The battle for the buried Leonardo

Press, 5 November 1977, Page 14

The battle for the buried Leonardo

By

GEORGE ARMSTRONG,

from Rome,

for the “Guardian”

The three-year scientific search for the art world’s best known buried treasure — Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Battle of Anghiari,” which was painted on the wall of Florence’s town hall early in the sixteenth century but has not been visible for more than 400 years — has concluded. The results ot the search are being assembled in two thick reports now in the hands of the Florence authorities. The reports suggest that the missing Leonardo mura l could still be on the Palazzo Vecchio wall, lying only about eight millimetres below a fresco superimposed between 156769 by Giorgio Vasari.

Leonardo’s Rattle was considered one of the world’s wonders when it was painted, and many artists who visited Florence, like Raphael, made their own copies of it. Rubens, born after the painting had been covered with Vasari’s layer of frescoes, was so impressed by . the copies he saw that he made a painting of the “Battle" which is now in the Louvre. Leonardo’s own preliminary sketches for the large work are in the Windsor collection and in Venice’s Academia. The last recorded references to the painting are in a letter written by Agnolo Doni to a friend in 1549, telling him that when in Florence he must not miss seeing “Leonardo’s horses, which will appear to you a miraculous thing” and in Vasari’s own account of Leonardo’s life, published in 1550.

It has generally been assumed that Leonardo’s paint-

ing was a terrible failure because of his experimental technique, or that Vasiar simply, destroyed it in his eagerness to complete his own work. Actually, the current search began with the hope, expressed by the historians, Carlo Pedretti and Alessandro Parronchi, that Vasari had carefully walled up Leonardo’s work in order to preserve it. Exhaustive research was performed on the large east wall of the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio, where most scholars, including Pedretti, Parronchi, Lord Clark and the National Gallery’s Cecil Gould, thought that Leonardo had painted. The justcompleted search found nothing on that wall. But on the west wall, behind the three other Vasari frescoes, there is a buried painted surface measuring over 20 metres in length and five metres high. It would be an almost routine matter to remove the Vasari frescoes without harming them. But will it be done? Part of the funds for the search, which used the latest acoustical and infra-red scanning methods, some of which are ' used in medical diagnoses, came from Dr Armand Hammer, the 80-year-old Russian-American oil magnate, art collector, and philanthropist. Last March, in a lengthy toast to the Communist Mayor of Florence, Mr Elio Gabbugiani, Hammer said that he personally would pay for the removal of the Vasari murals. He would pay for their restoration (they are buckling and flaking) as well as for the restoration of the hall.

If the Leonardo work is indeed brought to light, Dr Hammer announced, he would then be happy to build a suitable second home in. Florence either for the displaced Vasari or for the re-found Leonardo. This offer could cost Hammer SIM. As he told the Mayor, it will be worth more than that to Florence, from visitors flocking to see one of the rare works by Leonardo da Vinci.

Even with the funds available, and with the scientific certainty that “something” lies behind the Vasari plaster, the Vasari may not be removed for many years to come. The decision now lies primarily with three Florentines who are responsible for the supervision and care of Florence’s art treasures — Professor Unberto Baldini, Professor Nello Bemporad, and Professor Luciano Berti ~ as well as the Mayor, and the Rector of Florence’s university, Professor Enzo Ferroni, Even before seeing the researchers’ reports, Baldini said that he saw no wisdom in removing the present frescoes, for removal “is always risky, and we might find underneath only an earlier attempt by Vasari.”

The university’s Rettore Magnifico, as Ferroni’s office entitles him to be called, holds another view, one of a man of science, a man who worked enthusiatically and successfully on restoring Florentine art damaged in the 1966 flood. “I think that the problem now may be one of our usual Italian buck-passing,” Ferroni says. “Also, trying to get a group of scholars and experts, trained in the humanities and who may be wary of this scientific study,

to come to an agreement, will not be easy. There’s no question to me that there is something behind the Vasari, both pigments and organic binding media have been found and we owe it, not just to Florence, but to the world to find out what it

Professor Leonetto Tintori, Italy’s most famous restorer, has been consulted for the project from the beginning, and says that removal of the frescoes involves no risk. The two researchers who have been on the project from the beginning are Maurizio Seracini, an Americantrained Florentine with a degree in medical engineering, and Travers Newton, a California art restorer. Both men are young and earnest. Seracini’s contribution to the project was purely scientific, and he limits himself to saying that “on , the west wall we got a different acoustical behaviour over a vast area.” Their instruments “signalled” nothing on the east wall. Seracini and Newton are proud that they have determined the original structure of the great hall, which is important in itself.. But, in this context, it also mea'ns tha’ they have confirmed an earlier (1968) discovery that the original windows on the west wall were in fact low trough to permit any renaissance artist with big ideas to paint above them a giant panoramic njural. Leonardo was as much a scientist as he was an. artist, and as such he experimented in both fields. The technique he used in the Palazzo Vecchio was not the standard fresco technique, in which the colours are applied to wet plaster, but his own combination of oil and tem-

pera painting bn a dry wall. According to Professor Tintori, samples of the wall have revealed traces of pigment, oil, resin, and proteinsubstan„es Vasari would not have used in an underdrawing or for his own murals. Moreover, Vasari raised the . ceiling of the hall and brought his murals up to the new height. According to Ferroni and Tintori, both the ultrasonic work and the samples reveal that the hid-

deh mural stops at the level of the old height of the hall. Newton, the California restorer, says: “It just isn’t logical that Vasari would, have painted his sinopia with oil and then covered it over with the usual mezzofresco technique. And why doesn’t the buried work continue to the full height of the finished Vasari?” As of now, the battle to give back to' l the world what remains buried of Leonardo’s ■‘Bartle" is on.