Lisa Gherardini was born in May 1479, and is thought to have been the second wife of Del Giocondo, a wealthy silk merchant, with whom she had five children. Giuseppe Pallanti found a death notice in the archives of a church in Florence that referred to "the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, deceased July 15, 1542, and buried at Sant'Orsola," the Italian press reported. Lisa was ill and windowed when she died at age 63. Sant'Orsola is near the San Lorenzo basilica. It is now in ruins.
"It was in this convent that Mona Lisa placed her youngest daughter Marietta, who later became a nun. And it was there that Lisa, as stipulated in the will of her husband who died four years before her, ended her life," Pallanti told the daily La Repubblica on Friday.
Even in death, Lisa was famous. Records show that the whole parish tuirned out for her funeral.
It is thought that the final resting place for Lisa Gherardini's remains has been found. Scientists plan to use modern techniques to determine her physical appearance to unambiguously establish her identity.
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I was at the National Gallery one afternoon, long ago, when I became entranced by a simple portrait from the Northern Renaissance. I would stand and stare at her, and she back at me. I ended up revisiting her on three separate occasions that day. On the final visit, late in the afternoon, while gazing into her eyes, it struck me that I had been having this intimate relationship, there's no other word for it, with a woman who had been dead for 500 years.
The power of art, I guess.
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