Saturday, August 30, 2008
Rediscovering the People's Art: New Deal Murals in Pennsylvania’s Post Offices
The following link is to a magazine article on government-commissioned murals in Pennsylvania.
Post Office Murals
For a nice review of historical and technical aspects behind historic post office murals in pennsylvania, click here.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Henri Matisse, Interior of rooms
Still life, studio at Nice
The painter and his model, 1917
The music lesson
Interior at Nice, 1921
Interior with violin case
Red spacious interior
Interior with flowers and parrot
Interior with woman
The painter and his model, 1917
The music lesson
Interior at Nice, 1921
Interior with violin case
Red spacious interior
Interior with flowers and parrot
My room at the Beau Rivage
Window at Tangiers
Window at Tangiers
Interior with woman
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Modern man: Edvard Munch at MOMA.
The New Yorker, March 13, 2006
by Peter Schjeldahl
by Peter Schjeldahl
When he was seven years old, in 1870 or 1871, Edvard Munch used a lump of coal to draw a sprawling procession of blind men across the floor of his home in Kristiania—as Swedish-ruled Oslo was then named—one in a series of squalid flats taken by a family prone to poverty, disease, mental disorder, and death. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was five; his fiercely beloved older sister Sophie would do the same when he was thirteen. Another sister would be lost to psychosis. Munch himself was sickly from birth; he said later that he grew up feeling “like a boat built of hopeless material, of old rotten wood.” His father was a military doctor, at a time when doctors were ill-paid and little respected, and a guilt-ravaged religious zealot whose idea of parental duty was to instill the terrors of Hell in his children. The boy’s drawing expressed an alarmed fascination with anonymous crowds on city streets—the same theme appeared in major paintings that he made some twenty years later. According to Sue Prideaux’s assured and vivid recent biography, “Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream” (Yale), Munch’s Aunt Karen, the family’s mainstay, marvelled at “the trembling uncertainty” that the apparent prodigy had caught in the sightless figures. (As Munch matured, his talent was regularly noted—even as his art was loathed and his character deplored—in Norway.) In later years, Munch recalled “deriving such pleasure from the monumental format of my work, real satisfaction at the sensation of my hand so much more actively involved than when I drew on the back of father’s prescriptions.”
Two things impress me about this story. First, I believe it, despite its redolence of the sort of family lore that mythifies everybody’s childhood and abounds in the hagiographies of genius. No other great artist—and only a rare writer, short of Proust—has made so absolute a principle of truthful memory. (A perceptive German critic, in 1902, characterized Munch as “a Romantic who cannot lie.”) Second, I’m struck by the note of discovered joy in artmaking, never mind the direness of the subject, that may be typical of budding artists but would serve this one to an extreme degree, as an emotional tightrope over the abysses of a life that was otherwise pretty thoroughly awful.
“Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul,” at the Museum of Modern Art, is the second comprehensive Munch retrospective in the United States in the past fifty years. The first, at the National Gallery, in 1978, came as a revelation to observers who had not previously visited Norway, where all but a few of Munch’s paintings reside. (The Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ “Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice),” from 1893, is the only American-owned painting from his magnum opus, the series of pictures on themes of love, anxiety, and death which is commonly termed the “Frieze of Life.”) He was known here as a great printmaker—the most original of the Symbolist era—and, vaguely, as the father of German Expressionism. But reproductions of his work, including the already famous “Scream,” prepared no one for the originals’ astringent textures, dense space, tensile drawing, and eloquent color.
That show revolutionized my sense of modern-art history, particularly of its canonical elevation of the quartet of Post-Impressionism: Cézanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat. Munch, though younger than those masters, and hitting his stride a bit later, suddenly seemed to me their peer in giving form to the seismic forces of European modernity. He still does, both despite and because of a radically impure style that, at its best, varies from picture to picture. His strongest works, dating from about 1890 to the early years of the last century, exalted pictorial functions—narrative and illustration—that were being combed out of modern painting as specialties more proper to literature and the popular arts. Thereafter, until his death, in 1944, Munch, with less to say of life, painted mainly just to paint, with so-so results, except for the occasional, jolting self-portrait. As a happy compensation for being so long marginalized, and at a time of resurgent interest in storytelling among young artists, Munch today appears fresh and challenging in ways that his more honored peers may not.
