MIAMI — Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is one of the best-acknowledged artworks in the earth, renowned for its splendor as well as the thriller bordering the identity of the product and the site painted guiding her.
A resource of debate for hundreds of years, the village of Ponte Buriano, a suburb of Arezzo in the Tuscany location of Italy, is so persuaded the bridge behind Mona Lisa is the Ponte Buriano that they have designed it a key function of their regional tourism marketing campaign, even laying declare to the bridge on the village’s welcome sign.
But now, historian Silvano Vinceti says that the bridge at the rear of Mona Lisa is really the Romito Bridge in the close by Tuscan city of Laterina.
“The distinctive form of the Arno [River] alongside that extend of territory corresponds to what Leonardo portrayed in the landscape to the left of the female depicted in the renowned portray,” Vinceti stated at a media conference at the International Press Affiliation in Rome on Wednesday.
Vinceti also produced a digital reconstruction of the bridge to clearly show the similarities, and drew on documents from the condition archives in Florence.
The “Mona Lisa” was painted in the early 16th century.
Involving 1501 and 1503 Da Vinci lived with Cardinal Cesare Borgia in the vicinity of Laterina, Vinceti observed. The bridge was in use and had four arches — as depicted in the artwork.
On the other hand, the Buriano bridge has six arches, Vinceti claimed, and Ponte Bobbio, a bridge in Piacenza that some say capabilities in the painting, has much more than six arches.
The Romito bridge joined Arezzo, Fiesole and Florence but is now in ruins. Vinceti said he examined drone photos of the river banking institutions, the ruins and photos about the yrs to determine that the “Etruscan-Roman Romito bridge is unmistakably” the a person in the track record.
Laterina mayor Simona Neri was also in attendance at the press meeting and is fired up about the prospect of declaring the bridge to deliver tourists to her city of 3,500 persons.
“We definitely hope that this great information will intrigue and fascinate regional and overseas vacationers, with the understanding that it will be a terrific chance to relaunch the tourism of our territory on which we can do the job a great deal commencing from naturalistic, cultural and monumental valuation,” she explained.
“We have to have to consider to safeguard what is actually still left of the bridge, which will demand funding,” Neri claimed, noting that there are money out there for most spots tied to Da Vinci and other masters.
“There’ll be some rivalry we will need to place a poster up, way too,” she included.
Da Vinci’s 16th century masterpiece is now housed at the Louvre in the Paris, in which it is noticed by tens of millions of visitors every single 12 months. But industry experts say it owes its world fame to the truth that it was stolen from the gallery by Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911, instead than any creative singularity.
“If a unique a person of Leonardo’s functions had been stolen, then that would have been the most renowned operate in the earth — not the ‘Mona Lisa,'” Noah Charney, professor of artwork heritage and creator of “The Thefts of the Mona Lisa,” stated in 2013, which marked the 100-year anniversary of when the painting was recovered.
“There was very little that genuinely distinguished it per se, other than it was a pretty excellent do the job by a really popular artist — which is until it was stolen,” he added. “The theft is what actually skyrocketed its appeal and created it a family name.”
