World Still Safe from Zombie Mona Lisa [They Dug Up the Wrong Body]
Our Adorable Past
Attention, art history fans: Mona Lisa’s skeleton has not been found. Or, rather, the skeleton recently exhumed by art historian/researcher Silvano Vinceti, thought to have belonged to Mona Lisa model Lisa del Giocondo, in fact belonged to a different long-term resident of the Ursuline convent that is supposedly the final resting place of Leonardo da Vinci‘s muse.
Marina “We Can Go Ahead and Re-Bury Her Now” Del Riccio is actually the fourth non-Mona Lisa to have been exhumed from the convent by Vincenti and his team, and in all likelihood she won’t be the last, since there are plenty more graves (stacked on top of each other in a Big Mac of death at this particular convent) for the archaeologist and his team to dig up.
If del Giocondo’s remains are found, scientists could use facial reconstruction technology to try and determine what she actually looked like—because da Vinci being dead for almost 500 years is no reason not to fact-check him. Though there are those who have expressed doubt as to what the whole point of this whole quest is—facial reconstruction technology isn’t necessarily all that accurate, and anyway knowledge of what del Giocondo may have looked like won’t have any impact on the painting itself… plus the whole digging-up-graves-until-they-find-the-right-one thing is maybe a bit icky and disrespectful—but I prefer to think that there’s actually some sort of treasure map buried along with del Giocondo, and Vincenti is just a modern-day archaeologist/explorer à la Indiana Jones. National Treasure: Italia, anyone?
(Source: The Huffington Post)
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