A younger vision of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” will be presented in Geneva on Thursday with the suggestion that it is the original version of what has been called the world’s most famous painting. The Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation organizing the event said on Wednesday that detailed research over three decades strongly indicates that it is an earlier portrayal by the Italian genius of “the lady with the mystic smile.”
“We have investigated this painting from every relevant angle and the accumulated information all points to it being an earlier version of the Giaconda in the Louvre,” foundation member and art historian Stanley Feldman In Italy and France, the one currently recognized Leonardo “Mona Lisa” is known as “La Giaconda” or “La Joconde” after Lisa Gherardini, wife of early 16th century Italian nobleman Francesco del Giacondo who commissioned a portrait of her. But Leonardo never delivered it to him. The portrait to be presented to experts and media in Geneva shows a woman appearing to be in her early 20s — rather than the early 30s of the Louvre painting — in the same pose and with much the same enigmatic stare as the Louvre masterpiece.
