Art lovers have long debated many things about the Mona Lisa — why she's smiling, how best to install the work, how to beat the long lines to see it — but now there's a new topic of contention: who she even is.

According to Italian historian Roberto Zapperi, Leonardo da Vinci's "La Giocondo" does not depict Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a Florentine merchant, as generally assumed, but rather shows Pacifica Brandani, one of Julien de Médicis's many lovers. Zapperi says that the minutes of a meeting between Leonardo and Cardinal Louis d'Aragon show that the artist presented the cardinal with three paintings, including the Mona Lisa, and that the work is a portrait of Brandani commissioned by Medicis. Zapperi says that Brandani has long been known to experts, but that they generally favor the version of events put forth by Giorgio Vasari in 1550, which posits that the image is of Lisa del Giocondo, who Zapperi says "did not even know Julien de Médicis.”