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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"We have managed to see every single brick. Every single stone that is there. As never done before," he says.
He studied in San Diego himself, 35 years ago, planning a career in medical technology. Asked how he got from wanting to cure patients to wanting to cure paintings, Seracini tells Safer, "Well, it looks like a big jump. A big leap. But it's very straightforward. I wanted to put together art and science."
And art was in his blood: Seracini was born in Florence, where for six centuries children have grown up among the world's most treasured objects.
Upon his return from school in California, Seracini recalls that a friend asked him a fateful question. "Don’t you have any technology that could tell us if there is something left on 'The Battle Of Anghiari'? We're talking about 1975. Now that was enough for me to drop everything I was doing."
So 30 years ago, a young Maurizio Seracini set out to convince the art world that with his equipment he might find Anghiari somewhere in the Palazzo Vecchio. Experts were skeptical, and after two years Seracini hit a dead end.
"In 1977 I had to quit. Because there was no technology good enough to solve the research. The mystery," he explains.
But over the years technology improved, and Seracini built a solid reputation as an international art detective, an art doctor. He stunned historians with his work on another unfinished Leonardo, "The Adoration of the Magi." Seracini revealed that the brown haze on the painting had been added later by someone else.
Even more breathtaking was his ability-without even touching the painting-to reveal Leonardo's under drawing, his very first ideas.
His computers in San Diego allow us to "walk" into the painting, taking us beneath the surface, revealing a world of detail obscured for five centuries - including a frenzied battle scene, similar to Anghiari.
"He has done remarkable work this way. His imaging techniques with infrared reflectology are really, really fantastic resources for art historians," says Carmen Bambach, the Leonardo expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Bambach finds it somehow fitting that science is filling in some of the blanks in our understanding of the artist. After all, Leonardo's notebooks are full of his own visionary scientific thoughts - from machines of war to flying machines, sketched in the 1490s, four centuries before the Wright brothers.
"Leonardo says the painter must be universal. 'Ho pittore siete universale.' The painter has to know anatomy. The painter has to know all the theories of motion. Statics. Mechanics. Mathematics," Bambach explains.
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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