Displaying items by tag: silvano vinceti

Four hundred and four years after his death, the remains of Caravaggio will be buried near the Tuscan coastal town of Porto Ercole in a memorial park due to open on 18 July. Mystery surrounded the circumstances of Caravaggio’s death for centuries. Porto Ercole had been identified as the artist’s final resting place, but the whereabouts of his body was not known until Silvano Vinceti, the president of the Caravaggio Foundation, and a team of experts discovered the artist's remains in a local church in 2010.

The Italian art historian Silvano Vinceti announced that he will run a series of DNA tests on a skeleton that could be the remains of Lisa Gheradini, a Florentine woman believed to be the sitter for Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa." Vinceti is attempting to link the skeleton, which was found in a convent in Florence, to the bones of Gheradini’s relatives buried in a nearby chapel. The results should be ready in May or June.

It is believed that Gheradini’s husband, Francesco Del Giocondo, commissioned the portrait to celebrate either his wife’s pregnancy or the purchase of a house around 1502 and 1503. After Del Giocondo’s death, Gheradini became a nun. She died in 1542 at the age of 63 and was said to be buried near the Sant’Orsola convent’s altar. Her family tomb was opened up last August for the first time in centuries in hopes of identifying the model in da Vinci’s painting.  

It is widely believed that "Mona Lisa" was painted sometime between 1503 and 1506, when da Vinci was living in Florence. It now hangs in the Louvre in Paris, where it remains a star attraction.