French painting (Gauguin and van Gogh), Scandinavian theatre (Ibsen and Strindberg), and German philosophy (Nietzsche) shaped Munch’s emerging sensibility as he moved through the bohemian scene in Kristiania, with some agonizing experiments in free love, and on to art school in Paris, under the academic realist Léon Bonnat, and to scandal in Berlin, where, in 1892, his first major exhibition was denounced by Kaiser Wilhelm II and promptly shut down. Munch’s first successful works were interiors and portraits that strained against the genteel conventions of naturalism. The MOMA show includes a regrettably later version, from 1896, of “The Sick Child” (1886), a torturous reminiscence of Sophie on her deathbed, in which Munch struggled toward a new pictorial language. In the ravishing “Summer Night / Inger on the Beach” (1889) seaside rocks seem to pulse with incipient life. After experimenting with semi-Pointillist Impressionism in Paris, he painted, upon learning of his father’s death, “Night in St. Cloud” (1890), which shows a top-hatted man in silhouette, sitting at a window and smoking, in variously inky and luminous blues. It is a ticking bomb of suppressed feeling.
Munch became Munch with his allegories of love. “The Voice,” presenting a seductive woman in white in the seaside woods, backlit by a low summer-night sun, memorializes the onset of his first love. “Ashes” (1894) is about the affair’s end. Postcoital, the same woman, in perhaps the same woods, dispassionately tidies her hair, as a male figure huddles dejectedly. “Madonna” displays a woman during intercourse as seen by her lover, for whom plainly she cares nothing. Not all of Munch’s many relationships with women ended badly, by the way; some were casual. But any real attachment foretold disaster—in the worst case, a tussle over a gun that went off, shattering the middle finger of Munch’s left hand.
“The Scream” (1893) is keenly missed. Its absence from the show, except as an image in prints, produces the effect of an opera minus its soprano. I mean the original “Scream,” a delicate and raw marvel in oil, pastel, and casein on cardboard, which hangs in Norway’s National Gallery, not the inferior remake (one of three, none of them quite right) that was stolen from the Munch Museum. Standing in for it at MOMA is “Despair” (1892), his first representation—with a faceless and inert foreground figure under a seething blood-red sky—of a ghastly epiphany (“I felt a scream penetrating nature”) that he had had years earlier on a road outside Kristiania. The flayed and writhing homunculus of “The Scream” came to him from nowhere, unprecedented in any art and without an equivalent in his own, apart from the merged faces of the lovers in his paintings and prints called “The Kiss.” Munch avoided representing unreality. With no use for the supernatural, he was a stony skeptic in circles of spiritualist friends. The power of “The Scream,” I think, owes much to an intellectual resistance that it overcame in the artist. A similar resistance explains the popular tendency to treat that icon of unhappy modern consciousness as a joke in cartoons and inflatable toys. Laughter dies in the face of the supremely matter-of-fact original. It is the touchstone of Munch’s definitive quality in his great years: a self-abnegating submission to emotional truth. “If only one could be the body through which today’s thoughts and feelings flow,” he wrote in 1892. He became that body intermittently, at a cost of becoming almost nothing in his own person. Study his self-portraits. What is uncanny in them is narcissism turned inside out, giving itself away. ♦
Three books on Van Gogh
Van Gogh
His Life and His Art
By David Sweetman
Illustrated. 391 pages. Crown Publishers. $30.
Vincent van Gogh
By Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, Sjraar van Heugten, Johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance and E. B. F. Pey.
Illustrated. Two volumes: paintings, 292 pages; drawings, 336 pages.
Van Gogh
His Life and His Art
By David Sweetman
Illustrated. 391 pages. Crown Publishers. $30.
Vincent van Gogh
By Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, Sjraar van Heugten, Johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance and E. B. F. Pey.
Illustrated. Two volumes: paintings, 292 pages; drawings, 336 pages. Rizzoli. $90.
