LED lighting has gained just about all the credibility it is ever going to need after being chosen to illuminate the Mona Lisa in its new home in the Louvre.

“In the new room where Mona Lisa is there is top lighting,” Maryline Thorailler of collimator maker Fraen told Electronics Weekly. “We did a lamp which is lighting the Mona Lisa from the bottom.”

“The lamp prepares a beam of light which lights only the picture, not the frame or the wall,” said Thorailler. “It needs to compensate for angle and brightness across the picture.”

Fraen’s Italian operation provided the concentrating optics which collect light from the LEDs. German optics firm Sklaer designed and built the colour mixing section, which follows the collimation stage, and the output projector.

Mixing and projection use a fibre-optic assembly which will be disclosed later this year. “The light guide mixes the colour very well,” Sklaer MD Jean Pierre Miras told EW. “The idea came from a patent with a Russian company.”

www.fraen.com