Archaeologists find bits of bone in hunt for 'real' Mona Lisa

PanARMENIAN.Net - Italian archaeologists trying to solve the mystery behind one of the world's most famous paintings said Wednesday, September 23 they had found bits of bone that could have belonged to the 'real' Mona Lisa, AFP reports.

The team is certain that Florentine Lisa Gherardini was the mysterious woman who sat for Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, but after years of research on skeletons unearthed in the Tuscan city, they have just a femur that might match -- but no DNA to test it against.

Born in 1479, Gherardini was the wife of silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo. He is believed to have commissioned da Vinci to paint a portrait of her in 1503 -- the one now hanging in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Gherardini lived out her final years as a widow in the now-derelict convent of Saint Ursula in Florence, where two of her children were nuns, and where she died and was likely buried in 1542.

The researchers began exhuming skeletons in 2011 in the hope of finding her remains, unearthing a dozen in the process, according to Giorgio Gruppioni, anthropology professor at the University of Bologna.

While the first eight were well conserved, carbon dating tests showed they were too old to be the Mona Lisa.

The other four were found in a common tomb used until 1545, and carbon dating proved that one of those buried there -- of which only fragments of the femur, shinbone and ankle remain -- lived in the same period as Gherardini.

Convent archives show that the tomb is likely to have been used only in the years between 1521 and 1545.