She was cake coating and doused with acid. Vigilantes I stole itand the demonstrators I degraded her. She was manipulated and laser pushed, exposed to the general public and relegated to the ranks its own gallery in the basement. Most recently, thousands of people urged billionaire Jeff Bezos to to buy it, then eat it.
There seems to be no bottom to the mysteries of the Mona Lisa, the Leonardo da Vinci painting that has captivated 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? (The short answer – type of.) Did Da Vinci originally intend to paint her differently, with cropped hair or in a nursing dress?
While much about the art world’s most enigmatic subject has been relegated to the realm of the unknowable, today, in a strange intersection of art and geology, there may be one less mystery: where she was sitting when Leonardo da Vinci painted her.
According to Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and specialist in Renaissance art, Leonardo da Vinci’s subject is located in Lecco, Italy, an idyllic town near the shores of Lake Como. The conclusion, Pizzorusso said, is obvious: She understood it years ago, but never realized its significance.
“I saw the topography near Lecco and realized it was the perfect place,” she said.
The nondescript background has some important characteristics; among them, a medieval bridge that most scholars consider the key to Leonardo da Vinci’s setting. But Pizzorusso said it is rather the shape of the lake and the gray-white limestone that betray Lecco as the painting’s spiritual home.
“A bridge is fungible,” Pizzorusso said. “You have to combine a bridge with a place where Leonardo was and geology.”
These characteristics were so obvious to Pizzorusso that she concluded years ago, during a trip to Lecco, that the picturesque lakeside village was the setting for Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece. She assumed, she said, that such facts were self-evident. It was only when a colleague approached her, seeking information on possible adjustments to the Mona Lisa, that Pizzorusso realized her findings had scientific value.
“I told people, but I never did anything,” she said. But today, mapping technology has made his thesis more acceptable.
“Everything conspired to make my idea much more provable and presentable,” she said, speaking from Lecco, where she will formally present her findings at a geological event.
Yet such secrets have become inherent to the intrigue surrounding the sacred web. For centuries, the Mona Lisa has baffled, delighted, disappointed and confounded artists and art lovers. As its famously soft edges become existentially sharper, perhaps we need to ask ourselves: is it the painting we love, or its mysteries?
“In Lecco they have been talking about it for years,” said Donald Sassoon, a professor of comparative European history. He emphasized an article from 2016 in a local Italian news site by a Lecco researcher who identified geographic features similar to those noted by Pizzorusso.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Professor Sassoon said when asked about Pizzorusso’s discovery. “Identifying the location would have no impact.”
For Pizzorusso, however, the conclusion is less about the art and more about the man. In the Mona Lisa’s discreet clues, da Vinci reveals himself not only as a talented painter, she says, but also as a fastidious and careful student of science and geology.
“Every time he paints a rock,” Pizzorusso said, “it’s right.”
