Did Mona Lisa Suffer From High Cholesterol?

Mona Lisa's beauty comes as much from what she's hiding as what she reveals. Who is she looking at? What has triggered that famous smile? Is she even smiling at all?

Art historians have deduced in that singularly mysterious visage everything from a cross-dressing self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci to the knowing glance of an unfaithful wife to the satisfied pride of a pregnant woman. Bob Dylan once even offered up a very 20th century American conclusion on the matter: "Mona Lisa must've had the highway blues."

(See pictures of the Louvre in Paris.)

A Sicilian professor of pathological anatomy has come up with the latest and what is arguably the least poetic explanation imaginable for why Mona Lisa looks the way she does: high cholesterol. Vito Franco of the University of Palermo has spent his spare time applying his medical expertise to the study of famous subjects of Renaissance artworks. And in the first formal collection of his findings, Franco has concluded that the woman who Italians call "La Gioconda" suffered from xanthelasma, the accumulation of cholesterol just under the skin. Franco told the La Stampa daily this week that he spotted clear signs of the condition around Mona Lisa's left eye, as well as evidence of a lipoma, a fatty tissue tumor, on her right hand. Hardly a flattering diagnosis for one of history's most enchanting beauties.

But Franco, who presented his findings at a European congress on human pathology in Florence last fall, says his objective is not to bleed the lyricism out of art but rather to render the lives of the subjects more vivid. "Illness is part of the body, not a metaphysic or supernatural dimension," Vito told La Stampa. "And so in revealing their physicality, the people depicted expose their human vulnerability independently from our awareness of the authors of the work."

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