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.
The similarities are undeniable, she said. “I’m so excited about this. I really feel it’s a home run.”
Previous theories have included a 2011 claim that a bridge and a road in the Mona Lisa belong to Bobbio, a small town in northern Italy, and a 2023 finding that Leonardo had painted a bridge in the province of Arezzo.
But focusing on the bridge, she said, wasn’t enough. “The arched bridge was ubiquitous throughout Italy and Europe and many looked very similar. It is impossible to identify an exact location from a bridge alone. They all talk about the bridge and nobody talks about the geology.
“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.”
She noted that the rocks in Lecco are limestone and that Leonardo depicted his rocks in a grey-white colour – “which is perfect, because that’s the type of rock that’s there”. She added that, unlike Lecco, neither Bobbio nor Arezzo has a lake: “So we have really perfect evidence at Lecco.”
Her previous Leonardo research has involved studying both versions of the Virgin of the Rocks – the one in the Louvre in Paris, and the replica in the National Gallery in London. Until 2010, the National Gallery believed the one it had was mainly the work of assistants but, after restoring it, declared it possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself.
Pizzorusso’s analysis of the vegetation and geology in the landscape around the central figures revived the debate. She concluded: “The botany in the Louvre version is perfect, showing plants that would have thrived in a moist, dark grotto. But the plants in the London version are inaccurate. Some don’t exist in nature.”
She noted that Leonardo had always impressed on his students the importance of depicting nature accurately. For her latest Mona Lisa research, she visited Lecco, tracing Leonardo’s footsteps: “We know from his notebooks that he spent a lot of time exploring the Lecco area and the territory further north.”
Michael Daley, director of watchdog ArtWatch UK, said of Pizzorusso’s findings: “Because she has bona fide scientific knowledge, when she notices things in Leonardo – the most scientific artist ever – they’re momentous.
“Art historians all speculate on where the Mona Lisa was painted. Anybody who sees a bridge thinks it was there. But Pizzorusso has compellingly pinned down the location with proof of Leonardo’s presence in the area, its geology and, of course, a bridge.”
Jacques Franck, a former Leonardo consultant to the Louvre, said: “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.”
This weekend Pizzorusso will present her evidence at a geology conference in Lecco.
“I am actually euphoric about these findings – and there is a near-certain possibility that Leonardo painted [the landscape] from the exact spot where we are holding our conference,” she said.
