She has grease the cake and acidic. Alert stole herand protesters embarrassed her. She was lasered and prodded, put on public display and taken down her own basement gallery. More recently, thousands of people called out billionaire Jeff Bezos buy her and then eat her.
There seems to be no bottom to the mysteries of Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting that has captivated art lovers, culture vultures and the rest of us for centuries. Who is she? (Most likely Lisa Gherardini, wife of an Italian aristocrat.) Is she smiling? (Short answer – type.) Did da Vinci originally intend to draw her differently, with her hair cut short or styled? nursing gown?
While much of the art world’s most mysterious subjects have been relegated to the realm of the unknowable, now, in the strange intersection of art and geology, there may be something less mysterious : where was she sitting when da Vinci painted her.
According to Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and Renaissance art scholar, da Vinci’s subject was located in Lecco, Italy, an idyllic town near the shores of Lake Como. Pizzorusso said the conclusion was obvious — she figured it out years ago but never realized its significance.
“I saw the terrain near Lecco and realized this was the place,” she said.
The nondescript setting has several important features: among them is the medieval bridge that most scholars consider key to da Vinci’s setting. But Pizzorusso said it was the shape of the lake and the gray-white limestone that betrayed Lecco as the painting’s spiritual home.
“A bridge can be replaced,” Pizzorusso said. “You have to combine the bridge with the location where Leonardo was and the geology.”
Those characteristics were so clear to Pizzorusso that years ago she concluded during 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 wasn’t until a colleague came to her, looking for information about the Mona Lisa’s possible context, that Pizzorusso realized her conclusions had scholarly value.
“I would tell people, but I never did anything,” she said. Now, however, mapping technology has made her thesis more acceptable.
“Everything came together to really make my idea much more feasible and presentable,” she said, speaking from Lecco, where she will formally present her conclusions at a geological event.
Yet such secrets have become inherent in the conspiracies surrounding the Mona Lisa, which has baffled, amused, frustrated and confused artists and art lovers for centuries. . As her famous soft edges become sharper and sharper, perhaps we must ask: Is this the painting we love or its mysteries?
“At Lecco, they have been talking about this issue for many years,” said Donald Sassoon, a professor of comparative European history. He pointed a 2016 article on a local Italian news site by a scholar from Lecco, who identified geographical features similar to those noted by Pizzorusso.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Professor Sassoon said when asked about reporting Pizzorusso’s findings. “Location will have no effect.”
For Pizzorusso, however, the conclusion is less about art than about humanity. In the Mona Lisa’s discrete clues, da Vinci reveals himself not only as a skilled painter but also as a careful, to the point of tedious, student of science and geology.
“Whenever he drew a rock,” Pizzorusso said, “it was accurate.”
