Mona Lisa
Archaeologists began searching Wednesday for the remains of the woman believed to have inspired the Mona Lisa. But one of her descendants said she should be left in peace.
A team of Italian researchers began the hunt for her skeleton beneath a convent in Florence. They hope to gather enough skull fragments to be able to reconstruct her face to determine if she was the inspiration for the portrait.
"My ancestor's remains should be left to rest in peace," said the princess, who is also an actress and winemaker. "What difference would finding her remains make to the allure of Leonardo's painting?
The princess, whose family own an estate near San Gimignano, is a descendant of two noble lines, the Strozzis and the Giucciardinis, and her blood link to Gherardini goes back 15 generations. If the researchers find the remains of a woman of about Gherardini's age - she was 63 when she died in 1542 - they plan to extract DNA from the bones and compare it with that of her children, who are buried nearby.
The team is led by Silvano Vinceti, a self-styled "Sherlock Holmes" of the art history world, who claims to have detected secret codes in the eyes of the Mona Lisa and in the landscape which forms the backdrop to the portrait.
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