Mona Lisa’s mysteries: how geology helps determine Leonardo’s location. From the article:
The landscape behind Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has sparked endless debate, with some art historians suggesting the view was imaginary and idealised, and others claiming various links to specific Italian locations.
Now a geologist and Renaissance art historian believes she has finally solved the mystery in one of the world’s most famous paintings. Ann Pizzorusso has combined her two fields of expertise to suggest that Leonardo painted several recognisable features of Lecco, on the shores of Lake Como in the Lombardy region of northern Italy.
Pizzorusso has matched Leonardo’s bridge, the mountain range and the lake in the Mona Lisa to Lecco’s 14th-century Azzone Visconti bridge, the south-western Alps overlooking the area and Lake Garlate, which Leonardo is known to have visited 500 years ago….
“Geologists don’t look at paintings and art historians don’t look at geology,” she added. “Art historians said Leonardo always used his imagination, but you can give this picture to any geologist in the world and they’ll say what I’m saying about Lecco. Even a non-geologist can now see the similarities.”
For other posts on Leonardo da Vinci, see here.
While the recent interdisciplinary fusion of art interpretation and geology has illuminated the location
of the origin of the Mona Lisa, this was only possible owing to da Vinci’s own visionary studies on rock and water formations, which gave rise to the science of geology itself. Nor was the location of these studies first identified by academia but by Leonardo’s younger contemporary Dürer who went to study da Vinci’s work on two visits to the shores of Lake Como, which inspired his own landscape artwork, ‘Quarry’.