This is a rather fascinating piece.
The Search for the Hidden da Vinci
Mapping Technologies Used Could Lead
To Other Important Art Discoveries
July 11, 2008; Page A8
Florence
It was midnight in the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio here, and scientists were stalking the cold ghost of a vanished masterpiece. Armed with an infrared reflectometer, they searched for hidden traces of a mural by Leonardo da Vinci that helped change the course of Western art. The fabled artwork may be concealed within the walls, masked for centuries by overlays of paint, plaster, brick -- and a thick patina of misinformation.
For 30 years, Maurizio Seracini, a pioneer in forensic art analysis, has been experimenting with noninvasive imaging techniques to find the da Vinci mural -- should it still exist -- without touching or disturbing the equally priceless frescoes painted over it. Dr. Seracini's fascination with da Vinci's missing masterwork -- The Battle of Anghiari -- spurred a revolution in the science of art diagnostics, harnessing an array of medical and military technologies, ranging from radar mapping and X-ray fluorescence to ultrasound probes and ultraviolet scans.
"If we succeed, we will not only have a way to find the Leonardo," Dr. Seracini says, "but we will have a technology that could detect murals world-wide."
The search is expected to climax next year when, with support of the Italian government, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues plan to radiate one wall with a high-energy neutron beam that may reveal the mural for the first time in 450 years.
It is hard to imagine a more public experiment. The building itself is the ancient heart of the city. "You are working in the symbol of the Renaissance in Florence, in a monument that is in use practically every day," Dr. Seracini says. "It is like working on a stage."
In preparation, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues at Editech, the art- and architectural-diagnostics firm he founded in Florence, have been analyzing the building inch by inch. Their pace quickened when a radar scan revealed a gap between the fresco-covered bricks and the original stone wall -- one large enough to preserve anything painted on the older hidden surface.
On this night, art diagnostician Letizia Guffi and architectural historian Stefano Corazzini worked in the cool darkness with an infrared camera, seeking structural features that might have framed the mural. No one actually knows where in the main hall it was located.
The cavernous ceiling loomed like the night sky. Here and there, marble statues cast moon shadows. With their sensors, the scientists looked beyond the present onto an earlier era. "We can see the textures of the old walls, arches and windows under the plaster. We can see if they are bricks or stone because one is cooler than the other," Dr. Guffi says.
The tourists and city functionaries have vanished for the day. The two researchers work in complete darkness. The warmth of even a flashlight beam could wash out the heat-sensitive infrared traces.
Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci's mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo's own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.
In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci's work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: "cerca trova."
Seek; you will find.
Skeptical colleagues discounted the discovery. Yet they were the only words on the six enormous frescoes that cover the walls today. To Dr. Seracini, it could mean only one thing: The da Vinci mural must still be there, concealed behind Vasari's paintings. "We are talking about the masterpiece of the masterpieces of the Renaissance," says Dr. Seracini, "way more important than The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa."
Da Vinci and those who commissioned the work left no direct account as to why the master gave up on the mural. Whatever its technical flaws, the painting's inventiveness and savage passion dazzled artists throughout Europe for a half century before it disappeared from view. "One writer at the time says it is the most beautiful thing in existence, twice as beautiful as the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel," says Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield, a member of the Italian commission overseeing the project.
Dr. Seracini, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, wasn't the first art scholar to be seduced by the mystery of Leonardo's missing mural. No one, however, has pursued it with such technical acumen.
Not long ago, art conservationists had only a trained eye to guide their work. Today, sophisticated scientific techniques are becoming part of every art expert's tool kit. This spring in Vienna, for instance, restorers relied on X-ray fluorescence to analyze the solid gold of a priceless 16th Century sculpture. In France, University of Michigan physicists probed the walls of a 12th Century chapel with nondestructive terahertz beams. In Pittsburgh, NASA scientists used molecules of atomic oxygen to wipe a Warhol painting clean of the lipstick smear left by a vandal's kiss.
Before he turned to art, Dr. Seracini trained in bioengineering at UC San Diego and became expert in medical imaging during postgraduate work in electrical engineering at Padua University. He has used the tools of science to diagnose thousands of major paintings and sculptures -- from Botticelli and Caravaggio to Giotto and Raphael. With ultraviolet imaging, he proved in 2002 that much of a celebrated da Vinci masterwork -- The Adoration of the Magi -- had been painted over by someone else. "For me a work of art is like a patient," Dr. Seracini says.
For the past eight years, private philanthropist Loell Guinness, an heir to the Guinness brewing and banking interests, has underwritten Dr. Seracini's studies through his Swiss-based foundation, the Kalpa Group. "I was fascinated by the use of technology to find and preserve a masterpiece," says Mr. Guinness.
The portable neutron-beam scanner that Dr. Seracini and his team plan to use in the main hall next year is still in development. Months of technical trials are ahead of them.
As they prepare, the scientists take heart from what they know of the artist who covered da Vinci's mural so long ago. A master artist and architect himself, Vasari was loath to destroy the work of another.
Called upon to make major structural changes to the nearby church of Santa Maria Novella, Vasari took pains to preserve its frescoes behind a stone façade, even though he had no reason to expect they would ever again see light of day. Almost 300 years later, they were found by accident during routine church renovations -- in almost pristine condition.
Would Vasari have done any less for a painter he so admired? "We think he would have done the same for the masterpiece of Leonardo," says Dr. Corazzini.