For centuries, art historians have been on the hunt for the lost painting by Leonardo da Vinci and now there’s strong evidence that the search may be over. The Battle of Anghiari is a lost mural by Leonardo da Vinci that is said to depict a war scene from the battle of the same name that took place in 1440. It has been long thought that the missing mural, for which there is much preparatory work created by da Vinci, is hidden behind a 16th-century fresco painted by Giorgio Vasari in the famous Hall of the Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.
The National Geographic Society and the University of California, San Diego teamed up in recent search efforts and employed high-tech tools to make the latest discovery. Researchers used probes to poke through areas of the current fresco where the paint had either cracked or flaked off.
As reported in Art Daily, “Maurizio Seracini, an Italian engineer from the University of California, San Diego, told reporters that the fragments of color retrieved by the probe in the palace’s Hall of the 1500s are consistent with pigments used by Leonardo. He said an analysis showed that the red, black and beige paint found is consistent with the organic paint Leonardo used on his frescoes.”
The research team noted a similarity between the brown glazes found in Mona Lisa and St. John the Baptist and those that were discovered through the latest probe expedition. X-rays and radars were also used during previous searches, giving the impression that there is indeed a space between two walls that could be hiding the mural.
Peter Paul Rubens’s copy of “The Battle of Anghiari”
Tags: art news, Leonardo da Vinci
