The security guard at Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio waves Maurizio Seracini through the door of the Salone dei Cinquecento (the Hall of the Five Hundred). Ahead of him, a busload of English tourists shuffle to a halt under the mural on the east wall. It is a hot, humid, late-summer Tuscan day and the Brits are beginning to wilt under the weight of packaged culture.
“This magnificent mural of the ‘Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana’ was painted by Giorgio Vasari in 1563,” the tour guide intones. “Vasari reconstructed the hall for Cosimo de Medici, the ruler of Florence (1519-1574).” Seracini smiles benignly as he if he guards a secret.
And he does. As they move on, he points to the top of the bloody battle scene where an anonymous Florentine foot soldier waves a green flag amid a surging phalanx of pike men. There is a phrase on the flag—the only writing in the whole mural. You can’t read it from the floor, but Seracini has photographed it from a scaffold.
“Cerca Trova,” he says quietly, then translates: “He who seeks, finds.”
It is a phrase aptly applied to Seracini. He is seeking the lost Leonardo Da Vinci mural of the Battle of Anghiari, unseen since the 1540s, which he believes is hidden behind this wall. If that is not challenging enough, he has also just completed a four-year exploration of Da Vinci’s painting, the “Adoration of the Magi,” and uncovered a series of magnificent Da Vinci drawings hidden for 500 years. As Dan Brown wrote in his blockbuster novel, The Da Vinci Code, “Italian art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini had unveiled the unsettling truth.”
Unsettling indeed.Seracini has been a seeker since he graduated from UCSD’s Muir College in bioengineering in 1973. After he completed his postgraduate work in electronic engineering at Padua University in 1976, he set up his Florence-based company Editech (electronics, diagnostics and technology), in 1977. At first, the company was purely a medical diagnostic facility but Seracini soon began to apply his techniques to works of art in order to ascertain their age, history and authenticity. Within a few years, he had acquired a long list of clients and sold off the medical division. He has been challenging the art world with provable scientific data ever since.
Editech’s offices are on the Via dei Bardi a few minutes’ walk from the Ponte Vecchio over the River Arno, with its tourist shops and restaurants anarchically stacked like a child’s first Lego creation. Four-story Renaissance palazzos, now occupied by architects, bookmakers, artisan woodworkers and restorers, loom over a narrow street of rutted ancient flagstones, plagued by honking Vespas and the interminable rattle of three-wheeled trucks. Editech occupies the second floor of a palazzo built in the 1530s, two buildings down from where the movie Hannibal (as in Hannibal Lector) was filmed.
Like his career, Seracini’s offices display a convergence of Renaissance art and technology. Angels painted on the 20-foot-high vaulted ceiling hover benevolently over a half dozen international interns, working at a humming bank of computers, scanners and light boxes. In an adjacent room, a rainbow frieze of Renaissance coats of arms stand sentinel over a room stacked from floor to painted ceiling with 2,000 file boxes. Each contains the results of a clinical survey on a specific work of art. As well as diagnostics on 27 Caravaggio paintings and 33 Raphaels, the files range from detailed analyses on works in the Louvre to frescoes on the domed ceiling of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul to paintings in the Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona.
Stacked around these files, on metal shelves and in corners and closets he has carefully stored the costly tools of his trade. They include echographs, radar with high frequency antennae, X-rays and stereomicroscopes. Seracini adapted each of these machines, and his passion for tinkering with the innards of diagnostic tools is matched only by his passion for Renaissance art. “I believed from the beginning, that the technology should go to the work of art and not the other way around,” he says. “And so I adapt a sort of laboratory around the work of art and analyze it.”
Seracini is a fourth-generation Florentine, whose father owned a legendary ice cream store and became vice president of the European handmade ice cream makers (gelato artigianale). When he arrived at UCSD in 1969, his family’s culinary skills garnered him a reputation as a cook, and he recalls preparing dishes for a number of professors including Piero Ariotti and Herbert Marcuse.
A member of the Italian national volleyball team in high school, Seracini was quickly snapped up by the neophyte Tritons and played for four years. (He recalls that when he was not studying, or on the volleyball courts, he would go spear fishing for his dinner in the kelp beds off La Jolla shores — adding a new dimension to the term Renaissance man.)
Seracini believes he got a worldview at UCSD that he would not have received at any other school. “Almost everything I learned at UCSD, I’ve been using since,” he says. As well as classes in bioengineering and applied mathematics, UCSD taught him a way of thinking outside the box, of blurring boundaries between disciplines.
