The world's most famous smile portrayed in Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece Mona Lisa has been lit up with LEDs supplied by Toshiba.
The lighting of the Mona Lisa and other important paintings at Paris' Louvre museum, has seen the manufacturer's luminaires being used for the building's interior for the first time.
Toshiba's specially-designed luminaire, which enables colour mixing of 34 LEDs, is installed in front of the Mona Lisa painting and concealed in a shelf below it.?A colour temperature of 3200K was selected for the painting and the new lamp, which consumes 20W when operating and replaces a lamp developed by Arkanz-Sklaer containing 7 LEDs.
Toshiba wanted to replace and improve on the performance of the previously installed LED lamp and began to investigate how to improve the uniformity of illuminance on Mona Lisa, as well as the uniformity of spectral distribution over the painting and identify ways to limit drastically any production of UV radiation.
Referring to its new luminaire, Toshiba said: "Testing this device shows that colour mixing of very high quality takes place there, and as a result of that the uniformity of illumination would run close to 95 per cent. The spectral distributions of the LEDs have been carefully chosen in order to achieve a colour rendering index of up to Ra98." The luminaire is designed to compensate for colour shift caused by the painting's protective glazing and ambient lighting.
Toshiba said the lamps and luminaires it has developed for the Mona Lisa and the museum's Red room have improved colour rendering of the paintings, suppressed UV and IR radiation and reduced electricity consumption by 60 per cent to 39,600W, when compared to the 98,000W of energy consumed by the xenon and halogen lamps that were previously installed in the Red room.
Toshiba's partnership with the museum, which began in 2010, led to it completing the renovation of the museum's exterior lighting a year later. This significantly reduced the amount of power consumed by the museum's exterior lighting by 73 per cent. The museum's partnership with Toshiba will see LED lighting installed thoughout the Louvre by 2015.
On June 4, a lighting ceremony was held in the museum to celebrate the completion of the Toshiba LED renovation work for the Mona Lisa and Red room.
