Italian scholar Giuseppe Pallanti claims in a new book to have identified Mona Lisa, the woman whose mysterious smile has intrigued art lovers ever since Leonardo da Vinci painted her portrait 500 years ago.
Pallanti's book "Mona Lisa, Real Woman" says land registry records and other historical documents prove that she was Lisa Gherardini, born in Florence in May 1479. A recent blockbuster work of fiction suggests that Mona Lisa was Leonardo's disguised self-portrait. Another theory is that she never existed at all.
But the Italian professor said his research shows that she was, as his title asserts, a real person, who in 1495 married a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo. Lisa was about 24 years old when Leonardo began her portrait, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris and is known in French as La Joconde, a corruption of the subject's married name, La Gioconda.
Lisa Gherardini was originally identified as the subject of the world's most famous painting by Leonardo's first biographer, the 16th-century Italian writer Giorgio Vasari. But his claims were disputed after the painting was stolen from the Louvre in August 1911 and returned to the museum about two years later.