Historian's Research Suggests Remarkable Deep Subsurface Scans Reveal the 'Mona Lisa' Is Not Lisa del Giocondo, but Leonardo Da Vinci's Mother Caterina

MELBOURNE, Australia, Sept. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Advanced new research scanning suggests "Mona Lisa" was originally 40 years older than she appears today, as deep beneath the surface she is 60+ years of age and that Leonardo later "rejuvenated" her to look younger and more beautiful. According to research historian Graeme Cameron, these groundbreaking findings may prove the portrait cannot be of the 24-year-old Lisa del Giocondo but is instead almost certainly Leonardo's 63-year-old mother Caterina, whom Leonardo painted earlier "in Milan around 1493 and later 'rejuvenated.'" This could explain why he kept the painting closely with him until his death, and why his recorded portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, which he painted around 1503 in Florence, is another lost painting and not that at the Louvre.

Subsurface Mona Lisa/Caterina image: http://www.ereleases.com/pic/Subsurface-Mona-Lisa.jpg

Cover of book by Graeme Cameron: http://www.ereleases.com/pic/Graeme-Cameron.jpg

According to Cameron, this new evidence found deep within the painting itself may finally resolve the 500-year-old mystery of the "Mona Lisa's" actual identity, art history's greatest enigma, together with some incredible new research revealing Leonardo's secret working methods. This led to important rediscoveries of his other lost works, including Leonardo's pivotal "Self-portrait from the Year 1500," featured on Cameron's book cover. Other restituted masterpieces revealed through this unique research include a beautiful missing 1512 Raphael painting of "The Judgement of Paris" and an iconic Hans Holbein 1542 portrait of "Elizabeth 1st as a Young Tudor Princess."...