A hundred years after his death, Vincent van Gogh has become one of the world's most famous artists. His paintings sell for astonishing prices that break records, and such well known canvases as ''Starry Night'' and ''Sunflowers'' have been reproduced so many times on post cards and calendars that people who have never set foot in a museum boast a familiarity with his work. His life, too, has assumed the lineaments of a myth in the popular imagination: he is regarded as the very embodiment of the artist maudit, tortured, impoverished and insane.
These two new works on van Gogh - David Sweetman's highly detailed biography and a sumptuous two-volume catalogue that was assembled to accompany this year's exhibitions of his work in the Netherlands - should do much to flesh out the man and the painter behind that popular myth. They are best read in conjunction with each other: while the precisely annotated illustrations in ''Vincent van Gogh'' chart the amazing accomplishments of his 10-year career, Mr. Sweetman's biography gives us an understanding of the artistic, psychological and religious forces that shaped his life and work. Both works draw heavily on van Gogh's own letters, in themselves one of the most eloquent and moving records of any artist's aspirations and frustrations.
What Mr. Sweetman's biography makes clear to the lay reader is just how rooted van Gogh's choice of vocation was in his own family history. He was introduced to the world of art by his Uncle Cent, a successful art dealer, and at the age of 16 began an unsuccessful apprenticeship in a gallery in The Hague. (His devoted brother Theo would later follow him into the business with considerably more success.) Seven years later, a deepening religious crisis helped precipitate van Gogh's dismissal from the gallery, and he determined to become a pastor like his father and paternal grandfather before him. He obsessively studied the Bible, embarked on a constant round of churchgoing and began cramming for the examinations necessary to join the ministry in the Netherlands. When it became clear that he had no chance of passing those exams, he set off to do missionary work among coal miners in Belgium.
There, he threw himself into his work with fanatic zeal, starving himself and giving away his clothes in an effort to emulate Christ. It was only when he was dismissed, by a stuffy clergyman who believed representatives of the church ought to embody solid bourgeois values, that van Gogh decided to devote himself to art. He was 27.
Of course, the deep spiritual hunger that animated his search for God did not disappear; it was translated into his paintings. The dazzling light that fills his canvases from Arles pulsates with a moral radiance, intimations that some divine pattern might be discerned in the seemingly random designs of nature. The images of the sower and the reaper that turn up again and again in his work not only serve as homage to his favorite painter, Jean Francois Millet, but also as symbols of the rhythmic cycles of birth and death. As the progression of color plates found in the first volume of ''Vincent van Gogh'' so clearly demonstrates, van Gogh's development as a painter progressed with astonishing speed. The stiff, conventional portraits of weavers, done in Nuenen, his hometown in the Netherlands, swiftly give way to the dark caricatures of ''The Potato Eaters,'' which in turn give way to the lighter, brighter landscapes done in Paris. Though the Pointillist influence of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac can be discerned in those Parisian canvases, it is soon superseded in the wonderful paintings from Arles by a wholly distinctive vision.
In the first years of his career, Mr. Sweetman observes, van Gogh displayed no natural talent. His ''main resources were singlemindedness and an insatiable capacity for hard work.'' He turned himself into an artist, ''day and night turning out innumerable rough, bad, hopeless sketches but gradually mastering control of eye and hand until he was able to subject both to his will. If 'genius' is perhaps the wrong word, then 'courage' must replace it, for he never took the easy path.'' Following van Gogh's wanderings from the Netherlands to Belgium, from Paris to Arles, from the asylum in St.-Remy to the final days in Auvers, Mr. Sweetman traces van Gogh's voracious absorption of artistic influences and his discovery of his own style. In the last months of his life, he points out, van Gogh began to demonstrate a nostalgia for the northern landscape of his childhood: the electric palette he had adopted in the sunny south of France was replaced by more somber colors, and many of the motifs he had first explored as an apprentice artist resurfaced in his work.
