German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the "Mona Lisa" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait. Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.
Dang! I could have sworn it was UBL in hiding. I should have known better because she wasn't wearing a burkha.
But art historians have often wondered whether the smiling woman may actually have been da Vinci's lover, his mother or the artist himself.
Could have been all three!
Now
I wonder if that's why it's sometimes referred to as "La Giaconda"?... Nah. That couldn't be it.
"All doubts about the identity of the Mona Lisa have been eliminated by a discovery by Dr. Armin Schlechter," a manuscript expert, the library said in a statement on Monday.
Woohoo! No more sleepless nights!
Until then, only "scant evidence" from sixteenth-century documents had been available. "This left lots of room for interpretation and there were many different identities put forward," the library said.
I still think it was the Duke of Oxford.
Careers were built on this! Well, the Donks still need some spin-meisters.
The notes were made by a Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, an acquaintance of the artist, in a collection of letters by the Roman orator Cicero. The comments compare Leonardo to the ancient Greek artist Apelles and say he was working on three paintings at the time, one of them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo.
No wonder Michelangelo was so prolific - he had three arms!
Art experts, who have already dated the painting to this time, say the Heidelberg discovery is a breakthrough and the earliest mention linking the merchant's wife to the portrait. "There is no reason for any lingering doubts that this is another woman," Leipzig University art historian Frank Zoellner told German radio. "One could even say that books written about all this in the past few years were unnecessary, had we known."
Don't worry, you're not the only ones to have made that mistake.
The woman was first linked to the painting in around 1550 by Italian official Giorgio Vasari, the library said, but added there had been doubts about Vasari's reliability and had made the comments five decades after the portrait had been painted.
Jack Murtha said it was her too, but his word is even less reliable. Besides, his Altzheimer's was already affecting him pretty badly by the time it was being painted.
The Heidelberg notes were actually discovered over two years ago in the library by Schlechter, a spokeswoman said. Although the findings had been printed in the library's public catalogue they had not been widely publicized and had received little attention until a German broadcaster decided to do some recording at the library, she said. The painting, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris, is also known as "La Gioconda" meaning the happy or joyful woman in Italian, a title which also suggests the woman's married name.
Five extra-credit points go to whoever can tell me why it's called "The Mona Lisa".