Ann Pizzorusso says she has tracked down the background landscape of the world’s most famous painting
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 northern Italy’s Lombardy region.
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 southwestern 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.
