Dave Yoder Milan, Italy +39 340 539 9484

The Search for the lost "Battle of Anghiari"

“And having climbed the stairs of the Great Hall, diligently take a look at a group of horses and men, a battle piece by Leonardo da Vinci, which will strike you as a miraculous thing.”--Anton Francesco Doni (1549)

In 1505, Leonardo da Vinci began painting a vast mural in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall of Renaissance Florence. Although he never finished the work, some modern art historians consider the part he did paint, a larger-than-life clash of horsemen now referred to as The Battle of Anghiari, to be a turning point in Renaissance art. The painting was visible for more than 40 years, and two generations of artists admired and copied its unprecedented expression of form and fury.

In 1563, however, the hall underwent sweeping renovations, during which its walls were frescoed by the artist Giorgio Vasari, covering Leonardo’s masterpiece. The painting vanished from history, and no known records explain its fate. Some art historians including Carlo Pedretti, a leading authority on da Vinci, believe that Vasari would never have destroyed a masterpiece by the legendary Leonardo, whom he admired greatly, and that he must have found some way of preserving it behind his own fresco (in fact, on at least two occasions when Vasari covered masterworks by Giotto and Masaccio elsewhere in Florence with his own work, he left the underlying art intact). What’s more, within his own battle scene in the Hall of 500, and over the approximate area where Leonardo’s masterpiece is believed to lie, Vasari painted the only words in all of his vast frescoes covering the walls; “Cerca Trova”—“Seek and you will find.” The purpose of this exhortation is unknown.

   
Dr. Maurizio Seracini and an assistant prepare to test the east wall of the Hall of 500 in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Dr. Seracini believes the painting is hidden behind that wall.
  
The tower of The Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, behind a young Florentine couple.
     
  
A detail of an engraving of the Battle of Anghiari photographed in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
  
A grandfather and grandson at a wedding in the town of Anghiari, Italy, where the battle took place which da Vinci would later paint in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.
  
Cosimo Rucellai, a Milan lawyer, holds a copy of the Leonardo painting that has been handed down within his family from the time it was believed to have been copied from the original painting.
     
  
"Cerca Trova," seek and you will find. Those words, written too high on the east wall of the Hall of 500 to be seen with the naked eye, also happen to be written over the area Seracini believes the painting to be hiding.
  
Dr. Maurizio Seracini prepares to run tests on the east wall of the Hall of 500 in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. He believes the painting to be hidden by a Vasari fresco behind this wall.
  
Dr. Maurizio Seracini in the Hall of 500.
     
  
Ground penetrating radar searches for clues behind a Vasari fresco on the west wall in the Hall of 500. In the east wall, and nowhere else, the radar detected a thin air gap in the approximate area the painting is believed to lie.
  
A copy of the Palace Records dating to 1513 records the purchase of wood to protect the Leonardo painting from soldiers barracked in the Hall of 500.
  
Physicist Antonino Cosentino collects his thoughts while experiencing a difficulty with one of the technologies to be used in the search for the lost painting. A reactor looms in the background at the ENEA facility in Casaccia, Italy.
     
  
Gold leaf is loaded into a vial for gamma ray signature testing at the ENEA facility in Frascati, Italy.
  
Pigments similar to those known to have been used by da Vinci on the Battle of Anghiari are tested for gamma ray signatures at the ENEA facility in Frascati, Italy.
  
Scientists examine gamma ray signature results during testing at the ENEA facility in Frascati, Italy.
     
  
The energies and half-lifes of gamma rays emanating from pigment samples reveal themselves at the ENEA facility in Frascati, Italy.
  
Copies of the Battle of Anghiari are studied on the world's largest computer monitor at the CISA3 department of the University of California in San Diego.
  
Scientists are bathed in a UV fluorescent glow while testing pigments on the Vasari fresco which they hope covers a da Vinci painting behind it.
     
  
A graduate student at UCSD's CISA3 works in the StarCAVE on a 3D computer construction of the Hall of 500 in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.
  
Laser scanning is conducted in The Palazzo Vecchio's Hall of 500, used to build a computer model of the Hall of 500, accurated down to the centimeter.