Mona Lisa model's remains thrown into rubbish dump
The Telegraph, UK
The remains of the model for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa were thrown into a rubbish dump in Italy. Lisa Gherardini died in Florence in 1542 at the age of 63 and was buried in the grounds of Sant'Orsola convent. Over the centuries the convent was used as a tobacco factory and a university teaching facility. In the 1980s, a re-development project was launched to convert it into barracks for the Italian tax police.
During work to build an underground car park, the convent's foundations were excavated, along with the crumbling remains of graves and tombs. The rubble was then dumped into a municipal landfill site on the outskirts of Florence. Giuseppe Pallanti is convinced that Gherardini's remains are interred in the dump, now a grassy mound nearly 31 metres high. He is an expert on da Vinci and has spent 30 years studying the archives trying to establish the model's final resting place.
"Sadly, when the works were carried out in the 1980s no thought was given to the historical importance of the building and its artefacts. "The tombs have all been lost... the material they excavated was disposed of," he said. Pallanti, the author of Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo's Model, added: "It is sad that the tomb of Gherardini has been destroyed without anyone realising it at the time".
The prosaic end to the life of Gherardini has only recently come to light through a fresh building project for the convent site. Florence city council wants to turn the half-built police barracks into a £23mil community arts centre. Surveys of the site have shown that the site was excavated in the 1980s to such a depth that no tombs or other historical artefacts survived. Gherardini is believed to have been born in Florence in 1479.
At the age of 16 she became the second wife of a wealthy silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, and had five children. She moved into the convent after his death, staying there for the last four years of her life. The Mona Lisa portrait, which now hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, was completed by Leonardo in 1506 when she was about 24.