The mystery of the personality of the woman depicted in the world famous painting "Mona Lisa" ("La Gioconda") by the great Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci continues to excite the minds of researchers. A few years ago, the head of the Italian National Committee for the Protection of Cultural Heritage Silvano Vincheti suggested that the painting depicts not the wife of a Florentine merchant Lisa del Giocondo (Lisa Gherardini), as most experts believe, but a young apprentice Leonardo named Gian Giacomo Caprotti, with whom the artist allegedly was in a love affair.
Vincheti partially revised this hypothesis and now puts forward a version that the creature on the canvas is an androgyne, combining male and female characteristics, reports The Telegraph. According to the researcher, in the portrait, the artist captured both the features of Lisa Gherardini and his alleged lover Gian Giacomo Caprotti, better known by the nickname Salai (Devil).
According to Vincheti, he came to this conclusion after examining La Gioconda, written around 1503-1505, using infrared radiation. He claims that Mona Lisa's nose, forehead and smile are strikingly similar to the images in Leonardo's paintings, for which Salai posed. Among them are images of John the Baptist and a sketch for this painting "Angel in the Flesh", which depicts a naked young man with an erect penis.
“Mona Lisa is androgynous, half male, half female,” Silvano Vincheti told The Telegraph. According to him, Leonardo used two models for the painting - Lisa Gherardini and his student Salai.
It is known from the biography of Leonardo that Salai appeared in the artist's house on July 22, 1490 as a ten-year-old boy. The painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari mentioned the extraordinary visual appeal of the young apprentice. Salai worked as Leonardo's assistant for the next 20 years.
Vincheti's hypothesis of the androgyny of Mona Lisa was met with skepticism by one of the world's leading experts on Leonardo, the honorary professor of art history at the University of Oxford, Martin Kemp. According to him, using the method of infrared radiation, it is impossible to prove the hypothesis that Leonardo drew a creature that at the same time looks like Lisa Gherardini and Salai.
Recall that in 2011, at the initiative of Silvano Vincheti, the search for the grave of Mona Lisa began. Last fall, Italian scientists announced the likely discovery of the remains of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo, who is believed to have commissioned her portrait from Leonardo da Vinci. However, they could not accurately determine the identity of the remains, since modern technologies do not allow comparing the DNA of these bone fragments with samples taken from the remains of the children of Mona Lisa.
There are a large number of versions about the personality of the woman depicted in Leonardo's canvas. Thus, the researcher Carla Glory believes that Leonardo wrote the daughter of the Duke of Milan, Bianca Sforza. Hypotheses have been put forward according to which "La Gioconda" is a self-portrait of da Vinci himself. German art historians believe that the famous painting depicts the Italian Countess Caterina Sforza, one of the most famous courtesans of the Renaissance.
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Two years ago, the Italian historian and short story writer Angelo Paratico stated that Leonardo's mother was a Chinese slave and it was her that the artist depicted in his famous painting.