'Mona Lisa' claim draws skepticism

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ROME

It may be that the world's most famously enigmatic woman has shed some of her mystery.

An amateur historian believes he has found the final resting place of the Florentine Renaissance woman who inspired Leonardo da Vinci's renowned "Mona Lisa."

Giuseppe Pallanti, a high school economics teacher from Florence who has written a book about the "Mona Lisa," has unearthed a death certificate that shows the woman believed by some to have inspired the artist, Lisa Gherardini, died on July 15, 1542, in Florence and is buried in a convent in the center of the Tuscan city.

"Maybe Leonardo chose a woman like many others. She was not a noblewoman, or a princess. She was a family woman," Mr. Pallanti said Friday.

Gherardini was born in 1479 and married a rich silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo. She has been linked to the painting -- known in Italian as "La Gioconda" -- because Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century artist and biographer of da Vinci and other artists, wrote that da Vinci painted a portrait of del Giocondo's wife.

In addition, del Giocondo was a neighbor and acquaintance of the artist's father, Piero da Vinci, Mr. Pallanti says.

"I'm not taking a stance, I'm not an art historian," he says, "but it's hard to believe that Vasari lied."

Alessandro Vezzosi, a da Vinci expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, says Mr. Pallanti is a respected researcher whose work sheds light on Gherardini. However, he says, she was not the woman depicted in the work that hangs in Paris' Louvre Museum.

"There is a basic mistake, to say that this is the real Gioconda," Mr. Vezzosi says.