Mona-Lisa Exhumed.

Florence's oldest noble families, said that searching for and exhuming the remains of Lisa Gherardini was "a sacrilegious act". Gherardini was the wife of a rich Florentine silk merchant and is believed by many art historians to have been the model for Leonardo da Vinci's best known painting, which today hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. They plan to start excavating the site early next month, with the dig expected to take two weeks. If they find the remains of a woman of about Gherardini's age – she was 63 when she died in 1542 – they plan to extract DNA from the bones and compare it with the DNA of her children, who are buried in a nearby church. The team is led by Silvano Vinceti, a self-styled "Sherlock Holmes" of the art history world who claims to have detected secret codes in the eyes of the Mona Lisa and in the landscape which forms the backdrop to the portrait, although his theories have been dismissed by other scholars.

Natalia Guicciardini Strozzi, a member of one of a team of Italian researchers began the hunt for her skeleton beneath a convent in Florence, using ground-penetrating radar to search for evidence of old tombs. They hope to find Lisa Gherardini's remains and to gather enough skull fragments to be able to reconstruct her face. That would enable a comparison to be made with the Mona Lisa to determine once and for all whether Lisa Gherardini was the inspiration for the portrait – an objective that some scholars have said is far-fetched. "My ancestor's remains should be left to rest in peace," said the princess, who is also an actress, winemaker and former ballerina. "What difference would finding her remains make to the allure of Leonardo's painting? The attempt to find her bones seems to me an inappropriate and sacrilegious act." The princess's family own an estate near San Gimignano, the Tuscan village known as the "medieval Manhattan" for the 72 stone towers built by competing families during the Middle Ages, of which 13 remain.

She is a descendant of two noble lines, the Strozzis and the Giucciardinis, and Niccolo Machiavelli worked as a secretary to one of her ancestors. The Strozzis were enemies of the Medicis and the two dynasties jostled for power in Renaissance Florence. Another ancestor, a noblewoman, took drawing lessons from Michelangelo. The princess's blood link to Lisa Gherardini goes back 15 generations. The team of researchers will spend three days using the radar to analyse to a depth of 10ft the soil beneath the cloisters and chapels of the deconsecrated Convent of St Ursula, which is in a state of disrepair.