Naked Mona Lisa goes on show in Italy
The mysterious portrait of a semi-nude woman, looking straight at the viewer with an enigmatic smile and with her hands crossed, bears a remarkable resemblance to Leonardo's world famous painting.
Hidden for almost a century within the panelled walls of a library, the portrait appears to have been inspired by the Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris and was painted by the Italian master in the early 1500s.
It will form one of the centrepieces of a new exhibition at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence, where Leonardo was born in 1452.
"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa's iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.
The naked portrait once belonged to Napoleon's ambassador to the Vatican, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, and was rediscovered after being hidden inside the walls of his private library for nearly a century..
Art experts believe the portrait of the topless woman was probably not painted by da Vinci, but that the artist may have painted a similar picture, now lost, which then inspired one of his imitators to create this work...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
Hidden for almost a century within the panelled walls of a library, the portrait appears to have been inspired by the Mona Lisa, which hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris and was painted by the Italian master in the early 1500s.
It will form one of the centrepieces of a new exhibition at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, near Florence, where Leonardo was born in 1452.
"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa's iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.
The naked portrait once belonged to Napoleon's ambassador to the Vatican, Cardinal Joseph Fesch, and was rediscovered after being hidden inside the walls of his private library for nearly a century..
Art experts believe the portrait of the topless woman was probably not painted by da Vinci, but that the artist may have painted a similar picture, now lost, which then inspired one of his imitators to create this work...