Lisa

Art history

Limestone, a bridge and a lake. These three together provide the answer to the question of where the landscape behind the Mona Lisa is located. In the province of Lecco. That’s what an Italian researcher says.

What is that landscape behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa? Is it a real location? Or is it pure fantasy? And if it were real, where the hell is it? These are mysterious questions that have been floating around the equally mysterious smile for years. One theory followed another and the story that seemed most likely until now, according to the magazine Cartographica, was the one that linked the background to the Val di Chiana, a valley in Tuscany.

Until now. Because according to The Guardian, a new study has shown otherwise. The Italian art historian and geologist Ann Pizzorusso discovered, based on geological and historical research, that it must be Lecco, a province in the Lake Como region of Lombardy. So in the north of Italy.

Pizzorusso linked the bridge seen on the right of the painting, the mountains and the lake to images she found of the 14th-century Azzone Visconti Bridge against the backdrop of the Alps and Lake Garlate where da Vinci is known to have visited five hundred years ago.

The bridge may have been an important piece of the puzzle, but it wasn’t enough to get where she got. “You can find these kinds of bridges everywhere in Italy,” she told The Guardian. Her geological background made her alert to the rocks in the painting. “Geologists don’t look at paintings and historians don’t look at rocks,” she joked. According to her, the gray-white color that da Vinci gave to the rocks was undeniably the color of limestone, a stone that occurs in combination with a lake in Lecco but not in the other places previously linked to Mona Lisa’s background.

This weekend, Pizzorusso will present her research at a conference in Lecco.