He broadened his interdisciplinary studies when he took classes at UCLA with Carlo Pedretti, a Leonardo scholar who taught Renaissance art. His interest in applying engineering to art was further stimulated when he worked with John Asmus at the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics (IGPP) on a research project developing a way to clean dirty marble surfaces using laser beams.
In 1975, while Seracini was still at the University of Padua, UCLA’s Pedretti approached him with a tempting proposition. Could he help solve a Da Vinci mystery? Seracini had learned to use ultrasound at UCSD and at a local hospital. Pedretti asked if technology could uncover any trace of the lost Da Vinci mural, the “Battle of Anghiari”, in the Hall of the Five Hundred.
The trail of Leonardo’s lost masterpiece is interwoven with the violent political intrigues of fifteenth and sixteenth century Florentine history. In 1494, Piero de Medici was expelled from the city during the invasion of Italy by the French king, Charles VIII. The Dominican priest Girolamo Savonarola seized the moment and proclaimed a republic.
According to Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, “It was ordained by public decree that Leonardo should be employed to paint some fine work,” to celebrate the republic. “In 1503, the hall was allotted to him by Piero Soderini, the Gonfaloniere of justice. Leonardo began by drawing a cartoon ...” Da Vinci notes rather ominously in his own journal that he began to paint on June 6, 1505, just as a storm broke over the city and “great rain poured down until nightfall.”
We know the mural was still there in 1549, from a letter written by Anton Francesco Doni advising a friend who was traveling to Florence. “Having ascended the stairs of the Salone Grande, take a diligent view of a group of horses (a portion of Lionardo’s battle), which will appear a miraculous thing to you.”
However by the 1560s, the Medicis had returned to power and Cosimo Medici engaged Vasari to renovate the Hall of the Five Hundred and cover Da Vinci’s mural celebrating the republic. There is no mention of the “Battle of Anghiari” after 1563.
Enter Pedretti, Seracini and Asmus in 1975. With funds from the Kress and Armand Hammer foundations, they set about scanning the walls of the Salone dei Cinquecento with ultrasound. But because of a combination of limited technology and money, as well as the intrusions of local politics, the results were inconclusive (although tempting enough to convince Hammer to suggest that for a princely price the city remove the Vasari mural and see if Da Vinci’s mural was underneath).
Fast-forward 25 years. Seracini is now one of the most prominent experts in the science of art diagnostics with a worldwide reputation and a range of equipment in his arsenal. In a scene reminiscent of a Brown novel, a stranger walked into his office in 2000. “He said ‘good evening,’” Seracini recalls, “‘my name is Loel Guinness. I’m here to propose that you restart the Anghiari project and bring it to completion.’” Guinness, a member of the banking side of the Irish brewing family, said that his Kalpa Group would bankroll a new investigation of the Hall of the Five Hundred.
“Maurizio was looking for funding to carry out three-dimensional architectural diagnostics in the Hall of Five Hundred, using a range of non-invasive scientific techniques to probe the walls and floors,” says Loel Guinness. “The Kalpa Group is interested in unusual ways of thinking, ways that synthesize knowledge from very different fields. Maurizio’s work is one of those projects.”
Although his schedule was booked with clients ranging from Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and London, to Renaissance churches in hilltop Tuscan towns, Seracini did not hesitate to follow his passion. He set about planning his new search for the elusive Anghiari mural, reputedly three times the size of Da Vinci’s Last Supper.
After amassing a wealth of historical research from such Renaissance scholars as Professor Rab Hatfield from the University of Syracuse and Professor Martin Kemp from Oxford, he made a detailed architectural survey of the present-day building using laser scanners. Next he carried out a thermographic investigation, using a FLIRSytems Thermographic camera, which can detect radiation in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum (roughly 900-10,0000 nanometers). Since the amount of radiation emitted by an object increases with temperature, thermography allows the viewer to see these variations in temperature, which in turn reveal different materials within the walls. This allowed him to uncover the architecture of the building in 1495 and trace its major renovations since that period (see illustration 3, page 30). Using the thermographic surveys, he calculated the height of the ceiling and the placement of the windows and doors in the period when Da Vinci was working in the hall.
“We knew that by the time Leonardo walked into the hall, in June 1505, two earlier windows were filled in,” Seracini recalls. “This meant Leonardo had the entire east wall at his disposal to paint.”
But Seracini further discovered that during the renovation of the hall in the early 1560s, Vasari raised the roof, added three large arched windows and ten small rectangular ones. Most important for the Da Vinci mural, Vasari built a brick wall over the eastern side of the building’s original stone wall, the one on which Da Vinci is reported to have painted his Battle of Anghiari.
