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High-tech search for da Vinci fresco

By Frances D'Emilio
October 25, 2007

ROME (AP) -- Analyzing 500-year-old bricks, engineers in California are searching for a lost Leonardo da Vinci fresco that some researchers believe is behind a wall in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.

The hunt for the "Battle of Anghiari," an unfinished mural by da Vinci, has captivated art historians for centuries and is being tackled by experts wielding state-of-the art scientific tools.

Laser scanners, thermal imaging, radar and neutrons will be employed in the project that Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli says is expected to take about a year.

Art lovers want to get to the bottom of the mystery in the Salone del Cinquecento (Hall of the 1500s) in the Palazzo Vecchio, a fortresslike palace in the heart of Florence that houses municipal offices.

Maurizio Seracini, an Italian engineer, says he and colleagues at the University of San Diego are studying bricks and stonework that were found in a storeroom in the Palazzo Vecchio and once were part of the huge hall. The bricks were hauled to California, where their structure and composition are being analyzed, Mr. Seracini says by telephone.

Some researchers believe a cavity in one of the hall's walls might have preserved the mural, which da Vinci began in 1505 to commemorate the 15th-century Florentine victory over Milan at Anghiari, a medieval Tuscan town. The work was unfinished when da Vinci left Florence in 1506.

The search for the masterpiece was given new impetus about 30 years ago, when Mr. Seracini noticed a cryptic message by Giorgio Vasari on a fresco in the hall. Vasari was a 16th-century artist famed for chronicling Renaissance artists' labors.

"Cerca, trova" — "seek and you shall find" — say the words on a tiny green flag in the "Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley." Because Vasari respected the Renaissance masters, some hypothesize he wouldn't have destroyed da Vinci's work on what is presumed to have been a wall behind one Vasari painted when he decorated the room in the 1560s.

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