THE BATTLE OF ANGHIARI
The lost painting by Leonardo Da Vinci

A LITTLE HISTORY:
Anghiari is famous for a battle fought and won on its territory on Wednesday 29th June 1440 by the Florentine Republic led by Micheletto Attendolo and Giampaolo Orsini against the Milanese army led by Niccolò Piccinino.

When Machiavelli subsequently wrote about it he pointed out ironically that twenty or twenty four hours of skirmishing only produced one death and that when a soldier fell off his horse. None the less, historically the outcome of the battle was very important as it kept central Italy in the hands of the Florentines and, indeed, Machiavelli commented much more seriously on this aspect.


However important the battle was at the time, however, it would almost certainly have been gradually forgotten about if the Magistrati of Florence hadn’t decided to decorate the walls of the main Hall or Chamber of the government building, Palazzo Vecchio, with scenes celebrating the victories of the Florentine armies. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina and Leonardo da Vinci the Battle of Anghiari.

Leonardo drew up his project on cartoons and began to transfer the work from the cartoons to the wall of Palazzo Vecchio and painted the central section showing The Fight for the Standard. Unfortunately Leonardo’s love of experimentation caused the painting to be damaged during the drying process and the uncompleted painting was destroyed. Eventually it was replaced by the existing painting by Vasari and the legend of the Lost Leonardo began. Even while Leonardo was working on it the painting was lauded as a major innovative work so that many artists came to learn from it and make copies of it, thus the battle still lives on through the paintings of Rubens in the Louvre in Paris and that of Biagio di Antonio (1470) of the school of Paolo Uccello, which is in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.

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The Search for the Hidden da Vinci

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.

"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.

To better analyze paintings and sculptures, art conservation experts are adopting non-invasive imaging and testing techniques originally developed for medical and military purposes. Some examples:
• In the journal NDT&E International, UC-San Diego art expert Maurizio Seracini and his colleagues report on efforts to find Leonardo da Vinci's "The Battle of Anghiari" using ground-penetrating radar to look inside the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

• In Leonardo da Vinci: Studio per I"Adorazione dei Magi, Dr. Seracini describes how ultra-violet fluorescence and infrared scans reveal that much of da Vinci's famous painting "The Adoration of the Magi" had been heavily retouched by another artist.
• The search for the da Vinci mural has been aided by new documentary evidence reported by Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield in Finding Leonardo: The Case for Recovering 'The Battle of Anghiari.'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.

The search for the lost masterpiece raises the question of what the scientists ought to do if they actually find the Leonardo under the equally priceless frescos painted over it. Should they rip out the frescos that cover the Leonardo? Leave the whole thing alone? What do you think? 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.

LASTEST NEWS FROM AOL ABOUT THE HIDDEN DA VINCI PAINTING:

(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."

Da Vinci DiscoveriesEditech, APThirty years ago, art researcher Maurizio Seracini noticed a cryptic message painted on this fresco, sparking the search for Leonardo Da Vinci's long-lost masterpiece 'The Battle of Anghiari.'

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."

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