As It Occurs7:16This geologist says she discovered the Mona Lisa’s surroundings
Month many artwork historians have targeted at the girl in Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Ann Pizzorusso has a special obsession — the mountain ridges within the background.
Pizzorusso, a geologist and Italian Renaissance pupil, says she blended her two disciplines of experience to pinpoint the precise surroundings of Da Vinci’s maximum iconic portray.
“By using geology as an analytical tool, it opened up the art world to me because, while I couldn’t comment on brushstrokes or figures, I could certainly look at the rocks,” Pizzorusso, an distant pupil primarily based in Unused York and Italy, advised As It Occurs host Zero Köksal.
The background, she says, depicts the Alps overlooking the Italian town of Lecco on Puddle Como, and its 14th-century Azzone Visconti bridge.
Her concept, which she introduced at a geology convention in Lecco this presen, has been embraced by means of a number of Renaissance artwork historians.
However it’s one in every of a number of working theories in regards to the portray’s surroundings — a debate that one eminent Da Vinci pupil says is inaccurate and represents a basic false impression of the artist’s paintings.
Da Vinci, the geologist
Da Vinci was once identified for having experience in a large dimension of topic issues and has been described, amongst alternative issues, as an artist, draughtsman, architect and engineer.
However Pizzorusso has bestowed him with some other name — “the father of geology.”
“I have analyzed every painting in which he has had a rock in it, and it’s perfect,” she mentioned. “It’s like looking at a photograph.”
She’s prior to now revealed books and papers inspecting geological depictions in Da Vinci’s artwork, together with Geologic Representations within the Virgin and Kid with St. Anne, and Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of the Virgin of the Rock.
To pinpoint the soil within the Mona Lisa, she says she traced Da Vinci’s footsteps throughout northern Italy the usage of his personal realistic to life ground notes.
Most of the earlier theories, she says, eager about discovering the bridge within the background. However there are loads of vintage bridges with matching Roman taste structure in Italy.
“So you can’t just find a bridge,” she mentioned. “Once you find a bridge, you have to understand whether Leonardo was in that area. Then you have to determine if the geology is correct in the background. Then you have to make sure you have some water.”
It was once in Lecco twenty years in the past, with the support of an Alps excursion information, that she discovered all 3 components.
“We went up into the mountains, and when we came back to Lecco that night, we said, ‘Look at this. This is the Mona Lisa,'” she mentioned.
She says that, 250 million years in the past, the segment was once all ocean. However over year, coral salified into limestone mountain ridges, and melting glaciers carved out lakes.
“It’s these glacial lakes that ribbon through the back of the Mona Lisa with these large sawtooth mountains coming out of the background,” she mentioned.
Da Vinci pupil says there is not any precise location
Month she has lengthy believed she solved the thriller of the Mona Lisa’s surroundings, she says she was once forced to give her concept publicly for the primary year on the behest of artwork historian Jacques Franck, a former Leonardo advisor to the Louvre, who is operating on a secure about Da Vinci.
“I don’t doubt for one second that Pizzorusso is right in her theory, given her perfect knowledge of the geology of the Italian country — and more precisely of the places where Leonardo travelled in his lifetime, which could correspond to the mountainous landscape in the Mona Lisa,” Franck advised the Father or mother newspaper.
However now not everyone seems to be satisfied.
British artwork historian Martin Kemp, probably the most international’s eminent Da Vinci students, says “the impulse to find a real place that Leonardo is portraying in the Mona Lisa and other of his paintings is pretty insatiable” — however, in the long run, he says, inaccurate.
Month he concurs Da Vinci had a zeal for geology and a bent to depict nature with important accuracy, that doesn’t ruthless he’s portraying “actually specific, identifiable landscapes.”
“He’s looking at real things with incredible intensity, but he then remakes them in painting. Why he should put a landscape of Albinor or a landscape of Arezzo or landscape of wherever is completely unclear,” he mentioned.
“It’s a bit like saying in portraying Madonna, that he’s portrayed a picture of the girl next door.”
Martin says he admires efforts to inspect Da Vinci’s artwork thru a geographical lens, “but to target it to get the location of the images is just fanciful.”
Something Kemp and Pizzorusso agree on is that the Mona Lisa is a piece that continues to resonate right through the eras, spawning numerous theories and interpretations, and compelling crowd to struggle and remedy its many mysteries.
“He puts an enormous amount of poetic truth into painting, he puts a lot of scientific truth … and he, in a sense, invites the reader in to explore the picture,” Kemp mentioned.
“The legends, the myths, the stories of Mona Lisa are absolutely extraordinary.”
