Mona Lisa's remains 'lie in Florence rubbish tip'

The remains of the Italian woman who was the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa were dug up 30 years ago and now lie in a municipal rubbish tip, an Italian expert has claimed. Lisa Gherardini died in Florence in 1542 and was buried in the grounds of Sant’Orsola convent. Over the centuries the Franciscan convent was used as a tobacco factory and a university teaching facility but in the 1980s a redevelopment was launched to convert it into a barracks for Italy’s tax police, the Guardia di Finanza.

The developers had no knowledge that it was the final resting place of da Vinci’s famous model – that was only discovered in 2007 – and 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 in a municipal landfill site on the outskirts of Florence.
Giuseppe Pallanti, an expert on da Vinci, who has spent 30 years studying the archives trying to establish Lisa Gherardini’s final resting place, is convinced her remains are interred in the dump, now a grassy mound nearly 100ft high.

“The tombs have all been lost,” he said. “Sadly, when the works were carried out in the 1980s no thought was given to the historical importance of the building and its artefacts.

“They just wanted to build new barracks for the Guardia di Finanza and the material they excavated was disposed of.”

Mr Pallanti, the author of “Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo’s Model”, added: “It is sad that the tomb of Lisa Gherardini has been destroyed without anyone realising it at the time”.

The prosaic end to the life of one of the best known figures in art history 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, which has lain semi-derelict and bricked up for years, into a £23 million 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.

“What we found inside is a kind of devastation. All that remains of the old Sant’Orsola convent are the external walls and some fourteenth-century arches,” said an architect on the project, Luigi Ulivieri.

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, with whom she had five children.

She moved into the convent after his death, staying there for the last four years of her life.

She is believed to have died in the convent at the age of 63 in 1542, according to a document unearthed three years ago by Mr Pallanti during his research.

He found a funeral record in a church archive known as a “Book of the Dead” which reads: “Lisa di Francesco del Giocondo, died July 15, 1542 – buried at Sant’Orsola”.

The portrait that came to be known as the Mona Lisa, which now hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris, was completed by Leonardo in 1506 when she was about 24.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8056589/Mona-Lisas-remains-lie-in-Florence-rubbish-tip.html