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History's Hinge - 'Ain Jalut

[Solomon]

This manuscript bears the print of Leonardo da Vinci's left index finger, according to scientists at Chieti University. They analysed 200 documents which he is thought to have handled. They hope to find traces of sweat or saliva which could yield clues about Leonardo's diet. (AP/Piero Lucco)

Anthropologists said they have pieced together Leonardo da Vinci's left index fingerprint - a discovery that could help provide information on such matters as the food the artist ate and whether his mother was of Arabic origin.

The reconstruction of the fingerprint was the result of three years of research and could help attribute disputed paintings or manuscripts, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist and director of the Anthropology Research Institute at Chieti University in central Italy.

"It adds the first touch of humanity. We knew how Leonardo saw the world and the future ... but who was he? This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius," Capasso said in a recent telephone interview.

The research was based on a first core of photographs of about 200 fingerprints - most of them partial- taken from about 52 papers handled by Leonardo in his life. Capasso's work, presented in 2005 in a specialized magazine called Anthropologie, published in the Czech Republic, is on display in an exhibition in the town of Chieti through March 30.

The artist often ate while working, and Capasso and other experts said his fingerprints could include traces of saliva, blood or the food he ate the night before. It is information that could help clear up questions about his origins.

Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said there are documents that appear to back this up.

"This coincides with documented indications that she was Oriental, at least from the Mediterranean area, not a peasant of Vinci," he said.

Vezzosi, who manages the archive of documents Capasso used for his study, warned that her origin cannot be determined with any certainty until a contract documenting her sale is found.

 "Still, her name was Caterina, the most common name among slaves in Tuscany, and we have no certain elements about her," he said.

[Bart]

I hope his efforts bear fruit, and something is left to see.

- Bart

Art sleuth looks for lost Da Vinci masterpiece

By Silvia Aloisi Tue
Jan 30, 9:21 AM ET

FLORENCE, Italy (Reuters) -

     After 32 years on the trail of Leonardo da Vinci's lost masterpiece "The Battle of Anghiari," Maurizio Seracini thinks he is on the verge of solving one of the art world's greatest mysteries.

     The Italian engineer and art expert reckons he knows where the fresco, which disappeared nearly five centuries ago, might be hidden -- behind a wall right where it was painted, in Florence's Renaissance town hall.

Now that the Italian government has given him the go-ahead to complete his investigation, Seracini says he is just a few months away from finding out once and for all.

     If he is right, there is no overestimating the importance such a discovery would have.

     "At the time of Leonardo the contemporaries considered this not only his best work of art but also 'the' best work of art, the masterpiece of all," Seracini said in his office near the Palazzo Vecchio, where he believes the painting is buried.

     "So, we are searching for the most important masterpiece of the Renaissance, the highest point ever achieved, and the most important masterpiece of Leonardo," he told Reuters.

"MIRACULOUS THING"

     Florence's leaders commissioned Leonardo, then at the height of his career, to paint a fresco celebrating the Florentine Republic's victory over the Milanese in a battle on the plains of Anghiari that took place on June 29, 1440.

     Leonardo, who loathed war as "a most beastly madness," started working on the huge mural, thought to be three times the size of "The Last Supper," in 1505. Its central theme was a group of horses and riders furiously fighting for a standard.

     But a year later, perhaps disappointed with an experimental technique he used on the fresco that some experts believe damaged it, Leonardo abandoned the painting and left for Milan.

     The work, which one chronicler called "a miraculous thing," remains known today through Leonardo's preliminary sketches of fighters on horseback and copies made by other artists.

     But all trace of the original was lost after 16th-century artist and architect Giorgio Vasari renovated the Palazzo Vecchio's Hall of the 500 that was hosting it.

     For long, it was widely believed that the painting had been destroyed and replaced with Vasari's own frescoes of military battles.

Then Seracini came along.

SEEK AND FIND

     "Please don't make me look like Indiana Jones searching for the Lost Ark," Seracini, who sees himself halfway between an art doctor and a detective, said almost apologetically.

     With his unassuming manner, tweed jacket and blue tie, the grey-haired 60-year-old is very different to Steven Spielberg's adventurous, whip-cracking archaeologist.

     Yet the story of his quest for "The Battle of Anghiari" seems the stuff of a movie or a fiction novel like Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" -- which mentions Seracini's work.

