Image: Peter Paul Rubens' copy of The Battle of Anghiari. (Wikimedia Commons).
After 35 years of noninvasive research, art experts have turned to rather drastic methods to solve a longstanding Leonardo da Vinci mystery.
Putting aside the state-of-the-art technologies employed in the past decades, the researchers have simply drilled a hole into a frescoed wall that they believe hides a long-lost da Vinci masterpiece known as the "Battle of Anghiari."
"We are finally in the condition to put to an end a great research. In the next two-three months, one of art history's greatest mysteries will be solved once and for all," Matteo Renzi, the mayor of Florence, said.
Unfortunately, the drill wasn't performed on an ordinary wall. Standing in Palazzo Vecchio, Florence's 14th-century city hall, in the imposing Hall of Five Hundred, the wall houses a mural known as the "Battle of Marciano." It was painted by the renowned 15th-century painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari.
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Maurizio Seracini, director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, is convinced that Leonardo's lost work lies right behind that Vasari wall.
The long-lost fresco, which Seracini has been searching for since the 1970s, has a mysterious history. It was conceived in 1503, when Leonardo and Michelangelo received twin commissions to paint on opposite walls of the Palazzo Vecchio.
Both murals were to represent historic Florentine victories, and the commissions re-enforced the intense rivalry between the two artists.
While Michelangelo never got past a sketch of his "Battle of Cascina," Leonardo began to paint the ''Battle of Anghiari" on June 6, 1505, when he was 53. The mural would celebrate the Florentines' victory over Milanese troops in 1440.
In his 1550 book Lives of the Artists, Vasari (1511-1574) reported that Leonardo painted only a portion of the 12- by 15-foot fresco. It was a battle known as the ''Fight for the Standard," which represented "vividly the rage and fury both of the men and the horses," Vasari wrote.
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He also reported that Leonardo abandoned the project because of technical problems arising from his experimental mixing of oil paint and fresco.
Historians, however, have questioned Vasari's conclusion. Some speculated that he made up the story, and that the fresco, which now survives in several preparatory drawings and sketches by the master, actually was completed.
Ten years after writing his account of the "Battle of Anghiari," Vasari was given the task to modify the council room into the Hall of Five Hundred, a hall dedicated to the ruling Medici family.
During that operation, Leonardo's mural disappeared.
It wasn't the only artwork to dissolve. Working on the city-wide renovation plan devised by Duke Cosimo I to celebrate the Medici family, Vasari had to sacrifice masterpieces such as Masaccio's Trinity in the church of Santa Maria Novella.
Yet he did not destroy the work; he just covered it with a brick wall on which he painted a panel of the "Madonna of the Rosary."
Masaccio's work remained obscured until 1861, when Vasari's wall was removed.
Image: Giorgio Vasari's Battle of Marciano. (Wikimedia Commons).
In 2000, at a da Vinci conference, leading scholar Carlo Pedretti proposed that Vasari saved Leonardo's masterpiece just as he had Masaccio's.
The conference prompted Seracini to carry out sophisticated tests that involved the use of laser scanners, X-ray machines, and thermographic and radar equipment.
First he reconstructed the plan of the hall before Vasari's remodeling by finding the original windows and doors, now covered by walls. Then he focused on Vasari's work.
He found that the walls were reinforced with large stone frames, which Vasari then filled with bricks to create a surface for his own paintings: the "Battle of Torre" on the west wall and the "Battle of Marciano" on the east wall.
Seracini (the only nonfictional living character mentioned in "The Da Vinci Code") found a Dan Brown-like clue in the wall housing the "Battle of Marciano."
There, on a tiny painted green flag, Vasari wrote: Cerca, trova -- seek and you shall find.
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A radar survey carried out last September revealed the presence of a hollow space on the east wall (which houses the "Battle of Marciano") between Vasari's brick wall and the original stone wall.
After the survey's promising results, Seracini and his team launched a fund-raising campaign to develop a unique camera that could take photographs through the 5-inch-thick wall.
The camera would use a special copper-crystal mosaic gamma ray diffraction lens, which can map out hidden paint pigments.
As the fund-raising effort failed, the researchers turned to a less complicated but more intrusive technique.
In a sort of art endoscopy, they are now drilling holes in various areas of the Vasari fresco and inserting micro cameras to capture images inside the wall.
A total of seven micro holes will be drilled this week. Then at least two months will be needed for the final lab results.
The first hole has already revealed that a less than 1-inch hollow space indeed exists.
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"We are very moved. We are aware that there might be nothing behind the wall. However, the results of the radar survey have been totally confimed and this gives us great hopes," Renzi said.
Although Renzi stressed that the holes have been drilled in some already damaged areas of the Vasari fresco, which will be restored after the operation, a controversy has sprung up over the intrusive approach.
Cecilia Frosinini, mural paintings section director at Florence's Opificio delle Pietre Dure art restoration laboratory, resigned in protest from the project.
"It's an ethical question. I'm supposed to protect the artworks, and here there is an invasive intervention on the painting," Frosinini wrote.
According to Tomaso Montanari, an art historian at the University Federico II in Naples, the researchers will have to face disappointing results.
"I believe Leonardo's work is not behind that wall," he told the daily La Repubblica.
"Vasari would have never covered a work by an artist he admired so much in the hope that one day someone would search and find it. You would expect such a hypothesis from Dan Brown, certainly not from art historians," Montanari said.
article from Discovery News
Analysis by Rossella Lorenzi
Thu Dec 1, 2011 04:27 PM ET
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