judges, who have been known for such surprises as Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek and Italy’s Dario Fo.

Lessing, 11 days short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she is widely celebrated for “The Golden Notebook” and other works, she has received little attention in recent years and has been criticized as strident and eccentric....

A largely self-taught author who ended formal schooling at age 13, Lessing has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, exploring the divide between whites and blacks, most notably in 1950’s “The Grass Is Singing,”...

When police seized a photograph from the Baltic art gallery in Gateshead recently, taken by the celebrated American photographer Nan Goldin and owned by Sir Elton John, the directors of the Barbican art gallery must have felt pretty nervous.

The Barbican's new show, Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, deals with precisely the difference between art and pornography that the debate over Goldin's image of two small girls has reignited.

Is Klare and Edda belly-dancing an example of child pornography, or does the fact of Goldin's reputation as a serious documentary photographer, and the respectability of the Baltic as a museum, elevate the picture to the category of art?

What is sublime to one person can be smut to another, and Seduced does nothing if not tease out the difference between stimulating the mind and arousing the senses. Covering 2,000 years of representations of sex, Seduced sets out to seduce....

A grainy video of four masked vandals running through an art gallery in Sweden, smashing sexually explicit photographs with crowbars and axes to the strain of thundering death-metal music, was posted on YouTube Friday night.

This was no joke or acting stunt. It was what actually happened on a quiet Friday afternoon in Lund, a small university town in southern Sweden where “The History of Sex,” an exhibition of photographs by the New York artist Andres Serrano, had opened two weeks earlier.

Around 3:30, half an hour before closing, four vandals wearing black masks stormed into a space known as the Kulturen Gallery while shouting in Swedish, “We don’t support this,” plus an expletive. They pushed visitors aside, entered a darkened room where some of the photographs were displayed and began smashing the glass protecting the photographs and then hacking away at the prints.