Spanish curators identified Wednesday what they think is the earliest ever copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

It was an art heist for the ages: On August 21 1911, the Mona Lisa vanished from the main gallery of the Louvre museum, lifted by an Italian labourer.

Italian researchers will dig up bones in a Florence convent to try to identify the remains of a Renaissance woman long believed to be the Mona Lisa.

Rembrandt and Rubens may be turning in their graves. The latest show at the venerable Louvre sees blood, bones and beetles cohabiting with the grand masters of the Dutch, Flemish and German schools. France's biggest museum has invited a contemporary artist to show works "in counterpoint" with those of the old masters.

German academics believe they have solved the centuries-old mystery behind the identity of the Mona Lisa in Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait. Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, has long been seen as the most likely model for the sixteenth-century painting.

Like the Mona Lisa, she has a strange allure; the almost sad eyes looking at you across 2,15-million years. A lifelike bust shows what one of South Africa's most famous fossils, Mrs Ples, probably looked like. The bust, reconstructed by French artist Elisabeth Daynes, goes on display for the first time in Pretoria from Friday.