Da Vinci's Mona Lisa captured a disease that was not medically discovered for 346 years

Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance Master whose works continue to influence modern creative, engineering, and digital fields, unknowingly captured a disease that wasn't medically described for another three centuries. His most famous work, Mona Lisa, also known as La Gioconda or La Joconde, shows two clear signs of a hereditary cholesterol disorder. Apparently, Lisa Gherardini, the subject of the painting, died at the age of 37, and a nearly two-decade-old paper states that her early death likely proves that she was suffering from it. The tell-tale signs are visible in the painting: a yellowish, irregular patch in the inner corner of her left upper eyelid, and a swelling on the back of her right hand. They are both typical physical markers associated with familial hypercholesterolemia (FH). This condition is linked to the presence of a defective gene in the body that doesn't allow low-density lipoprotein (LDL, or “bad” cholesterol) to be flushed out.

A 2008 scientific paper published in Current Cardiology Reviews talks about these two physical anomalies present in the Mona Lisa. The patch near the eye is what modern medicine calls xanthelasma, while the approximately three-centimetre-long swelling near the index finger is a lipoma or xanthoma. While the Mona Lisa was painted in 1506, the generic disorder got a formal clinical description in 1852. Leiv Ose of the Rikshospitalet in Oslo, the author of the paper, stated that the portrait is probably the first recorded evidence of familial hypercholesterolemia, over three centuries before science gave it a name.

Also Read: Leonardo da Vinci pulled off gravity genius two centuries before Newton, study reveals

Ose says that the presence of these lesions in a woman between 25 and 30 years old is not a coincidence. The disease linked to cholesterol is known to manifest at an early age. Gherardini died at the age of 37, although the exact cause remains unknown. However, the scientist believes that her death at a young age is consistent with the elevated cardiovascular risk associated with the condition.

Also Read: 500-year-old Leonardo da Vinci sketch of a flying machine can solve a major drone issue

Another painting also revealed the deadly disease

The paper further states that the Mona Lisa is not the only portrait to reveal signs of this disease. Dutch master Frans Hals's 1663 Portrait of an Old Woman shows xanthoma lesions on the back of the hand of a 60-year-old woman. However, the eyelid marker is missing. She likely inherited only one defective copy of the relevant gene, which meant only one marker was present. Today, several people take cholesterol medication belonging to a class of drugs known as statins. They weren't made until the 1900s. Physician Carl Müller was the first person to identify in 1937 that elevated cholesterol was linked to heart disease. Then, in 1971, Japanese scientist Akira Endo started screening thousands of microbial strains, and his work ultimately led to the invention of mevastatin, a drug that came before statins. So technically, da Vinci revealed familial hypercholesterolemia to the world over four centuries before it was diagnosed and treated.