In July of 1890, after repeated suicide attempts, 37-year-old Vincent van Gogh shot and killed himself. Had he fallen into a state of irredeemable despair? Or was he simply suffering from another episode of anxiety and upset, perhaps medical from which he might have recovered as he had so often in the past. As Mr. Sweetman notes, theories about his state of mind revolve around two paintings of wheat fields done in his last days. One titled ''Wheat Field Under Clouded Sky'' is tranquil and serene; the other, titled ''Wheatfield With Crows,'' radiates an air of menace and fear.
''They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies,'' van Gogh wrote his brother Theo, ''and I do not need to go out of my way to try to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I hope you will see them soon - for I hope to bring them to you in Paris as soon as possible, since I almost think that these canvases will tell you what I cannot say in words, the health and restorative forces that I see in the country.''
Starry-Eyed Innkeeper Hopes to Bring van Gogh’s ‘Fields’ Home
AUVERS-SUR-OISE, France, Oct. 14 — The painting by Vincent van Gogh nearest to this village, where he lies in a modest grave, probably hangs some 20 miles away at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. But Dominique-Charles Janssens, who owns the country inn here that was van Gogh’s final abode, has a bold plan to change that.
Plan, though, may be too optimistic a word. It is Mr. Janssens’ dream to see an authentic van Gogh hanging on the wall of the tiny attic room where he died on July 29, 1890. Two days earlier he had shot himself in the stomach while working at his easel in a nearby field.
Mr. Janssens, an affable 59-year-old Belgian, knows exactly which painting he wants, and he says he has a rare opportunity to get it. “The Fields” (also known as “Wheat Fields”), one of the last works van Gogh painted, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 7.
“People have called me a megalomaniac, yet this plan is not my dream, it was the dream of van Gogh,” said Mr. Janssens, quoting from the painter’s correspondence. Just seven weeks before his death van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in Paris: “Some day or other I believe I shall find a way of having an exhibition of my own in a cafe.”
Sotheby’s estimates the painting’s value at $28 million to $35 million, and bidders may drive the price higher, so Mr. Janssens is trying to raise money through private donations and an appeal to van Gogh lovers online via vangoghsdream.org.
If the foundation he has created, Institut Van Gogh, can buy “The Fields,” he said, all donors will receive a personal access code to view the painting at any time through a Webcam in the attic room. The fund-raising effort began on Oct. 8, but he declined to say how much has been raised so far. The plan is dismissed as a mad fantasy by some curators and art dealers. “Sure, it’s heroic and wonderful, but unrealistic,” said Neal Fiertag, a Paris art dealer specializing in the 19th century. “Besides, van Gogh’s images have already been turned into a mass commodity. You wonder if this will create more of a commercial circus.”
Walter Feilchenfeldt, a Swiss dealer and van Gogh scholar, who sold “The Fields” to its current owner (whom he will not name), said he saw no problem with its return to the little village inn. He knows the building well, he said, describing it as “very respectfully and tastefully restored.”
“I have a certain sympathy for Mr. Janssen,” Mr. Feilchenfeldt added. “He lives for this dream. If he has the right money, yes, he should have it.”
There has been much debate about which work was the last by this self-taught painter, an enigmatic and often troubled man who nonetheless wrote hundreds of thoughtful and lucid letters.
In his final 70 days at Auvers van Gogh worked nonstop, producing oils and drawings of its residents, rough farmhouses and fields of wheat and potatoes, much like those he knew during his youth in the Netherlands.
Mr. Feilchenfeldt, like other specialists, said he did not consider the “Fields” on sale at Sotheby’s to be van Gogh’s final canvas; that, he said, is probably the unfinished “House in Auvers.” But he is confident, he added, that “The Fields” is among van Gogh’s last works.
Wouter van der Veen, a Dutch specialist in van Gogh’s writing, noted that in a letter, probably written on July 10, 1890, he tells Theo that he has just finished three wheat field paintings. “They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I hope you see them soon.” He painted about a dozen images of the Auvers wheat fields.
Over Sunday lunch at the inn, Mr. Janssens said he wanted to return “The Fields” to van Gogh’s room precisely because it speaks to his mood at the end of his life. “It was in his room when he died,” he said.
