She’s been smeared with cake and doused with acid. Vigilantes have stolen her, and protesters have defaced her. She’s been lasered and prodded, displayed for the masses, and relegated to her own basement gallery. More recently, thousands urged billionaire Jeff Bezos to buy her, and then eat her.
There is no bottom, it seems, to the mysteries of the Mona Lisa, the Leonardo da Vinci painting that has captivated art lovers, culture vultures and the rest of us for centuries. Who is she? (Most likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of an Italian nobleman.) Is she smiling? (The short answer: kind of.) Did da Vinci originally intend to paint her differently, with her hair clipped or in a nursing gown?
The Mona Lisa, a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, in the Louvre.Credit: Getty Images
While much about the art world’s most enigmatic subject has been relegated to the realm of the unknowable, now, in a strange crossover of art and geology, there may be one fewer mystery: where she was sitting when da Vinci painted her.
According to Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and Renaissance art scholar, da Vinci’s subject is sitting in Lecco, Italy, an idyllic town near the banks of Lake Como. The conclusion, Pizzorusso said, was obvious – she figured it out years ago, but never realised its significance.
“I saw the topography near Lecco and realised this was the location,” she said.
The nondescript background has some important features: among them, a medieval bridge (near her shoulder on the right) that most scholars have held as the key to da Vinci’s setting. But Pizzorusso said it was rather the shape of the lake and the grey-white limestone that betrayed Lecco as the painting’s spiritual home.
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Such features were so clear to Pizzorusso that she had concluded years ago on a trip to Lecco that the quaint lakeside village was the setting for da Vinci’s masterpiece. She assumed, she said, that such facts were self-evident. It was not until a colleague approached her, seeking information on the painting’s possible settings, that Pizzorusso realised her conclusions had scholarly merit.
“I would tell people, but I just never did anything,” she said. Now though, mapping technology has made her thesis more palatable.