Hunt for Mona Lisa tomb begins in Italy

2011-04-28 06:13:56 GMT+7 (ICT)

FLORENCE, ITALY (BNO NEWS) -- A team of researchers started on Wednesday a hunt for the tomb and possible remains of the model for Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in an ex-convent in the city of Florence, the ANSA news agency reported.

The team will be using a special radar device to scan underneath an ex-chapel in the old convent of St Ursula for the next three days. The aim is to find the DNA of Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo and compare it with that of her two children buried in Florence's Santissima Annunziata church. Then, the team of experts hopes to reconstruct the woman's face.

"I'm reasonably confident we're going to find something," said Silvano Vinceti, an art historian who has found the bones of Caravaggio and reconstructed the faces of other artists based on their skulls.

"We're looking underneath the cement that was laid down when the convent was supposed to be turned into a barracks in the 1980s. Eventually we'll start digging," he added, as cited by ANSA.

The ex-convent was used to shelter WWII refugees in the 1940s and '50s before housing university classrooms in the following decades and then falling into disuse and becoming a dump.

Leonardo sleuth Giuseppe Pallanti has published a book arguing the former convent "must be" the last resting place of La Gioconda, as Italians call it. Most modern scholars have now agreed with Pallanti that the Mona Lisa sitter was Lisa del Giocondo, who according to the Italian researcher became a nun after her husband's death and died in the convent on July 15, 1542, aged 63.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2011-04-28

This'll be interesting. Many years ago I read that a dentist said that it was obvious to him that her odd smile was largely due to her having a couple of missing teeth on the left side.

Look at the painting again and judge for yourself.