The garret is already something of a shrine, thanks to Mr. Janssens’ crusade to rescue the inn. It began accidentally when, a sales manager at the time, he was injured in a car crash in 1985 in front of the inn, Auberge Ravoux. While recovering he was given a book of van Gogh’s letters and decided it was his destiny to buy and restore the inn. “I was very moved,” he recalled. “I was 37, just like van Gogh,” who died at 37.
The process took six years and included jousting with creditor banks and with local officials who objected to a foreigner taking over such a symbolic property. As the new owner he set out to recreate the atmosphere as van Gogh might have known it. The downstairs room that had been serving as a wine shop and cafe is again a restaurant, with rustic tables, a pewter-covered bar and glasses and decanters copied from van Gogh paintings.
A narrow staircase leads to the small attic room with its bare walls, skylight and a single chair. “It was left empty, so visitors can furnish it with their thoughts,” Mr. Janssens said. “It often has a strong impact on people. Some cry, some have fainted.”
One wall now has a bulletproof glass case where he hopes to install an authentic van Gogh canvas. He said he had taken steps to secure the room and the house. Admission to the attic is about $7.
Village authorities concede that Mr. Janssens has become an unofficial guardian of van Gogh’s memory. He has restored adjacent buildings and organized the display of placards with reproductions of village scenes painted not only by van Gogh but also by Cézanne, Corot and Pissarro, who spent time here. One stands by the village’s 11th-century church, a famous van Gogh subject, and others are in the wheat fields and by the cemetery where Vincent and Theo are buried under a thick blanket of ivy.
Before Mr. Janssens’ efforts to put the village back on the map, it might have seen a few thousand visitors a year, mostly art students, painters and historians. Last year some 400,000 people came, drawn by the artist’s mystique.
If the Institut Van Gogh foundation falls short in the effort to buy “The Fields” at Sotheby’s, it is legally allowed to continue raising funds for another three years. Mr. Janssens said he would not stop until he has brought a van Gogh painting back to Auvers and installed it in the little room with no view.
Van Gogh: Expressive With a Brush, or a Pen
Vincent van Gogh considered drawing to be "the root of everything." He once confided to his brother, Theo, that he could not stop drawing because "I really have a draftsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle."
Although his career lasted only a decade, van Gogh created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything around him, from peasants and postmen to landscapes and interiors. Drawing was as important a way to record his thoughts as the letters he wrote to his family and friends.
Yet the public is far more familiar with his 800 paintings. Images like "A Corridor in the Asylum" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Irises" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are among the most famous images in the history of art.
That situation may change next week, when the Met unveils "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," the first major exhibition of the artist's drawings ever held in the United States. (A version of the show was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this summer.) The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 works from public and private collections around the world, 20 of which were not shown in Amsterdam.
"Drawings have always been the P.S. part of van Gogh's work," said Colta Ives, a curator of drawings and prints at the Met. "Yet he was a letter writer, a guy with a pen in his hand."
Ms. Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, teamed up with two of their colleagues from the Van Gogh Museum - Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections there, and Marije Vellekoop, curator of drawings - to put the show together. Their mission was to tell the story of van Gogh's work through his drawings and watercolors.
Sitting in the Met's galleries, surrounded by packing crates and work tables, as the exhibition was being installed, Ms. Stein said she had been thinking about a show like this for 20 years. As coordinator first of the Met's blockbuster 1984 show "Van Gogh in Arles" and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" two years later, she was introduced to the artist's drawings. "As exciting as the paintings are," she said, "the drawings were a revelation."
For three years she and Ms. Ives have immersed themselves in van Gogh's world, traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe. "People opened their collections to us," Ms. Stein said. So did the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest number of the artist's works on paper in the world.
"We borrowed judiciously," Ms. Stein said. Deciding what not to show was as difficult as what the curators chose. For every drawing on view, at least 20 were reluctantly rejected.
The exhibition also includes eight paintings: three from the Met's own collection, two from the Van Gogh Museum, and three loans, from the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and a private collection. Each was chosen for its relationship to his drawings.
Rather than tackle the subject strictly chronologically, as most curators have done, Ms. Stein and Ms. Ives decided to underscore relationship between drawing and painting in van Gogh's work and how he reinvented certain recurring themes in different ways.