Seracini had planned to develop a portable echograph for the east wall but did not have the funds, so he adapted a portable, ground-penetrating radar machine. “We used much higher frequencies, which meant less penetration,” says Seracini. “On the other hand, you got a much higher resolution, so you get better information over a shorter distance.”
Seracini discovered a gap, varying from 1- to 3-centimeters thick, between the newer brick wall and the original stone wall—a gap large enough to preserve a mural on the hidden, older wall.
“Vasari was a great admirer of Leonardo as we know from his Lives of the Artists, “ Seracini concludes. “And he would have had no reason whatsoever to destroy Leonardo’s mural. He had to place a wall in front of it since it represented a victory of the Republic of Florence.”
Professor Hatfield concurs with the results obtained during the surveys. “Seracini’s work with thermography reinforces my own conclusions,” Hatfield says. “And they also help me refine these conclusions.”
So is the mural still there behind this “new” Vasari wall?
It would seem that Seracini had gone about as far as he could, without unpeeling the Vasari mural and removing the wall that held it. Then last July he was asked to address a physics conference on “solid state imaging systems,” in Taormina, Sicily. Seracini’s genius is that he is constantly searching for new technologies and is undaunted by the challenge of fusing art and science. Although it was a long shot, he finished his lecture by posing his dilemma. Did they know of any new non-invasive method that could penetrate the walls and detect paint on the second wall behind the Vasari?
Professor Raymond DuVarney, chair of the physics department at Emory University, mused on the question overnight and woke up to a Eureka moment. “The next day I had this idea,” DuVarney says, “to use neutron activation and a gamma camera.” Neutron activation could penetrate the wall with gamma rays and then capture the returning rays with a gamma camera. “The intensity of the gamma ray will be proportional to the kind of pigment that is in various colors,” DuVarney explains. It is therefore hoped that as the camera scans the walls reading the returning gamma rays it will be able to trace out a black and white image of what is on the inner wall.
“This new approach is an example of the type of research that thinks outside the box,” says Kalpa’s Guinness. “It may get nowhere, but on the other hand, many developments in the past seemed ‘sci-fi’ until they were successful.”
Seracini’s Editech offices are in a constant flurry of activity. While he patiently explains his reams of research on the Hall of the Five Hundred, he fields calls from London’s Guardian newspaper, a French television station, and Horizonte, a German technical magazine. Then he sets out for an appointment across the River Arno with the organizing committee of a new Da Vinci exhibit to be opened in March 2006.
The media is always interested in his work, but this latest spurt of interview requests is because Seracini is about to lob another bomb into the world of Renaissance scholarship.
In essence: After four years of intensive detective work, uncovering original Da Vinci drawings, Seracini believes he can prove that Da Vinci did not paint the “Adoration of the Magi.” “Leonardo never meant the painting to look like this,” he says. “He left us just a drawing that was later covered by someone else.”
He crosses the river to the Uffizi gallery, where the “Adoration” hangs. He knows the history of virtually every palazzo, piazza, street and alley in the city. As he passes a construction dumpster outside a fifteenth century building advertising remodeled apartments, he erupts with barely concealed disdain. He runs his fingers along a discarded heap of narrow, 3-foot-long stone slabs and unpeels layers of plaster flakes. In delicate shades of blues and whites, the flakes represent the many layers of passing generations.
“This is what they used to fill in arches in the fifteenth and sixteenth century.” He shakes his head and hastily snaps a photo with his cell phone. “It is such a pity to see this thrown away. But they don’t care. What they call architectural restoration here, is sometimes really just demolition.”
Seracini feels he is in a constant battle to protect the city’s irreplaceable heritage from the development that threatens to destroy it. At the very least he insists on reminding Florentines of the treasures that still lie hidden behind the walls of their city. He passes the Palazzo dei Notai, which for centuries was the official building for the notaries of Florence. “Part of the property was sold to someone who wanted to open a restaurant. A restorer was called in and she asked me to look at the walls. What we found hidden behind plaster was a mural, the very first portrait of Dante Alighieri.” He shrugs. Despair, disbelief? Or is it the universal Italian gesture of whimsical acceptance?
Finding what is hidden. It is a motif, a ruling metaphor in his life.
