# Kultura > Arti shqiptar > Arti botëror >  Leonardo cover up (Eni)

## katana

*  New York Times*
April 21, 2002

  The Leonardo Cover-Up
By MELINDA HENNEBERGER 
I have something to tell you,'' Maurizio Seracini began, a little apologetically, when we met for coffee in Florence recently. Seracini is an art diagnostician, an engineer who studied medicine but who has spent the last 27 years examining works of art. His first prominent patient was Botticelli's ''Allegory of Spring,'' and he has since conducted a whole battery of tests on Caravaggio and Raphael. He has X-rayed Giotto, given Piero della Francesca a sonogram, even performed a routine check-up on Michelangelo's ''David.'' Over the years, he has done work for the Uffizi and the Louvre, the Met and the Getty. 
[image]graphics.nytimes.com/images/2002/04/21/magazine/21leo.468.1.jpg[/image]

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. It was some weeks after I had done a newspaper article on the Uffizi's decision not to go ahead with the restoration that we met again. 

He cleared his throat several times, as if he were about to reveal something dreadful. The bar he had chosen -- smoky, overpriced, packed with an early-evening crowd of tourists and couples who looked married to other people -- seemed perfect for guilty revelations, though I couldn't imagine what these might be. 

''I didn't tell you when we talked before,'' he said finally, ''because I still wasn't sure. I thought, If I'm wrong, this is the end of my career. But now there can be no doubt.'' Instinctively, he lowered his voice and then looked right at me. ''None of the paint we see on the 'Adoration' today was put there by Leonardo. God knows who did, but it was not Leonardo.'' 
[image]graphics4.nytimes.com/images/2002/04/18/magazine/21leo.184.2.jpg[/image]_  Seracini examining "Marciano" with his thermal camera._ 
[image]graphics4.nytimes.com/images/2002/04/18/magazine/21leo.184.3.jpg[/image]_  The thermal camera detects a filled-in arch behind the plaster of the room's east wall._


Da Vinci did sketch the gray-green underdrawing, still visible in the unfinished areas of the work, which was commissioned in 1481. But the paint itself was added later, Seracini said -- and not just a little later but much later. And whoever came along behind the master traced his work in some places, reinterpreted it in other spots and made a few unscripted additions of his own. 

Leonardo, whose multitude of passions frequently made him what one contemporary called ''very impatient with his paintbrushes,'' has never exactly been known for his follow-through. Yet scholars always assumed that he had got pretty far along with this work before moving on. In fact, the ''Adoration'' has been highly prized in part because the contrast between the painted and unpainted areas supposedly provides a dazzling glimpse over Leonardo's shoulder at the way he worked. 

What Seracini has found, though, is that the original intention of the ''Adoration'' was subverted by the anonymous painter, with some of the most important themes covered over entirely. In other words, we have been admiring the painting all these years for all the wrong reasons. And once the implications of his findings sank in, Seracini himself couldn't stop wondering why generations of connoisseurs had lavished such praise on the handiwork of the Leonardo understudy who stepped in as much as a century later -- a painter whose mountains in the background suddenly struck him as resembling little pup tents. ''The guy was not even a very good artist,'' he says. 

One of the world's leading Leonardo scholars, Carlo Pedretti of the University of California at Los Angeles, who has known Seracini for 30 years, says the results of his recent tests are unambiguous. ''From what he showed me,'' Pedretti says, ''it's clear that Leonardo's original sketch was gone over by an anonymous painter.'' Pedretti says he was surprised, though not disappointed, that the news was finally getting out. ''It's extremely important and should be said because it has to be clarified.'' 

The Uffizi is in no hurry to do that, although Seracini insists that officials there are unusually brave both for allowing the tests and for accepting the rather humbling results, albeit quietly. Still, in the Leonardo room of the museum, there is a small sign where the ''Adoration'' used to hang that says, ''This work is undergoing diagnostic tests in preparation for restoration.'' It is hardly surprising, though, that the results, known for months, now would go unadvertised. 

While new technology has more than ever to tell us about the genesis of works of art, scientific inquiries are often dreaded and dismissed by scholars, auction houses and others who would have a lot to lose if such tests were done more routinely. There is still no such thing as a paternity test for paintings. The long-running Rembrandt Research Project, for example, a Dutch undertaking that sought to separate real Rembrandts from impostors, ended up concluding that it is only rarely possible to establish authorship through science alone. Tests can, however, retrieve much of the hidden history of a work. They can date certain materials and pigments and uncover obscured images and reconstruct techniques, raising all sorts of inconvenient questions in the process. Seracini's accidental discovery about the ''Adoration'' shows clearly why, as far as much of the art world is concerned, masterpieces should be entitled to their secrets. 

