Nothing wrong with a virtual party -- but, in the meantime, here is a Renaissance dilemma to solve.
No Fair! Leonardo Got the Good Side of the Room!
By John Tierney
Kalpa Group Project
Leonardo Da Vinci began painting “The Battle on Anghiari” in 1505 on the eastern wall of the Hall of 500, near the spot where Maurizio Seracini is standing on the scaffolding. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint another battle mural to the left of Leonardo’s. The wall today is covered with later murals of battles painted by Vasari.
What stopped Michelangelo from even starting the battle mural he was commissioned to do on the same wall as Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Battle of Anghiari”? Before we get to some imaginary dialogue between the two painters (in response to my previous post about the murals), let me give you an answer from Maurizio Seracini, who has been leading the search for the lost Leonardo painting.
He believes the answer may be found in the layout of the hall, which Dr. Seracini has constructed with the help of colleagues at the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, like Falko Kuester, who used lasers to map the current hall to a precision of one millimeter. By studying the current hall and probing beneath the surface with radar and other techniques, they’ve discovered what the hall looked like before its 1563 remodeling.
Dr. Seracini’s work has won praise from scholars like Marco Leona, who leads the science group at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “In the quest for the lost Leonardo,” Dr. Leona said of Dr. Seracini, “he has been methodical and persistent, and I think he has built his case carefully. The combination of the archival research with the 3D reconstruction of the original architecture is in itself a great result.”
The reconstruction showed that there had been large windows at the end of the room closest to Leonardo’s painting. As he faced the east wall, there would have been light coming from the south wall to his right, which would have been fine for an artist who painted with his left hand, as Leonardo did.
But the arrangement wouldn’t have been so good for Michelangelo, who was supposed to paint a mural on that wall farther from the windows, to the left of Leonardo’s. Like Leonardo, Michelangelo was naturally left-handed, but he had trained himself to use mainly his right hand. So as he worked, his right hand would have cast a shadow on the light coming from the windows to the right. And because his assigned location was farther from the windows, there would have been less overall light for him to work in — and for his painting to be displayed to the public.
Would the great Michelangelo have tolerated getting the crummy side of the wall? “No way,” Dr. Seracini said. “It was an incredible mistake by the Signoria [the Florentine government] to put two of the greatest minds in the same room. Michelangelo would not have wanted the dark side of the room. I can see a lot of problems and a lot of clashing egos.”
One Lab reader, James F Traynor, concisely imagined the dialogue between the two painters:
Mike: You got the light.
Leo: I got here first.
Mike: Jeez, I can’t work under these conditions. See ya.
Another commenter, Ken White, provided a link to his full-length screenplay, “Lions of Florence,” that imagines Leonardo and Michelangelo dueling in the Hall of 500 — initially just with brushes as each works on his mural, but then the competition takes a nastier turn. (Without giving away too much of the plot, I can tell you that they throw plaster and paint at each other.)
Dr. Seracini believes that Vasari, the architect who remodeled the hall and painted his own battle scenes on the wall, preserved Leonardo’s painting by leaving an air gap in front of it. Now Dr. Seracini is trying to establish what’s underneath by using neutrons to probe for the chemicals in Leonardo’s painting (as I describe in my Findings column. If the painting is still there, Dr. Seracini says, Vasari’s fresco could be temporarily removed so that Leonardo’s oil painting could be retrieved.
“There are well-established techniques for removing a fresco without damaging it,” Dr. Seracini said. “Frescos have been moved quite successfully in other situations. It could certainly be done if even a smart portion of Leonardo’s painting is still there. Remember, eyewitnesses said it was the highest achievement of the Renaissance.”
The mayor of Florence, Matteo Renzi, said that if the Leonardo painting is there, he would like to see it displayed to the world as part of a quincentennial celebration planned in 2012 to honor the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci (who died in 1512).
“I hope that we do discover ‘The Battle of Anghiari,’” Mr. Renzi said. “All the signs point to it being under there. And even if it isn’t, at least we can put a full stop on the whole story.”
