PhotoDude.com

Mon. Apr 22, 2002

The Leonardo Cover-Up

The Leonardo Cover-Up – A great tale about Maurizio Seracini, who you might call an art archaeologist, and how his devotion to Leonardo Da Vinci ended up revealing a fraud hundreds of years old. "Nearly a year ago, the Uffizi brought Seracini in again, to help settle an international brawl over whether Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece, ’’The Adoration of the Magi,’’ one of the two or three most important paintings in Italy, was too fragile to be restored."

”The Adoration” (view at various sizes) is Leonardo’s representation of the Three Wise Men visiting the newborn Christ and mother Mary. It has long been considered a treasure, as it supposedly revealed Leonardo’s ”process,” in that much of it is unfinished with his original sketch work showing through.

Seracini brings the world the scandalous news: " ’None of the paint we see on the ’Adoration’ today was put there by Leonardo. God knows who did, but it was not Leonardo [...] The guy was not even a very good artist.’ "

You might think he’s just another detractor, the type who likes to bring down the mighty. Quite the opposite: "Seracini is highly indignant that Leonardo could ever have been held responsible for some of the lines painted in brown. The Madonna’s right foot, for example, has pointy toes and even a pointed heel. Or worse, the bambino’s little foot looks as if it were carved out of wood. And what about the poor child’s hair? Is that supposed to be a baby toupee?"

Leonardo painting a bad toupee on the baby Jesus? No, that sounds like a rejected REM lyric, not history. But Mr. Seracini is on the trail of another Leonardo mystery, a big one. He thinks he knows where "Leonardo’s largest and perhaps most important work, the ’Battle of Anghiari,’ " is located, though it hasn’t been seen since 1563.

And he wants to use new technology to find out what’s behind Mona Lisa’s smile. "Everybody has been speculating about how she got that smile. All I’m saying is let’s find out."