(FOX News) – Lisa Gherardini is coming closer to emerging from the grave. The
remains of the woman believed to have inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa
likely are about to be exhumed by researchers.

The announcement, at a news conference in Florence, follows the discovery of
another skeleton, the fourth since the bone hunt began last year — beneath an
altar in the church of the now-derelict Convent of St. Orsola.

"The skeleton doesn’t belong to the Mona Lisa, but it’s hinting to her burial. Indeed,
she might be just underneath," Silvano Vinceti, president of a private organization
known as the National Committee for the Promotion of Historic and Cultural Heritage,
told a news conference on Wednesday.

Vinceti’s ambitious project aims to possibly reconstruct Lisa’s face in order to see
if her features match that of the iconic painting hanging at the Louvre Museum in
Paris.

Self-portrait of Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci