Where’s the Mona Lisa? In Eastern Tuscany, Of Course

It is a landscape as enigmatic as her famous smile.

Behind the Mona Lisa, the Western world’s best-known portrait subject, Leonardo da Vinci painted a fantastical topography of jagged mountains, a misty lake and a winding river. The only human-made object in sight is a rustic bridge off Mona Lisa’s shoulder. The landscape so enchanted one critic that he proclaimed that it could be viewed only through a telescope trained on Leonardo’s mind.

Other scholars, however, refuse to believe that Leonardo invented a fictional backdrop to the very real portrait, especially because he was an ardent student of nature and conveyor of detail. (Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer, considered the features of the model so awesomely vivid that “on looking closely at the pit of her throat, one could swear that the pulses were beating.”) There have been plenty of claims for the location, as cities and regions vie to call Leonardo their own. Mainly the sites are in the Italian Alps, with few, curiously enough, in Leonardo’s home province of Tuscany.

Now a pair of amateur art sleuths claim that the landscape is as real as Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, the Mona Lisa herself. They have combined simple observation, historical research and computer technology to pinpoint the location of the landscape: in eastern Tuscany, practically in view of a superhighway near Arezzo, 40 miles southeast of Florence. And the site, the researchers fear, will soon be partly flooded when the level of a nearby dam is raised.

In an upcoming article, Carlo Starnazzi, a University of Florence paleontologist, says the lake to the left of the painting is Lake Chiana; what seems to be a winding road is a canal that links the lake to the Arno River; to the right is the Burgiano Bridge, a medieval stone structure that spans the Arno and is still open to traffic.

And the mysterious peaks? Not mountains at all, but a group of eroded hills unique to Tuscany--which also happen to stand near Arezzo. “It’s all right here within a few miles of each other. And Leonardo knew this area intimately,” said Starnazzi, who has been formulating his argument for two years.

Starnazzi began his research after a friend, lawyer Cesare Mafuzzi, surmised that the Burgiano Bridge was the one painted in the “Mona Lisa.” Looking south, the Chiana canal enters above the bridge much as a stream seems to enter the river in the painting. The lake in the painting appears to be in the same position as the lake in real life.

But how might Leonardo have gotten such an interesting view? Starnazzi discovered that an old castle once stood about 1 1/2 miles from the bridge, and he decided that Leonardo would probably have surveyed the terrain from it. Starnazzi then rigged up computer models to approximate how the area might have looked from the castle vantage point. It looks, he said, pretty much like the scene in “Mona Lisa.”

Some experts are skeptical. John Sherman, a Renaissance art professor at Harvard University, points out that the kind of landscape painted by Leonardo had precedents in works by previous artists. “I don’t want to dismiss it, but I have heard such claims before. It doesn’t really seem to bear any relation to any place on Earth,” he said.

Art and culture are to Italy what oil is to Saudi Arabia--but unlike oil, these resources are potentially inexhaustible. They attract tourists by the millions and dollars by the billions. All Italy has to do is preserve its heritage, but that is becoming difficult--particularly where the Italian landscape and cityscape themselves are a kind of artwork.

The mayor of Rome has put the Spanish Steps off-limits to ice cream eaters. Venice is considering plans to curtail visitors, including charging a fee to enter the city.

Now comes the question of preserving this scene. If the Burgiano Bridge proves to be the heart of the “Mona Lisa” landscape, it would pose a problem for dam engineers. The dam is supposed to protect Florence from flooding. Citizens of Arezzo are pressing the regional government to spend money to dredge sediment rather than raise the dam’s level.

“It’s bad enough to cover up a medieval bridge,” Starnazzi said. “It would be worse to cover up part of ‘Mona Lisa.’ ”