For now, the ''Adoration'' is locked away in a Uffizi warehouse across from the museum, where mostly minor, damaged or unattributed works are stowed. The walls there are covered ceiling to floor with a mosaic of retired paintings. A couple of rooms are stuffed to bursting with self-portraits; another, with Madonnas of every description. The ''Adoration'' itself is wedged in between one Virgin that has been severely water-damaged and another of dubious parentage. 

An enormous work done on 10 vertical slabs of wood glued together, the ''Adoration'' is still up on the blocks where Seracini has been surveying it for the last nine months. The morning I tag along with him, he is doing some of his final work on the painting -- a last bit of housekeeping, really -- photographing it grid by grid with a high-resolution digital camera. Later, this effort will yield thousands of images of the work as it is visible to the naked eye. 

Standing face to face with the painting -- a fading image of the biblical story of the three kings visiting the newborn Christ child and his mother -- it is easy enough to distinguish the orange-brown paint from the grayish Leonardo sketch, which was brushed on with lampblack mixed with diluted glue and then covered by a primer of lead white. 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? Seracini sees his findings not as detracting from Leonardo but as defending the artist's honor, exonerating him in a sense. How could anyone have ever thought so little of Leonardo, particularly as a student of anatomy, as to have held him responsible for those awful pointy toes? 

Sure enough, the lines of Leonardo's underdrawing on the Madonna's face and robes do seem superior to the brown ones. Seracini is telling me what art is, too, of course, and my eyes are adjusting. A Leonardo primer for sale in the Uffizi bookshop says the ''Adoration'' has long been loved ''as a work in progress, miraculously balanced between painting and drawing. It seems that we can penetrate, and almost participate in, the mental secrets and techniques that lead to a completed work.'' But a prominent art historian, Antonio Natali, who heads the Renaissance painting section at the Uffizi, says that it is only Seracini's tests that have made it possible to read the painting correctly at long last. Seracini says he believes that Leonardo, man of science, would have approved. 

The images hidden beneath the paint, uncovered in full detail by infrared reflectography, show figures constructing a staircase, transforming the scene from one of a world in ruins to one in reconstruction at the beginning of the Renaissance. Also mostly obscured by the paint was a violent clash of horses that Natali now considers an important prelude to Leonardo's revolutionary war scene, the ''Battle of Anghiari,'' done nearly a quarter of a century later. ''We all thought it was with the 'Battle of Anghiari' that Italian painting took a sharp turn,'' he says, noting that the work placed an entirely new emphasis on movement and the expression of intense emotion. ''But now we see that the earthquake was really the 'Adoration.' Only unfortunately, you can't see it, or feel the modernity of the ideas'' under what he calls the ''brown jelly'' laid on later. 

Leonardo was commissioned to do this work at 29, when he had already been in Florence for around a dozen years, initially working under the Florentine painter Andrea del Verrocchio. Even at that age, Leonardo was bored unless he was trying some new method in his art, and he had a restless mind -- engaged by math and mechanics, geology and anatomy. Indeed, he was sending out his resume even as he was starting the sketch of the ''Adoration.'' 

In a letter applying for work with Milan's ruling Sforza family, Leonardo emphasized his engineering skills over his artistic talents: ''I have a way of building incredibly light and strong bridges, secure and unattackable covered wagons, catapults, ballistas, trabuchs and other extraordinary and admirably effective instruments.'' Oh, yes, he added, and ''I will be able to create a bronze horse to the eternal honor of your father and the House of Sforza.'' He got the job, of course, and left the ''Adoration'' behind in the hands of his friend Amerigo de' Benci, Natali believes, when he left town in 1482. 

The ''Adoration'' has been through a lot in the centuries since then, and that wear and tear is on display here, too. Like Leonardo's portrait of de' Benci's daughter Ginevra, the ''Adoration'' has been lopped off at the bottom, simply sliced out of its original frame. Along the top, whole chunks of wood have been ripped out. On the back, there is evidence of water damage, lines from where the work had been left lying face down with water dripping onto it. Not surprisingly, some of the wood has rotted as a result. 

At some point after the work was painted, someone scratched the date 1634 onto the front. There is also a man's profile carved into the wood on the back. ''That just shows the respect this work was paid,'' Seracini says angrily, ''maybe because there was just a drawing on it. They may not even have known who the drawing was by.'' No one knows who to blame for this rough treatment or who had the ''Adoration'' when it was painted. There are huge blanks in the history of the painting before the Uffizi finally acquired it in 1670. But more recently, the ''Adoration'' has been lavished with care. 

Which is why last spring's announcement that the museum was planning to restore the work caused such an international uproar. Both sides were on Leonardo's side, of course, and everyone said they were only thinking of him. Essentially, the battle was between those who thought the work was too special to be entrusted to potentially overzealous restorers and those who thought it was too special to be left in its current, largely illegible state. Oddly, as it turned out, Seracini was set loose on the ''Adoration'' only because art historians loudly made the case that Leonardo's masterpiece was too fine to be touched. 


In his workshop just across the Ponte Vecchio, Seracini and his half-dozen assistants are busy studying X-rays, echography and chemical analysis from various projects. ''I am a doctor at heart,'' says Seracini, now 55, who worked his way through college and reluctantly left medical school when he ran out of money. He is a holistic practitioner in his current line of work and likes to get to know the paintings that are his patients. First, he sits down and literally introduces himself to the work. ''I have to understand who is in front of me,'' he says. ''If I feel there's no dialogue, then I'm not ready to start. A patient talks back, and a painting does, too.'' 

Seracini grew up in Florence, where his parents ran a pastry shop. He worked there, sweeping floors and serving gelato, from the time he was a kid. He loved science in particular, but found school so unchallenging, and so resented that he was not allowed to question his teachers, that he finally dropped out at 16. He studied on his own for several years, before leaving for college at the University of California at San Diego, where he majored in engineering and commuted to U.C.L.A. to study Renaissance art with Pedretti. It was under Pedretti -- who once helped Seracini try to find the money to build a hang glider based on a design by Leonardo -- that Seracini began learning about art diagnostics. 

Though the field has been around for nearly a century, Seracini started the first such private firm in Italy, and his specialty became adapting new medical technology to art investigations. (He was the first to use ultrasound on frescoes, for example, after perfecting the technique on his pregnant wife.) Museums do not always pay for such diagnostic tests, though. So, not unlike Leonardo, he has mainly made a living thanks to a series of wealthy private sponsors. The latest of these is Loel Guinness, heir to the brewing fortune, a friend of a friend he met for the first time when Guinness appeared in his office one night 18 months ago, when Seracini was typically on the brink of insolvency. It was Guinness who later financed the examination of the ''Adoration.'' 

Hunched over a computer in his workshop, where he wears a tweed jacket and tie every day, Seracini pulls up some of the test results from the project. Using two screens, he points out the difference between the painting as it appears in the warehouse and the images under the paint that he captured with an infrared camera. ''You see?'' he says, leaning into the screen, chin in hand, too absorbed to push up the eyeglasses that are nearly slipping off his nose. He goes back to the Madonna's perfect, rounded foot in the Leonardo underdrawing. ''Just look at this foot! Now, compare it to what this guy has done'' -- this guy,'' of course, being the anonymous painter, he of the pointy toes. ''Or these hands! Look at the Leonardo wrist -- so mild, soft and true, and then here, in the painting, it's a straight line.'' 

Next he has me look at a dot-size cross-section sample of the ''Adoration'' under a microscope, which shows that by the time color was first brushed on top of Leonardo's sketch, there were already significant cracks in the work, cracks deep enough for the wet orange-brown paint to have seeped down into them. That cracking could have occurred only after a significant period of time, Seracini says, anywhere from 50 to 100 years. 

When Seracini himself first realized what the slide and others like it were trying to tell him, he was so unnerved that he threw out everything he had done and started over. But there it was again: outside of two repainted trees that Seracini had not yet fully analyzed, the only dabs of paint that could conceivably have been applied by Leonardo were some strokes of lead white on the head of the infant Jesus and a few more on the head of one of the kings bowing down before the child. Only those marks are contemporaneous with Leonardo's sketch. 

Throughout the months of testing on the ''Adoration,'' the pressure from both sides of the debate over restoration was intense. Though Guinness was picking up the tab, the Uffizi officials constantly pressed Seracini for results that could settle the fight their way. Both Natali and the director of the museum, Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, were adamant that the restoration should go forward. On the other side was a group of Renaissance scholars led by James Beck, an art history professor at Columbia University and founder of a group that crusades against the dangers of restoration. Seracini heard from him, too. Finally, in January, Seracini called Petrioli and Natali to his office to share the results. Antonio Paolucci, the superintendent of fine arts in Florence and all the state museums in Tuscany, was also there, as was the restorer who was to have done the job. Seracini remembers that he himself was uncharacteristically nervous that night. 


In Natali's office in the Uffizi, where he displays a huge oil painting of some flowers -- a work that his daughter did at age 4 -- he describes the meeting in Seracini's office as ''hardly peaceful.'' First, there was the usual tension because Petrioli and her boss, Paolucci, have been at each other's throats for years. But also, Natali says, ''we were doubting the challenges to what people had for ages taken for granted.'' 

According to Seracini, Paolucci left the session first, quietly, saying that he had just learned the bitterest lesson of his life. What he and the others seem not to have noticed is that Seracini's tests had failed to answer the central question they were supposed to resolve: to restore or not to restore? While Seracini took no position, saying he hadn't had enough time to analyze the results, both sides seized on his findings to buttress their positions. Those opposed to restoration said there was no urgent need to proceed. Those in favor said that the underdrawing revealed so clearly by Seracini cried out in favor of at least a light cleaning. In January, Paolucci, a former Italian culture minister, sided with the opponents of restoration, saying that it was simply ''not the right moment politically'' to go forward. Paolucci refused to comment further. 

Natali did agree to talk, but on the condition that Seracini be present. An exuberant man in jeans and a V-neck sweater, Natali bounds all over his office as he speaks. He pulls out book after book to illustrate his various points, the first of these being that the museum has accepted Seracini's findings absolutely. ''The analysis was very clear and speaks for itself.'' But then, over the course of a two-hour interview, he makes every effort to avoid talking about the details of Seracini's point that Leonardo himself could not have laid on the paint. Finally, on what may only feel like the 10th try to pin him down, he says: ''We can accept the news, or be afraid of it, and in something like this, that everybody thought was sure, some people will naturally doubt. But science shows us what the eye cannot see, and you cannot doubt that most of the paint comes from modern times,'' by which he means post-Leonardo times. 

Most of the paint? Seracini, who is sitting right there, had said all of the paint, or all but a couple of highlights, anyway. Do they disagree on that point? Natali is silent for a moment. ''When he shows me the tests, it's useless for me to argue,'' he says. ''If you look at the painting, it's obvious that some parts have no finesse at all.'' So does he or does he not agree that no paint was put on by Leonardo? ''We need to be delicate in how we present the results,'' he responds. ''And whatever has been painted on top is still on top of a Leonardo.'' 

When I call another top Leonardo man, Martin Kemp, a professor of art history at Oxford, to ask about the implications of Seracini's findings, he seems shaken -- at least partly at having been taken by surprise: ''Is he saying the paint was added outside the Leonardo period? If he's saying the only thing that's Leonardo is the underdrawing, it obviously has severe implications. I've always assumed much of what we saw was Leonardo. But if that assumption is wrong, I'd rather know it's wrong.'' 

Seracini says he hopes that in the end his findings on the ''Adoration'' will show that diagnosticians should be brought in routinely to establish a ''baseline chart'' to track the condition of every important work, rather than as referees in fights over restorations. ''But there's a lot of interest in keeping the rules the way they are so you trust the experts and leave science out of it,'' he grouses. ''Technology is still left knocking at the door of the art world, and it's not so easy even to get your hands on a Leonardo.'' 

Still, he has already managed to examine all three Leonardos at the Uffizi, where his work also led to a revised reading of the ''Annunciation.'' He has also tested a series of sketches in the Louvre, as well as the ''Last Supper'' in Milan, which he had barely begun to assess when, to his horror, the restoration was started. ''You don't do surgery just because a man is famous, but in art that is how it works,'' he says. (In fact, Seracini ended up walking off the ''Last Supper'' job after he showed up for work at Santa Maria delle Grazie one day and found Jack Palance standing in front of the work under the bright lights that are murder on art, reading fun facts about Leonardo off cue cards for a documentary.) 

Not surprisingly, he dreams one day of examining the ''Mona Lisa,'' too. He even goes so far as to ask how we know for sure that the work on display at the Louvre is the original -- especially since it was stolen early in the last century. At a dinner recently, Seracini sat next to Valery Giscard d'Estaing and dared to raise the subject of testing the world's most famous painting, which the Louvre has been reluctant to do. Instantly, he says, the former French president changed the subject. Later, ''he told me I really should go to France, where Leonardo died, because there was still a lot of research to be done there.'' Isn't even Seracini afraid to strip the ''Mona Lisa'' of her mystery? ''No,'' he says. ''Everybody has been speculating about how she got that smile. All I'm saying is let's find out.'' 


