Leonardo DiCaprio or Da Vinci? Fox News presenter accidentally credits actor

Gherardini lived out her final years a widower in a convent in Florence, where she died and was likely buried in 1542.

Vincenti said it may take several more years with improved technology and new sources of DNA to definitely say Gherardini is Mona Lisa.

Art historians differ on who might have been the enigmatically smiling model.

However, the researchers stopped short of announcing that the mystery was completely solved, as the state of the children’s remains was too degraded due to flooding over the centuries to allow DNA comparison with the bones found in Gherardini’s resting place.

The bone shards were “fragmented, very deteriorated”, he said.

One a leading artist and intellectual of the Italian Renaissance period, another still awaiting that elusive Oscar, Smith made the slip up of mixing up his Leonardos when introducing a segment about the Mona Lisa.

The researchers began exhuming skeletons in 2011 in the hope of finding her remains, unearthing a dozen in the process, according to Giorgio Gruppioni, anthropology professor at the University of Bologna.

Head researcher Silvano Vinceti said unfortunately there are few remains, and no skull, which might have helped determine if the woman could have been Leonardo’s model for the portrait, which is in the Louvre in Paris.

It has all the ingredients of a Dan Brown thriller – an ancient crypt, a collection of human bones, a passionate sleuth and Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting.

For now, the research has come to a halt, its results as intriguing and enigmatic as Mona Lisa’s famous smile.