Mona Lisa Revealed - The Results are In!

New claims to the real subject of the Mona Lisa have again been made, this time apparently confirming not only the model who sat for Leonardo but also the location the artwork was painted in.

Carla Glori, who has used the recent numeric discovery in the eyes of the Mona Lisa to back her conclusions,(which was investigated by Sig Silvano Vinceti and written about in the Guardian and on here of course, last month) claims that the landscape in the background, which was previously believed to be imaginary, is in actual fact a real existing place in a town called Bobbio in Northern Italy.

"The twisting road from the painting can be found there, as is the arched bridge that Da Vinci would have seen from the windows of the town's castle"

Ms Glori's conviction of the location of the painting has been drawn upon by investigating the recent identity of the model for the artwork. Always believed to have been Lisa del Giocondo, Ms Glori ventured into the possibility that the subject could have been Bianca Giovanna Sforza, the daughter of Ludovico Sforza who controlled the area of Bobbio and whose famous library da Vinci probably used like many other artists and scientists of the time.

The Guardian describes the town as;

A small medieval town whose abbey was a model for Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, Bobbio and its Roman bridge sit astride the Trebbia valley, which was once described by Ernest Hemingway as the most beautiful in the world.

Ms Glori used the research conducted by Silvano Vinceti who found the numbers 72 in the Mona Lisa's pupils. She believes that this number refers to the year 1472 marking a near disaster for the bridge in the background of the painting, which was nearly overcome by floods in Bobbio in that year.

Sig Silvano Vinceti's team of researchers, say the Guardian are not entirely convinced by the reports from Ms Glori who claims that Bianca Giovanna Sforza was the original Mona Lisa sitter;

we believe Bianca Giovanna Sforza is unlikely because she died at 15 and the sitter is at least 22," he said. Glori said she believed Da Vinci may have aged Sforza's face over the years he spent finishing the painting in a bid to hide her identity following her father's downfall.

The Guardian also reports;

Martin Kemp, a renowned Da Vinci scholar, said that he was not convinced. "The portrait is almost certainly of Lisa del Giocondo, however unromantic and un-mysterious that idea might be," he said, adding that he also had his doubts on Bobbio. "Leonardo is remaking an archetypal landscape on the basis of his knowledge of the 'body of the earth'."

So it is not only I questioning the credibility of this loose claim. Surely Leonardo would have been familiar with the landscape surrounding Bobbio, especially if he knew the Library and Ludovico Sforza territory. The thing about artists is that they can pick and choose what they want to create, so to see a familiar landscape and depict it in a painting as a mysterious yet recognizable one, is, as they say, artistic license. A painting made up of many clues, symbols, designs, ideas and codes can hardly have been made from one single visual memory alone and does not i fear, point to the paintings location of creation nor to the identity of the true model for the Mona Lisa.

Like so many other things about this painting i believe it will remain a topic of intrigue, investigation and argument for years to come.

See:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jan/09/mona-lisa-bobbio-da-vinci?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/dec/12/mona-lisa-eyes-model-identity?INTCMP=SRCH

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2010/dec/14/eyes-mona-lisa-leonardo-da-vinci?INTCMP=SRCH