     A biomedical engineer with a U.S. degree and a passion for art conservation, Seracini began looking for the painting, sometimes known as "The Lost Leonardo," in 1975.

Exploring inch by inch the huge Vasari mural he thinks might be hiding Leonardo's fresco, Seracini noticed an inscription, almost invisible from the floor, on a tiny green flag.

     "Cerca Trova" -- "Seek and You Shall Find," says the cryptic message, the only writing in any of the six battle scenes decorating the Hall of the 500.

     "It puzzled me then and it still puzzles me now. It could be an army motto. Or maybe it doesn't mean anything. But maybe it's a hint," Seracini said.

     Despite the tantalizing finding, Seracini had to abandon his project in 1977. Technology at the time was not advanced enough to explore further without touching Vasari's fresco, he said.

     But in 1999, thanks to funding by Anglo-Irish millionaire ,  Loel Guinness the search resumed.

     And Seracini, using medical and military technology such as thermography, X-ray and radar scans, found another possible clue -- a small cavity underneath Vasari's mural that makes him think Vasari did not destroy the wall where Leonardo had painted, but built another wall in front of it.

     "Vasari was a great admirer of Leonardo. He did not have any reasons to destroy, damage or remove Leonardo's painting. And he used a similar technique to hide the 'Holy Trinity' by Masaccio. So maybe he saw he had a chance and he saved it," Seracini said.

     In 2003, Seracini, who had by then come to world attention by discovering that Leonardo's "Adoration of the Magi" had been heavily painted over by other artists, hit another snag.

     The Florence town hall did not renew his permit to continue his search, arguing the evidence was unconvincing. This month, however, the government decided Seracini should go ahead.

     Seracini says he needs 10 months to develop a scan that can capture radiations from chemical elements contained in the color pigments used by Leonardo in the fresco -- such as lead for white, copper for blue and mercury for red. Then he can solve the mystery.

     "It's time to go and see if there is something left," he said. And if it's not there, he would not feel he has wasted his time. "I hope I have proved that we can use scientific methods to understand works of art and preserve our cultural heritage."

[Solomon]

So few of Leonardo's paintings survive, it would be good to recover this fresco.

...right where it was painted

That's good: a fresco that moved would be miraculous. 

Loel Guinness: we have seen him before in this forum.

Solomon

[Bart]

Mona Lisa's Identity Revealed?

   The woman behind Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa painting was born in an old Florentine house that was no beauty, according to newly discovered archival documents.

   Originally used as a workshop by wool artisans, the house stood a few hundred feet from the Medieval bridge Ponte Vecchio, in a dark alley known as Via Sguazza.

   According to historian Giuseppe Pallanti, it was right in Via Sguazza, where the woman Leonardo began painting in 1503 was born, on June 15, 1479.

Mona Lisa's Birthplace?

"It wasn't a really nice place to live. Rain water and sewage stagnated just in front of the house," Pallanti told Discovery News.

Humble Origins

   The author of the book "Mona Lisa's Story," Pallanti has identified her as Lisa Gherardini, a member of a minor noble family of rural origins. She later married a wealthy Florentine silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo.

   Pallanti's 25-year investigation supports a claim first made in 1550 by Giorgio Vasari. In his work, "Lives of the Artists," the 16th-century painter and art historian named Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo as the subject of the portrait.

   One among many theories is that Francesco Del Giocondo commissioned Leonardo for the painting to mark his wife's second pregnancy when she was about 24.

   "Mona Lisa did exist indeed. My new findings reveal that she lived a very ordinary life, always struggling to live in a decent house," Pallanti said.

Lisa's Historic Home

   The historian found evidence of Mona Lisa's birthplace in a 1480 tax declaration by Giovanbattista Corbinelli, who owned the building in Via Sguazza.

   "Corbinelli wrote that the previous year he had turned two workshops used by wool artisans into two small houses. He gave one to his nephew, and rented the other to Anton Maria Gherardini and Lucrezia Del Caccia for 16 fiorins per year," Pallanti said.

   It was an expensive rent, the equivalent of a year's salary at that time.

   According to Giuseppe Cacialli, who owns an artisan workshop in Via Sguazza, Mona Lisa's place of birth still exists, but has been closed off for decades.

   "I was born near this street, but I have never seen that door open in the last 50 years," Cacialli told Discovery News.

