The Hunt Is On for the Hidden Da Vinci
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(July 12) - Thirty years after spotting an enticing clue, Dr. Maurizio Seracini is still trying to find a long-lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. And some of his colleagues believe he is on the verge of a remarkable discovery."We are talking about the masterpiece of the masterpieces of the Renaissance," Seracini told The Wall Street Journal, "way more important than The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa.
Many art historians have gone looking for "The Battle of Anghiari," a mural of war painted about 450 years ago, but rumor had it that Da Vinci had botched it and that a Medici duke had destroyed it. Then more clues began popping up, including an important one Seracini spotted when he was just a young apprentice in 1977.In the famous Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, in a room where Da Vinci's art once donned the walls, Seracini noticed a small cryptic phrase on a painting by Giorgio Vasari. On one tiny green flag, Vasari had written "cera trova," meaning "seek and you will find."To Seracini, that meant one thing: Da Vinci's prized work lay behind Vasari's art. The problem was, in order to search for the lost masterpiece, the Seracini would have to knock down the walls covered with Renaissance art.Fast forward to 2008. Seracini, now a professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a pioneer in forensic art analysis, is working with noninvasive imaging techniques to look through the walls in that same room to find the "The Battle of Anghiari."Inch by inch, his team of researchers is using new technology to scan the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio where he is convinced Da Vinci's masterpiece has stood untouched for more than four centuries.Next year the search is set to reach a climax. Seracini plans to use a portable neutron-beam scanner that is still in development to peer through the walls and into history."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."