Carbon-14 tests could confirm Mona Lisa original model

FLORENCE, ITALY – Carbon-14 results on the remains of a woman thought to have sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa painting are due within days. The time-consuming tests are being carried out to find out whether the bones exhumed in an archeological dig in a Florence convent in 2012 date back to the same period in history as that of the beguiling model who sat for the famous portrait, which is now housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Art historical scholars now believe that model was Lisa Gherardini, wife to the merchant Francesco Del Giocondo, who died in the Florence convent on July 15, 1542.

If the tests come back positive we move on to phase 2, which is comparing the DNA from the remains to that of Lisa Gherardini’s children, whom we know are buried are in a family tomb in Santissima Annunziata basilica. Those DNA tests will also take months. If there is a match, La Gioconda, as Italians call the woman with the enigmatic half-smile, will be positively identified for posterity, solving a centuries-old mystery of the art-historical world.