she was coat the cake And doused with acid.vigilante stole herand protesters defiled her.She was lasered, prodded, put on display for the masses, then demoted to her own basement gallery.Thousands of people recently urged billionaire Jeff Bezos buy her and eat her.
The seemingly bottomless mystery of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa, has fascinated art lovers, culture buffs, and the rest of us for centuries. who is she? (Most likely Lisa Gherardini, the wife of an Italian nobleman.) Is she smiling? (Short answer – kind of.) Did Leonardo da Vinci originally intend to paint her differently, with her hair cut or with her hair down? nursing clothes?
While much of the art world’s most mysterious subject has been relegated to the realm of the unknowable, now, in a strange intersection of art and geology, it may not be so mysterious anymore: Where was she sitting when Leonardo da Vinci painted her .
According to geologist and Renaissance art scholar Ann Pizzorusso, Leonardo’s subject was located in Lecco, Italy, an idyllic town on the shores of Lake Como. The conclusion was obvious, Ms. Pizzoruso said—she had thought of it years ago but never realized its significance.
“I saw the terrain near Lecco and realized this was the place,” she said.
The humble background has some important features; among them, a medieval bridge is regarded by most scholars as the key to understanding Leonardo da Vinci’s background. But Ms. Pizzorusso said it was the shape of the lake and the gray-white limestone that betrayed Lecco as the painting’s spiritual home.
“Bridges are replaceable,” Ms. Pizzoruso said. “You have to tie a bridge to where Leonardo was and the geology.”
These characteristics were so clear to Ms. Pizzorusso that on a trip to Lecco a few years ago, she concluded that this quaint lakeside village was the setting for Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. She said she believed these facts to be self-evident. It wasn’t until a colleague approached her seeking information about the Mona Lisa’s possible background that Ms. Pizzorusso realized her conclusions had academic value.
“I would tell people, but I didn’t do anything,” she said. But now, drawing technology makes her paper more accessible.
“Everything really made my ideas more demonstrable and expressible,” she said, formally presenting her conclusions at a geological event in Lecco.
Nonetheless, these secrets have become intrinsic to the conspiracy surrounding the sacred canvas. The Mona Lisa has baffled, delighted, disappointed and bewildered artists and art lovers alike for centuries. As her famous soft edges become sharper, perhaps we must ask: Is this the painting we love, or is it its mystery?
“At Lecco, they’ve been mentioning this for years,” said Donald Sassoon, a professor of comparative European history.he pointed An article from 2016 An academic from Lecco, who published such an article on a local Italian news website, found geographical features similar to those pointed out by Ms. Pizzorusso.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Professor Sassoon said when asked how to report Ms Pizzorusso’s findings. “Determining the location won’t have any impact.”
For Ms. Pizzoruso, though, the conclusion is less about the art than it is about the men. In the discrete threads of the Mona Lisa, she said, Leonardo revealed himself not only as a skilled painter but also as a dull and careful student of science and geology.
“Any time he painted a rock,” Ms. Pizzorusso said, “it was accurate.”