Seracini's most enduring Leonardo obsession, though, has nothing to do with the ''Adoration,'' ''Annunciation'' or even the ''Mona Lisa.'' All of his professional life, he has been looking for Leonardo's largest and perhaps most important work, the ''Battle of Anghiari,'' which he is convinced lies behind a wall in the Hall of the 500 in the Palazzo Vecchio. 

This was the seat of power for the Florentine Republic, the room where the city's democratic council, the Gran Consiglio, met from 1495 to 1512 and home to the Medici after they returned to power in 1512. At least politically speaking, you could argue, this is the spot where the Renaissance was born. 

Leonardo's 1503 commission to decorate the walls here with a battle scene commemorating the victory of the Florentines over the Milanese in the 1440 battle was a way of celebrating the restoration of the republic. The commission, signed by Leonardo's friend Niccolo Machiavelli, was a high honor -- even if Florence was also hiring Leonardo's chief rival, Michelangelo, to compose a twin work of another battle scene on the same wall. Michelangelo seems never to have got past the cartoon stage with his work, ''The Battle of Cascina,'' while Leonardo completed only the centerpiece of the ''Battle of Anghiari,'' known as the ''Fight for the Standard.'' 

Leonardo, who died in 1519, began painting the work in 1505, when he was 53 and at the height of his powers. Most Leonardo scholars say that he was, as usual, experimenting and had terrible difficulties. They say that may have been one reason he dropped the project. Pedretti disputes this, saying that ''it makes me furious to see that the romantic image of Leonardo, who keeps experimenting and failing, persists.'' He says that Leonardo's methods were sound and that fragments of the fresco might still exist. 

In the end, the widely copied result was considered an almost unparalleled artistic triumph. The horses, appearing as ferocious warriors biting one another, represent Leonardo's view of war itself as ''pazzia bestialissima'' -- a form of madness, beastly in the extreme. 

Almost 60 years later, the Medici hired the architect Giorgio Vasari to replace Leonardo's work with something a little less democratic, something celebrating their own most glorious victories. The Leonardo disappeared right around 1563, when Vasari was renovating the room, and it has always been assumed that it was demolished. Yet Seracini, who was brought in on this project by Pedretti back in 1975, has always believed that Vasari was far too big a fan of Leonardo to have destroyed the work. 

There is no record of where in the hall the ''Battle of Anghiari'' was painted. But it is known that Vasari changed the hall's dimensions before replacing the Leonardo fresco with his own work, ''Marciano in the Chiana Valley.'' Seracini argues that it would have been a simple enough matter for him to have built a new wall over the Leonardo -- as was commonly done then -- rather than knock it down. One of the most tantalizing clues, certainly, is a small inscription near the very top of the east wall of the room. There, on a tiny green flag, are the inch-high words ''Cerca Trova'' -- Seek, and you shall find.'' The words are written in white paint, paint that Seracini's chemical analysis shows was applied at the same time as the rest of the work -- in 1564 and 1565, according to historical documents. These are the only words on any of the six enormous murals that cover the walls today. 

''It sounds like an invitation, doesn't it?'' Seracini says. And for Seracini a longstanding one, because he found those words many years ago, while moving the scaffolding for his initial examination here in the 70's. He had to stop the project in 1977 because the technology at the time was not up to the challenge of finding out if the Leonardo was there without damaging Vasari's work. Also, once again, he ran out of money. 

For years, the project was given up for dead, primarily, in Seracini's view, because it is not a treasure hunt in the usual sense. ''Searching for Leonardo is not like searching for a sunken vessel. It's a masterpiece that enriches us all, but nobody makes money from it.'' Now, however, thanks to Guinness, he figures he is about a year away from finding either the fresco or the final proof that it is not there. The project will take time because Seracini is still in the process of developing a portable, low-frequency sonogram machine capable of seeing all the way through Vasari's wall or walls, as well as special software to store the findings. 

He often works in the Hall of the 500 overnight, until sunrise, because some of his instruments work only in the dark. Which is how I found myself on the top of a scaffold 60 feet in the air in the perfect midnight quiet of the empty museum, squinting at the words ''Cerca Trova.'' A lot of the figures and faces up at this height are barely sketched in, as details that would never be seen from the ground. 

