Art HERstory: The Mystery of Mona

Mona Lisa (1503-1519) by Leonardo DaVinci.
Oil on Poplar (30 x 21 inches) Musee de Louvre, Paris. 

The Telegraph UK reports that Italian archaeologists are searching for the remains of Lisa Gherardini--the presumed 16th Century model for Da Vinci's now iconic painting Mona Lisa. Digging will take place beneath the former Convent of St Ursula in central Florence, where Gherardini is believed to have died in her sixties in 1542.



L.H.O.O.Q., a cheap postcard-sized reproduction of the Mona Lisa,upon which Marcel Duchamp drew a mustache and a goatee. The "readymade" done in 1919, is one of the most well known act of degrading a famous work of art.

 
The team will use ground-penetration radar to search for forgotten tombs inside the building. If they discover human remains, they will sift through the bones to identify any that are compatible with a woman of Gherardini's age. They then plan to conduct carbon dating and extract DNA, which will be compared to that extracted from the bones of Gherardini's children, some of whom are buried in a basilica in Florence.




Born June 15, 1479, the eldest of seven children, Lisa  married at 15 to a cloth and silk merchant who later became a local official. She was mother to six children and led what is thought to have been a comfortable and ordinary middle-class life.
Artwork by Jessica Rodrigue courtesy of Green City Fine Art.


The archaeologists' ultimate aim is to find enough skull fragments to be able to reconstruct her face, enabling a direct comparison to be made with the Mona Lisa. It could solve a mystery which has intrigued art historians for centuries – the identity of the subject of the world's best known painting, which hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.