Photography by Laila Pozzo
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.
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| Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi” (1481-82),
Galleria
degli Uffizi, Florence. |
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.)
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| In search of the lost Da Vinci, Seracini used ultrasound
in the Salone dei Cinquecento in 1977. |
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.”
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