When they began conceiving the show, Ms. Stein said, one of the first things she did was to put together 86 pages of excerpts about drawing from all three volumes of van Gogh's letters. "We wanted to hear his discussion," she said, "to know what mattered to him as an artist."
Throughout his life van Gogh embraced drawing for many different reasons. At first he felt it necessary to master black-and-white before tackling color. Sometimes it was a question of economics: paper and ink was far cheaper than canvas and paint. He also used drawing as a way of working on subjects that interested him, like wintry trees or tree-lined roads or expansive views of wheat fields.
Drawing didn't always come easy. "He struggled with black and white," Ms. Ives said. "But when he got to Arles in 1888, he discovered the reed pen, and it was then he developed a more comfortable relationship with his tool. As reed wears down, it becomes softer, more flexible and responsive to his gestures on paper."
It is generally assumed that most artists make drawings as studies for larger, more complete paintings. But sometimes van Gogh did just the opposite. He would reproduce some of his paintings in pen and ink; he would then send them to his artist friends Émile Bernard and John Russell, and to his brother, Theo, as a way of letting them know what he was up to. None of these drawings were exact copies; each contained spontaneous details.
Often even scholars haven't been sure which came first, a painting or a drawing. Three images of a Zouave solider - a watercolor from the Met's collection, a painting from the Van Gogh Museum and a pen-and-ink drawing that belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - have been the subject of scholarly debate. "It's been long accepted that the watercolor came after the painting," Ms. Stein said. "But when we looked at it, it seemed there were hesitant passages. The background, for example, is unresolved."
First the curators looked at the Met's watercolor next to the Guggenheim's pen-and-ink drawing, which they knew came after the painting.
"It's harvest time; it's raining," Ms. Stein said. "He has a model, he spends five days and writes his brother and his friends that he's finally painting portraits. He doesn't mention the watercolor. Six weeks later he sends the pen-and-ink rendition of the portrait to John Russell. But because the watercolor isn't mentioned in the letters, it's one of the many riddles we addressed."
Marjorie Shelley, a Met paper conservator, subjected the works to technical analysis, including infrared reflectography that revealed the artist's graphite sketch underneath the finished work, showing how he was struggling with his subject, something he did not do with either the painting or the later pen-and-ink drawing.
Ms. Ives was curious about "Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer," an 1888 series of drawings and one painting of a dirt path with a row of thatched cottages on one side and tangled vegetation. From his letters it is known that a pen-and-ink drawing was made before a painting of the same subject. He did the drawing in Saintes-Maries, in the Camargue region of Provence, then returned to nearby Arles and made the painting.
"Noticing the similarity in size between the drawing and the painting, I wondered if there might be a still closer link between them," Ms. Ives said. "Perhaps it wasn't a free-handed interpretation in oil." Or, she said, he may have been so happy with his drawing that he traced it onto the canvas, which is unusual, because he generally painted freehand.
So Ms. Ives made copies of both the painting and the drawing to scale, then superimposed the drawing on the painting. She deduced that van Gogh had indeed traced the drawing's outline onto the canvas as the structure of the composition, then added more sky at the top and more pathway at the bottom to fill the squarer canvas. But drawings and paintings were never exactly the same. In a drawing he made for Bernard, he added a tiny boat in the horizon. "There is no boat in the painting," Ms. Ives said.
The way van Gogh grabbed onto a theme, composed it in his mind and then tried it out in different variations fascinated the curators. "Very few artists do that," Ms. Ives said. "Often we tried to get into van Gogh's shoes and walk with him to see what was catching his eye." A series of watercolors van Gogh created of the plains of La Crau, three miles northwest of Arles, is one example. The curators persuaded the Van Gogh museum to lend them "Harvest in Provence" (1888), a rarely lent painting, because they were able to borrow a watercolor that preceded it and a pen-and-ink drawing from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that the artist did after it.
"Each has a distinctive character," Ms. Ives said. "During the harvest he was out there every day, tromping through the fields, and certain motifs like fences, haystacks, clumps of reeds and rushes he keeps repeating in all different media and scales."
