Giuseppe Pallanti, a teacher from Florence who has spent 25

years researching the city's archives, has discovered the first clear
evidence that da Vinci's family was closely connected to the silk
trader, Ser Francesco del Giocondo, who married Lisa Gherardini in
1495. He has been praised by other scholars for helping to solve the
Mona Lisa mystery.

Giuseppe Pallanti, following Giorgio Vasari's lead, bases his work on

a meticulous and in-depth review of archival materials in attributing
a name to one of the most iconic faces in art history: Lisa
Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The author looks beyond
the myth enshrouding one of the absolute masterpieces of
Leonardo's genius, and gives us Mona Lisa as an authentic and living
woman. With his engaging and casual style, he has reconstructed
her personal and historical dimension. The revelation of the
mysterious identity of the model, hidden up until now and object of
the most disparate and far-fetched hypotheses, certainly takes
nothing away from the enigmatic quality of that "smile". It becomes
even more fascinating to us after we have been immersed in the
world of her affections and read her husband's will, palpably imbued
with a genuine love for his "cherished wife". The beauty of her spirit
now seems even more radiant than the external beauty eternalized
by Leonardo.

Lisa Gherardini was a young mother, generous and "noble in

spirit," according to her husband, Francesco del Giocondo. But
was she "Mona Lisa" as the 16th-century Florentine painter and
architect Giorgio Vasari claimed? For centuries Gherardini reigned
as the undisputed model for da Vinci's iconic portrait until its 1911

theft from the Louvre and 1913 recovery spurred new critical
debates that continue today over the sitter's identity.
Author Giuseppe Pallanti remains firmly in the Vasari camp and
seeks to reinstate Gherardini as the famous face by
reconstructing her daily life through archival accounts of
Florentine records and correlating them to da Vinci. To support his
argument, Pallanti scoured Florence's Archivio di Stato, Archivio
Notarile and the Archivio dell'Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. "The
testimonies and documents collected here seem to clarify the
question," Pallanti asserts, "making it difficult not to side with
Vasari's supporters and the thesis in favor of Mona Lisa."