Exhuming Mona Lisa

Many articles on the discovery of a document recording the burial site of Lisa Gherardini, most of them full of inaccuracies. MSNBC seems to have one of the more sensible writeups:

An amateur historian said Friday that he has found the final resting place of a Renaissance woman who has been linked to Leonardo da Vinci's most renowned painting, the "Mona Lisa."

A death certificate shows that Lisa Gherardini — the woman some have identified as the model for the "Mona Lisa" — died on July 15, 1542, in Florence and is buried in a convent in central Florence, Giuseppe Pallanti said. . .

It's not certain that Gherardini, who was born in 1479 and married a rich silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, is the woman in the painting whose smile has inspired speculation for centuries.

Tradition links Gherardini to "La Gioconda," as the painting is known in Italian, because Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century artist and biographer of Leonardo and other artists, wrote that da Vinci painted a portrait of del Giocondo's wife.

The article also notes the discrepancies between the portrait described by Vasari and the Mona Lisa. The Scotsman, by contrast, uncritically reports:

[Pallanti] added that his research had wiped away all doubt about the identity of La Gioconda . . .

Historians are certain that Lisa Gherardini was the model and records show that she married Francesco Del Giocondo in 1495 when she was 16 and he was 35.

Then there is this truly embarrassing quote:

The world's greatest Da Vinci expert, Professor Carlo Pedretti, said: "Now that the final resting place of Mona Lisa Gherardini has been found, it would be very worthwhile to locate her remains and obtain her DNA.

"With the medical techniques available today, we could rebuild her physique and recreate the famous pose. The discovery of her burial place is very significant and I congratulate Pallanti."

PS It's "Leonardo".

Posted by David on January 19, 2007 9:59 PM