‘Very Likely’ Mona Lisa Remains Found But Conclusive DNA Evidence Still Not Available

MessageToEagle.com – Italian archaeologists are still trying to solve the mystery behind Mona Lisa, one of the world’s most famous paintings.

They found bits of bones that could have belonged to the ‘real’ Mona Lisa.

It is “very likely” that bone fragments found in a Florence convent and carbon-dated to the time of the death of the Mona Lisa are in fact those of the woman whose real name was Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo,” said lead researcher Silvano Vinventi.

“There are converging elements, above and beyond the results of the carbon-14 tests, that say we may well have found Lisa’s grave.”

Convent archives show that the tomb is likely to have been used only in the years between 1521 and 1545. There is no mention in that period of any lay person other than Gherardini being buried in the small church — though even the information relative to Gherardini is incomplete.

The team is certain that Florentine Lisa Gherardini was the mysterious woman who sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait.

Born in 1479, Gherardini was the wife of silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. He is believed to have commissioned da Vinci to paint a portrait of her in 1503 — the one now hanging in the Louvre museum in Paris. Gherardini lived out her final years as a widow in the now-derelict convent of Saint Ursula in Florence, where two of her children were nuns, and where she died and was likely buried in 1542.

However, after years of research on skeletons unearthed in the Tuscan city, they have just a femur that might match — but no DNA to test it against.

“We can’t provide absolute certainty that some of the remains examined are Lisa’s but the likelihood is very high,” he said.

“I have to say that many historians would have stated this was Lisa on the basis of written records, with many fewer elements and without scientific data,” he said, but it might take “several years”, and with technology that “does not currently exist” to definitively clinch the find as that of the Mona Lisa by using “new sources of DNA we will have managed to scrape together”.

The researchers began exhuming skeletons in 2011 in the hope of finding her remains, unearthing a dozen in the process, according to Giorgio Gruppioni, anthropology professor at the University of Bologna.

While the first eight were well conserved, carbon dating tests showed they were too old to be the Mona Lisa.

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via Yahoo News

Gazzetta del Sud