Another art story in the internet news yesterday was
the confirmation of a painting being a Caravaggio. The
guy who figured it out was able to buy it for $100,000
- smart guy. He donated it to Oxford University.
>
> This just came in on my RSS feed:
>
> 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.
> But art historians have often wondered whether the
> smiling woman may
> actually have been da Vinci's lover, his mother or
> the artist himself.
> Now experts at the Heidelberg University library say
> dated notes scribbled
> in the margins of a book by its owner in October
> 1503 confirm once and for
> all that Lisa del Giocondo was indeed the model for
> one of the most famous
> portraits in the world.
> "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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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."
> 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.
> 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.
>
> ~Michal
> 3-12 Kansas Art Teacher
> HS Digital Communications
> Technology Integration Specialist
> http://www.geocities.com/theartkids > http://spotlight.digication.com/maustin >
>
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