DNA test on family could confirm Mona Lisa model's identity

Samples to be taken at Florence church on April 29

(ANSA) - Florence, April 24 - Italian experts on April 29 will be taking DNA samples from the remains of family members of Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo at a family tomb inside Florence's Santissima Annunziata church to determine whether she was the sitter for Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, local authorities said on Thursday.

The samples will be taken by forensic anthropologists Giorgio Gruppioni and Antonio Moretti together with experts who are testing bones taken at a convent in the Tuscan capital where the wife of wealthy Florentine merchant Francesco Del Giocondo died in the mid-16th century. The family tomb in the Santissima Annunziata church holds the remains of Francesco Del Giocondo and the couple's children.

The tests on bones exhumed in 2012 aim to find out whether they date back to the same period as that of the model who sat for what would become the world's most famous painting, whose enigmatic half-smile thrills visitors to Paris's Louvre museum. The skeleton's DNA will be compared with that about to be taken from the remains of Gherardini's children. If there is a match, the woman portrayed by the Renaissance master, will be identified at last.