But a perch on top of the scaffold also offers a better view of the Vasari scenes across the hall on the west wall, scenes that echo the ''Fight for the Standard'' in a way that suggests to Seracini that maybe Vasari was staring across the cavernous room at the Leonardo while he painted. The Vasari work does show men grappling for a flag, just as in the ''Fight for the Standard.'' As in Leonardo's sketches, the horses are biting one another. One face seems a mirror image of one in the Leonardo. 

While we are sitting up there, gazing at Vasari's ornate work on the ceiling just above, Seracini says there is no record of the ''Battle of Anghiari'' being destroyed -- or moved, for that matter. ''It was a beautiful fresco by a great artist. If a fresco by Leonardo da Vinci had been destroyed, don't you think that would have been a hell of a story? People would have written about it. For 60 years, people came here to admire the great horses of Leonardo.'' He is talking as much to himself now as he is to me. ''If I follow my instinct, I say something must be there. And if I follow logic, I say why would such an admired masterpiece be destroyed?'' 

Back down on the ground, he throws open the three huge windows at the end of the room and brings out his thermal camera, which contains a heat detector that works most effectively in the cold. The heat emanating from the walls projects a shadow, and in that shadow it is possible to see the ghosts of the structure of the room as it used to be -- a door that has been filled in behind a statue by Michelangelo, a crack in one of the frescoes, the original height of the ceiling before Vasari raised it. This is all part of the important process of elimination in trying to figure out just where the Leonardo was located. 

Seracini is sure he is getting closer. Just this week, the team he works with, from the electronic engineering department of the University of Florence, found a discontinuity -- a narrow space of some kind -- in the wall behind the panel where ''Cerca Trova'' is written. They also found that on the opposite side of the hall there is a double wall -- the Vasari fresco, a brick wall, then more plaster behind that. 

Seracini doesn't doubt that his low-frequency sonogram machine, when it is completed, will let him look through Vasari's wall, or walls. Only recently, the project seems to have become a priority for the city, too, with the top cultural official for Florence, Simone Siliani, gushing that Seracini could lead the city into a second Renaissance, ''bringing art and science together as the contemporary mission of this city.'' 


Walking to the train station one afternoon, Seracini and I passed one of Florence's most beautiful churches, Santa Maria Novella, and I mentioned that I had just seen the restored Masaccio fresco of the Trinity there, with what must be the world's oldest and oddest looking Madonna appearing almost bored kneeling beneath the cross and her crucified son. 

Seracini looked as if I had just handed him exactly what he wanted for Christmas. ''Did you know that that fresco was also found behind a second wall that was built by Vasari?'' he asked. Apparently, Vasari did this to preserve the work while he was making some structural changes in the church in 1566, the year after his renovations in the Palazzo Vecchio. The Trinity, lost for hundreds of years, was found by accident in the mid-19th century, almost intact. We went in to look again at the liberated fresco. ''If so much was done for Masaccio,'' Seracini sighed, staring up at it, ''why less for Leonardo?'' 


_  Melinda Henneberger is the Rome bureau chief for The New York Times._

----------


## katana

denku
Deputet
Posts: 198
(4/23/02 7:13:27 pm)
Reply | Edit | Del  Re: The Leonardo Cover up
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Artikull teper kurioz.Me pelqeu. 

Enip  
Shpirt i Lirë
Posts: 1201
(4/24/02 3:26:11 am)
Reply | Edit | Del  Re: The Leonardo Cover up
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Kurse une jam kurioze nese ndonje dite Seracini do te mund te lejohet te kontrolloje Mona Lisan dhe cfare do te konkludoje pas atij inspektimi.

Nuk e dija qe francezet, nuk lejojne qe ate pikture te Leonardos te mos e kontrolloje njeri ne eshte autentike apo fallse.


denku
Deputet
Posts: 200
(4/24/02 6:50:37 am)
Reply | Edit | Del  Nje kuriozitet 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Enip ti ndoshta mund ta dish ,por po ta veresh me vemendje portretin e Mona Lizes,ne anen e majte tek floket,ndiq linjat e flokeve .Eshte studiuar me kujdes nga vezhgues te artit dhe ata kane nxjerre ne pah se Leonardo da Vinci ka hedhur profilin e tij dmth po ta shikosh me vemendje sheh qarte linjat e profilit te tij.
pershedetje!!!!!

----------