   The owner of several estates in the Chianti countryside, the Gherardinis might have had a rather difficult time in the years following their daughter's birth.

   At a certain point, when the girl was 15, it appears that her parents became homeless and had to sub-rent the house of the merchant Leonardo Busini in the Santa Croce quarter.

   "With my great uneasiness I'm renting half of my house to Anton Maria Gherardini, because they have no house. We agreed that this accommodation won't last more than three years," Busini wrote in another tax declaration found by Pallanti.

The Leonardo Link

   "What is interesting about this new accommodation is that Leonardo's father ? a local notary, Ser Piero da Vinci ? and Lisa's family were neighbors. Ser Piero lived just across the street in Via Ghibellina," Pallanti said.

   Lisa lived in Busini's house only one year, Pallanti says

   In 1495, when she was 16 years old, she married the merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Ser Francesco was 14 years her senior and had lost his first wife, Camilla Rucellai, the previous year.

   The girl moved to Del Giocondo's house, located in today's San Lorenzo market quarter. Though the house was big and beautiful, the surroundings were less than ideal: prostitutes populated the area, which was a sort of a Renaissance red light district. In that house, Lisa gave birth to five children: Piero, Andrea, Giocondo, Camilla and Marietta.

   In previous research, Pallanti found Ser Francesco's will and was able to reconstruct Lisa's last years. The will was signed by the notary Ser Piero, confirming that Leonardo's father and Lisa's husband knew each other.

   "In the document, Francesco asked his younger daughter, Marietta, to take care of his 'beloved wife,' Lisa. Marietta, who had become a nun, brought her ill mother to the nearby convent of Sant'Orsola," Pallanti said.

Lisa's Last Years

And, Her Resting Place

   An archive known as a "Book of the Dead," found by Pallanti in a church archive, states that Lisa died four years after her husband's death, at age 63, and was buried in Sant'Orsola.

   "La Gioconda," as Italians call the Mona Lisa, has puzzled art lovers since the portrait was completed around 1506.

   Attempts to solve the enigma surrounding her famous smile as well as her identity ? the panel is unsigned, undated and bears nothing to indicate the sitter's name ? have included theories that she was the artist's mother, a noblewoman, a courtesan, even a prostitute.

   Theories also abound that the sitter was happily pregnant, or affected by various diseases ranging from facial paralysis to the compulsive gnashing of teeth.

   "My research confirms that Lisa Gherardini and the Mona Lisa were one and the same. We might never solve the mystery behind her smile, but now we know that she had a modest childhood and a rather ordinardy life," Pallanti said.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/05/02/monalisa_arc.html?category=archaeology&guid=20070502143030&dcitc=w19-502-ak-0000

[Solomon]

The identity of the model
Lisa Gherardini

Vasari identified the subject to be the wife of socially prominent Francesco del Giocondo, who was a silk merchant of Florence. Until recently, little was known about his third wife, Lisa Gherardini, except that she was born in 1479, raised at her family's Villa Vignamaggio in Tuscany and that she married del Giocondo in 1495.

In 2004, the Italian scholar Giuseppe Pallanti published Monna Lisa, Mulier Ingenua (literally '"Mona Lisa: Real Woman", published in English under the title Mona Lisa Revealed: The True Identity of Leonardo's Model[12]). The book gathered archival evidence in support of the traditional identification of the model as Lisa Gherardini. According to Pallanti, the evidence suggests that Leonardo's father was a friend of del Giocondo. "The portrait of Mona Lisa, done when Lisa Gherardini was aged about 24, was probably commissioned by Leonardo's father himself for his friends as he is known to have done on at least one other occasion." Pallanti discovered that Lisa and Francesco had five children and that she outlived her husband. In early 2007, Pallanti found a death notice in the archives of a Florence church that referred to "the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, deceased July 15, 1542, and buried at Sant'Orsola." Sant'Orsola is a convent in Florence. Pallanti ascertains with certainty that this refers to Gherardini. This would make her age at her death to be 63 years. Also in January 2007, Italian geneologist Domenico Savini identified the princesses Natalia and Irina Strozzi as living descendants of Lisa Gherardini.

In September 2006, Bruno Mottin argued that the guarnelo he studied using the 2004 scan data suggested that the painting dated from around 1503 and commemorated the birth of Lisa Gherardini's second son.