Location found

Mystery of the background of the “Mona Lisa” solved?

The "Mona Lisa" is a world-famous oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci.

(Bild: AFP/Kenzo Tribouillard)

More than five centuries have passed since the "Mona Lisa" was created, but the painting is still causing a stir. An art historian and geologist now claims to have solved the mystery surrounding the landscape in Leonardo da Vinci's portrait.

The geologist and Renaissance specialist Ann Pizzorusso believes she has found the background to the painting in the northern Italian town of Lecco. "When I came to Lecco, I realized that the Mona Lisa was painted here," she said of the small town on Lake Como, which was previously best known as the setting for Alessandro Manzoni's masterpiece "The Betrothed".

According to her, the arched bridge depicted in Leonardo da Vinci's painting is the 14th-century Ponte Azzone Visconti, although previous theories had linked it to similar structures in other Italian towns such as Arezzo and Bobbio.

"Geology was wrong in other hypotheses"
Pizzorusso is not the first person to claim to have solved the mystery. "But the bridge was not the most important aspect of the painting for me," she said. "With the other hypotheses, the geology was wrong." She now believes she has found the spot from which the background was painted. "If you look at the Mona Lisa, you see this part of the Adda River and another lake behind it, perfectly depicted under these sawtooth mountains."

Just a year ago, other experts gave a press conference in Rome at which they identified the landscape in the background of the painting as the Romito Bridge in Laterina in the Tuscan province of Arezzo. The president of the Italian Committee for the Valorization of the Historical Cultural and Environmental Heritage, historian Silvano Vinceti, also supports this thesis. The expert dispute therefore still does not seem to have been settled.

Picture hangs in the Louvre Art Museum in Paris
The "Mona Lisa" is a world-famous oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci from the height of the Italian Renaissance at the beginning of the 16th century. The original painting has been on display in the Louvre Art Museum in Paris since the end of the 18th century and is considered one of his most famous exhibits.