FLORENCE, ITALY – The remains of the sitter for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa have very likely been found in a Florence convent, but DNA evidence to clinch the find will only be available thanks to technology that doesn’t yet exist.
The tomb of the Mona Lisa is definitely in Florence’s Sant’Orsola convent, carbon-14 tests on bones buried at the same time as Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo have shown, a leading art sleuth and Leonardo da Vinci expert said Thursday.
Tests on one of three batches of bones have been dated back to the period of Lisa’s death in 1542, said Silvano Vinceti, an expert who has made groundbreaking discoveries based on Caravaggio’s remains.
It is very likely that the bone fragments are in fact those of the real-life Lisa, lead researcher Vincenti said Thursday.
“There are converging elements, above and beyond the results of the carbon-14 tests, that say we may well have found Lisa’s grave,” he said. “I’m speaking of historical, anthropological and archeological analyses that have been carried out very rigorously,” Vincenti said.
Vinceti added that future DNA tests may enable researchers to establish the colour of eyes, hair and skin of the remains of the people found. This will perhaps solve a centuries-old mystery of the art world over the identity of the woman with the enigmatic half-smile known as La Gioconda in Italian, whose portrait thrills visitors to the Louvre museum in Paris.
If scientists can find the remains of the sitter, they plan to digitally reconstruct what she looked like. Italians call the Mona Lisa La Gioconda both because of her husband’s surname, del Giocondo, and because ‘gioconda’ in Italian means a playful woman.
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