They had discovered something unexpected.

Conservators working on a painting by Pablo Picasso back in 1992 noticed odd patterns in

the artist's brush strokes, lines that didn't seem to match the overall composition of the

piece.

So they decided to take a deeper look.

On closer inspection, these conservators noticed that tiny cracks in the surface paint

revealed more paint beneath, paint of entirely different colors.

And today, they know why.

Thanks to advances in X-ray technology, researchers have been able to peer beneath the top layer

to see what lies under it.

Picasso, it seems, painted his famous work the crouching beggar over an older landscape.

Then it's not the only one.

It's a technique called over painting, and usually happened when an artist didn't care

for the previous work or had a better idea.

For Picasso, it might have been a financial decision.

The crouching beggar was a product of his early blue period, a time when money was tight

and new canvases were hard to buy.

So he took a landscape he'd already painted and built a brand new composition on top of

it.

And that's life, isn't it?

There's the part everyone sees, and then there are the parts beneath it all.

Things can be beautiful and entertaining and valuable, and yet hide something older beneath

...