Leonardo's Mona Lisa inspired by literary images

Throughout the centuries, art historians have speculated over Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Mona Lisa; the famous portrait with its rather enigmatic smile and mysterious landscape behind the sitter has always triggered the strangest conjectures; conjectures, mind you, without any firm evidence or proof.

So after having read in the newspapers that Leonardo probably hid in the painting two numbers (7 and 2) indicating the date of the appalling flood which destroyed the bridge of Bobbio in Emilia (art historian Carla Glori believes that the Italian master depicted that very bridge in the background), we now have to consider a new and even more exciting conjecture; in fact according to Ross Kilpatrick, professor emeritus of Classics at Queen’s University in Canada, Leonardo painted not a real landscape but one inspired by two great poets of the past: Horace and Petrarch; apparently their poems – Horace’s Ode 1.

22 and some of Petrarch’s sonnets – hold the key to this age-old secret.
Orazio e Petrarca, nuove rivelazioni sulla Gioconda di Leonardo