She has been smeared with cake and doused with acid. It has been stolen by security guards and defaced by protesters. She has been shot and prodded, paraded before the masses, and relegated to her own gallery in the basement. More recently, thousands of people urged billionaire Jeff Bezos to buy it and then eat it.
There seems to be no bottom to the mysteries of the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci’s 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, sort of.) Did Da Vinci originally intend to paint her differently, with her hair cut short or in a nursing gown?
While much of the art world’s most enigmatic subject matter has been relegated to the realm of the unknowable, now, in a strange cross between art and geology, there may be one less mystery: where she was sitting when da Vinci painted her.
According to Ann Pizzorusso, a geologist and Renaissance art scholar, Da Vinci’s subject is located in Lecco, Italy, an idyllic town near the shores of Lake Como. The conclusion, Pizzorusso said, is obvious: He discovered it years ago, but never he realized its meaning.
“I saw the topography near Lecco and realized that was the place,” he said.
The nondescript background has some important features; among them, a medieval bridge that most scholars have considered the key to da Vinci’s environment. But Pizzorusso said it is rather the shape of the lake and the grayish-white limestone that gives away Lecco as the painting’s spiritual home.
“A bridge is fungible,” said Pizzorusso. “You have to combine a bridge with the place where Leonardo was and the geology.”
Such characteristics were so clear to Pizzorusso that years before, on a trip to Lecco, he had come to the conclusion that the picturesque lakeside town was the setting for Da Vinci’s masterpiece. He assumed, he said, that such facts were evident. It wasn’t until a colleague approached her seeking information about possible Mona Lisa scenarios that Pizzorusso realized her conclusions had academic merit.
“I would tell people, but I never did anything,” he said. Now, however, mapping technology has made his thesis more acceptable.
“Everything has conspired to make my idea much more demonstrable and presentable,” he said, speaking from Lecco, where he will formally present his findings at a geology event.
Still, those secrets have become inherent to the intrigue surrounding the sacred canvas. For centuries, the Mona Lisa has confounded, delighted, disappointed and baffled artists and art lovers. As its famous soft edges become existentially sharper, perhaps we should ask ourselves: is it the painting we love or its mysteries?
“Lecco has been talking about this for years,” said Donald Sassoon, a professor of comparative European history. He pointed to a 2016 article on a local Italian news site written by a Lecco academic that identified geographic features similar to those pointed out by Ms. Pizzorusso.
“I wouldn’t bother,” Professor Sassoon said when asked about reporting Ms. Pizzorusso’s discovery. “Identifying the location would have no impact.”
For Pizzorusso, however, the conclusion has less to do with the art than with the man. In the discreet tracks of the Mona Lisa, da Vinci reveals himself not only as a skilled painter, he said, but also as a tediously careful student of science and geology.
“Every time he paints a rock,” Pizzorusso said, “it’s accurate.”