Inside the Uffizi Gallery, Da Vinci’s “Adoration” is surrounded by an adoring crowd of tourists. Seracini shakes his head in frustration, as if he wants to share a secret with them but can’t. He steps back and quietly explains that the friars of San Donato in Florence asked Da Vinci to paint an altarpiece for their chapel, in 1481. Except for the mention by Vasari in 1568, the “painting” essentially disappeared until it turned up in the collection of Antonio D’Medici in 1621. “No one knows what happened to this painting,” Seracini says. “No one knows where it was and no one knew if he really finished it until we started investigating.”
He points at the dark brown wash that surrounds most of the area containing Mary, the child Jesus and the Magi. “There is a sequence of drawings underneath this brown top layer, which is a mix of carbon, bitumen, pine resin and shellac,” he says. “They have never been seen by anyone. It’s like discovering hundreds of drawings by Leonardo that nobody’s ever seen. And all this is in one painting hidden under the layers.”
Back behind the bank of computers at Editech, Seracini reveals these drawings, the result of four years’ work. First he explains how his investigation revealed that the 96 inch-square altarpiece was cheaply constructed of ten planks held together with iron bars and nails. “Probably the friars were not the richest or perhaps it was not a good relationship between them and Leonardo. Incidentally, we have records that he was paid initially with wine,” he says with a smile, “so that doesn’t sound like a good return.”
Using a portable X-ray fluorescence unit, he discovered that the wood was overlaid with a mixture of fibers and glue, then a layer of calcium sulfate (gesso, which is still a base for oil paintings) ground together with colored fibers, and finally another layer of finely ground gesso. So far so good, but examined under ultraviolet light, (see illustration 5, page 32 ) Seracini saw that the final layers of paint (what was previously thought to be painted by Da Vinci) had penetrated the base layers of gesso.
“The layer of the priming, covered by the layer of the sky, had time to age and dry and crack,” Seracini points to the image on the screen. “After that time, paint was added on top and sank into it. This is proof that the paint on top was not added right away. In other words, these phases happened through time, a long time. The paint dried and formed cracked layers and then was painted over and that paint sank in.”
Seracini began to suspect that something very special might be hidden under the monochrome surface. He recalls the excitement of finding himself alone in one of the studios at the Uffizi gallery. “So here I am, in a very small room, with a big painting. I’ve built myself this scanner, with an infrared camera mounted on it hooked up to a computer. And I’m taking a total of 2,400 shots, going up and down so as to create a mosaic.”
He stops as if once again absorbing the import of his discoveries. Then he leans into the computer screen again as he brings up the series of newly uncovered drawings. “This is Leonardo,” he stresses.” “A work being created by Leonardo.”
Other Renaissance scholars are equally convinced. “There is no case for thinking that the new aspects of the very first under drawings are by anyone other than Leonardo,” says Oxford University’s Professor Kemp. “They confirm that the innovatory dynamism of his drawings on paper was carried over into his designing of the surface of the panel. No earlier artist had used such a ‘brainstorming’ technique to develop a composition.”
And Professor Hatfield of Syracuse concludes that, “Seracini’s proposals about the “Adoration” are the most important contribution we have had on that great painting for a long, long time.”
So now Seracini has revealed the drawings hidden for 500 years. But why were they covered and by whom? He believes the brown wash was applied 50 or so years after Da Vinci. Hatfield is not so certain. “Seracini’s assertion that the dark brown paint seen in many places is the work of a later hand remains to be verified,” he says. Seracini hopes that further scientific work may yet uncover the answer, but until then we are in the speculative world of Dan Brown’s Code. Was Da Vinci’s work covered by someone else as an act of censure? Or did he paint over symbols and signs that he wanted or needed to keep secret?
So what next? What do you do for an encore if you’ve spent your life lobbing hi-tech grenades into the sacred temple of Renaissance scholarship? Seracini wants to teach others to do the same.
Loel Guinness sees a need that is not being met. “Maurizio Seracini is still pretty much a lone voice in this field,” says Loel Guinness. “Until art historians, curators and conservators accept that science has a role to play in their field, these techniques will not be developed as fast as they should. But maybe the increasingly exciting results of Seracini’s research will convince the profession to take this sort of work seriously.”
Seracini wants to fill that need and create an interdisciplinary institute, bringing electrical and bioengineering, chemistry and biochemistry together with art scholarship in the same classrooms.
“If this kind of scientific study can produce such an understanding of Leonardo,” he says, “then it is obvious how much we need a new breed of scientists to produce this kind of knowledge.”
Seracini sits back from the large computer screen and clicks the mouse. The tantalizing image of the green pennant in Vasari’s mural appears. “Cerca Trova.”
“He who seeks, finds.” It is very apt.
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