Aug. 17, 2008
The Lost Leonardo Da Vinci
An Art Detective's Quest To Find A Lost Leonardo Da Vinci Masterpiece
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Play CBS Video Video The Lost Leonardo The Leonardo DaVinci masterpiece, The Battle of Anghiari, is thought to be lost forever, but an art detective thinks he has solved the mystery of the missing mural. Morley Safer reports.
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This is what "The Battle of Anghiari" by Leonardo da Vinci is believed to look like. (CBS)
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Maurizio Seracini (CBS)
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In the art world, there is perhaps no mystery more enduring than the fate of a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest mind of the Renaissance. It was an immense unfinished mural known as "The Battle of Anghiari." For centuries, it has been assumed the work was destroyed, painted over or simply faded away long ago.
Now, after three decades of battling skepticism and bureaucratic resistance, an art detective named Maurizio Seracini believes he's close to solving the Leonardo mystery. As correspondent Morley Safer reported in April, Seracini suspects the mural hasn't been lost at all, but is right where it’s always been - for 500 hundred years.
"We are searching for the number one work of art by Leonardo. It was considered the masterpiece of the Renaissance," Seracini tells Safer.
We know roughly what "The Battle of Anghiari" looked like from fragments of Leonardo's sketches and copies made by his admirers before the mural disappeared. It celebrated a victory by Florence over Milan - a furious tangle of men and horses frozen in the fever of war. The painting was in its time, at the beginning of the 16th century, something to behold.
"We have diaries, for example, of people seeing and being in admiration of the horses of Leonardo," Seracini says.
The people came to the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall of Florence. The city is ground zero of the Italian Renaissance, the rebirth of ideas and the arts in the 15th and 16th centuries that brought Europe out of the Dark Ages. Here, in the shadow of Dante, Machiavelli, and of Leonardo himself, Seracini searches for the "The Battle of Anghiari" using 21st century technology that can peer through paint, through stone walls, even through history.
"You simply have to go beyond what your eyesight can do," Seracini explains.
He believes the mural is on the east wall of the palazzo in the "Hall of 500," which was the seat of government five centuries ago. There, Seracini works on an enormous scaffold. To drop anything could be disastrous: standing right below is a priceless statue by Michelangelo. He is convinced Leonardo's mural lies protected behind an immense painting, which was done by the artist and architect Giorgio Vasari when he remodeled the palazzo in the mid-16th century, 50 years after Leonardo.
Seracini believes the Leonardo mural is on a second wall behind Vasari’s painting, separated from it by a small air gap, which appeared on a radar scan. Of the six Vasari murals in the room, only the one has an air pocket behind it.
"Why would you have an air gap just there?" Seracini asks. "Other than you don't want to place a wall directly in contact with Leonardo's mural because you don't want to ruin it, you want to damage it. He left just that air gap enough so that today we can have this masterpiece."
Produced by David Browning
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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See all 21 CommentsPosted by jh6379"
Different era, people today love cheap and trashey because in a couple of years they toss it and buy something else. You couldnt even find someone willing to spend 4 years painting a ceiling laying on their back on a scaffold for the equiv of maybe $1 an hour today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sistine_Chapel_ceiling
This is an incredible find!!
This is an incredible find!!
http://www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=6300
One wonders who he was to be able to "see" the future. He lived in a time when it was not acceptable, yet as an artist he could draw these things. Makes one wonder!
Shame on the uneducated American''s who are boorish in their taste and do not have any type of class. go play with your playdoh and paint by number sets.
Posted by shafteriffic
Here''s a great example of why Europeans in general think Americans are rude, crude and clueless.
Posted by sincityq
Assuming its there, any number of reasons, political, severe damage, was barely started and then stopped, or even to hide/protect it against damage during some conflict and then forgotten.
Im hardly ignorant of art, Im an artist and antique collector, no one was suggesting they drill a hole large enough through the center of it to drive a truck through! a 3 mm dia hole on a MURAL SIZED painting they need a scaffold to reach is hardly going to ruin the painting.
"As for the *** with the acrobat nets and moving the statue, I think the author of the story was merely giving you an idea as to how high the scaffolding was.
Posted by spadeisspade"
You insult the guy for his concern? easiest way to deal with this is don''t carry anything like hammers, crowbars or bricks up on the scaffold to begin with.
As for the *** with the acrobat nets and moving the statue, I think the author of the story was merely giving you an idea as to how high the scaffolding was.
Hello? Why not move the statue out of the way temporarily? If that''s not practical, perhaps they could put up a net under the worker like the ones used by circus acrobats, to catch anything that might fall and save the artwork below. If it is, why not do both?
I can''t believe I''m the only one on this planet (or at least in your audience) who thought of these things. Granted, I haven''t read every word of every post in this blog, if that''s what you call it. But I did glance at all the ones on this page, anyway. Mostly I saw suggestions about drilling small holes in the wall, although your story talked about x-ray and/or other devices that can see through paint, which would seem to make such holes unnecessary.
They worry about touching this or that or drilling a tiny hole when there''s far more things to worry about- like the next earthquake that could collapse that building. Nothing lasts forever unfortunately, and at some point a quake, fire, flood or war will almost certainly damage/destroy this building and many others.
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