FOR CENTURIES, art historians have speculated about the identity of Mona Lisa, the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s great portrait that hangs in the Louvre in Paris.
Is it Lisa Gherardini, wife of a rich Florentine silk merchant? Or Gian Giacomo Caprotti, a male apprentice to and alleged lover of the maestro? Is it, perhaps, a self-portrait? Or maybe a blend of all three?
Some light might finally be shed on this historical conundrum now that art historian and researcher Prof Silvano Vinceti and his team of experts have begun a search in the Convent of Sant’Orsola in central Florence for the grave of Lisa Gherardini, also known as “La Gioconda”, after her husband’s surname.
Prof Vinceti’s team will be using state-of-the-art radar equipment to identify two crypts below the convent floor where, according to 16th-century library documents, “outsiders” were buried.
He argues that, as the mother of a nun in the Sant’Orsola convent, Lisa Gherardini, believed to have died in 1542, may well be buried there.
After two weeks of radar analysis, the team hopes to begin digging for the grave.
Prof Vinceti, who made headlines last year when he claimed to have identified the bones of Caravaggio, intends to compare the DNA of any bones found under the convent with those taken from a known, more recent Gherardini family grave.
He has even expressed the hope of finding a skull, possibly allowing him to reconstruct Lisa’s face in order to see if the features match those of the iconic painting.
In the professor’s opinion, they won’t – which just might prove his most sensational, and controversial, theory: that the “model” for what is arguably the world’s most famous painting was a man, the apprentice Gian Giacomo Caprotti, and not Lisa Gherardini.
This claim is widely disputed, with art historian Pietro Marani calling it “groundless”.
He argues that the portrait simply evolved over the many years it took da Vinci to paint it.
Tradition has it that he began the work in 1503.
Princess Natalie Strozzi, a modern-day relative of Lisa Gherardini, this week called the grave dig an “act of sacrilege”, expressing the hope that the researchers would leave her distant ancestor in peace.