As an art form, however, works on paper are extremely delicate and cannot be subject to light or to changes in temperature. As a result, many of the drawings and watercolors in the show have rarely been exhibited, and it may be some time before the public will see them again.
"The problem with drawings is they have to have a rest," Ms. Ives said. "The next generation won't be able to play in this garden for quite a long while."
Van Gogh in Moods, Both Dark and Light
The cypresses stand tall and unbudgeable in the blustery wind as, perhaps, a symbol of strength and fortitude.
The sky, by contrast, is speckled and swirling. Clouds spiral and whorl, or twist into tight knots, rising up from behind a mountain range that slopes gently downward to where it joins the land. Foul weather is on the way.
An explosion of wheat grass, golden and yellow, carpets the foreground of the painting. The grass leaps high into the air like flames, mimicking the elegant, vertical, slender shape of the cypresses.
This work, “Cypresses,” by Vincent van Gogh, was painted in June 1889 during his confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in the south of France. Until September it will be hanging at the Yale University Art Gallery, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a two-work show organized by Jennifer Gross, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art.
The other painting is van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Also painted in June 1889, it provides a very different view of the southern French countryside.
Perspective is the most obvious difference between them. The cropping and closeness of “Cypresses” convey an immediacy and almost tactile relationship to nature, immersing you there in the grasses beneath the grinding sun. “The Starry Night,” by contrast, is painted from up high, the town off in the distance and possibly observed from the artist’s window at the asylum. You get a feeling of detachment.
It is tempting to see these pictures (one at daytime, the other night) as a reflection of the artist’s lighter and darker moods. “Cypresses” suggests joy and an attachment to the world. “The Starry Night” tends to reinforce a sense of the artist’s isolation. Whereas “Cypresses” is a painting about living life in the moment, “The Starry Night” seems to say that, for the artist, life is elsewhere.
Then there is that incredible sky in “The Starry Night.” The moon and stars are balls of orange-yellow light verging on the radioactive. Meanwhile, the clouds have begun to coil, twist or whirl into atmospheric surf. An unearthly glow confers a further intensity to the picture. It is manic and tripped-out.
All this neatly equates with the madman of legend. But the idea that van Gogh’s paintings are the expression of his illness and thus somehow “mad” is so wrong-headed that it requires immediate refutation. It was van Gogh’s illness that stopped him from painting. His paintings are the product of his moments of lucidity, his efforts to stay in touch with reality. They couldn’t be saner.
In both paintings there is ample evidence of the artist’s concision, exactness of judgment and remarkable powers of visual analysis. And how brilliantly he assimilates color opposites, mixing together hot colors like orange, yellow and red with cold whites and blues to give the paintings added zing.
He is also looking closely at nature. Although some of van Gogh’s paintings were spontaneous outpourings of creative energy, in many cases he plotted out his pictures. He made countless drawings, impassioned sketches in which he worked out compositional elements. His paintings are mindful and premeditated.
Perhaps the museum could have assembled some of these drawings to illustrate the sequence of the painting’s evolution? It also might have been useful to have seen here “Nuit Étoilée (Starry Night)” ( circa 1850-1865) by Jean-François Millet, housed at Yale but currently on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Ms. Gross said in an e-mail message that van Gogh might have been able to see the Millet painting in Paris between 1873 and 1875, and it may even have inspired him to paint his own version.
But these historical add-ons are in no way essential to the exhibition. The logic behind putting two paintings together in an intimate setting is to invite viewers to slow down, to look closely and have a concentrated experience with an artwork. And when the paintings are as good as the two that are showing here you don’t need anything else.
Officials Report Mold in a Leonardo Collection
MILAN (AP) — Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus, the largest bound collection of his drawings and writings, has been infiltrated by mold, Italian scholars said Friday.
The extent of damage to the Codex — an assemblage of 1,119 pages of drawings and writings dating from 1478 to 1519 on topics ranging from flying machines to weapons, mathematics to botany — is not yet known, but the mold is not spreading, they said.
But officials appealed for aid in restoring and conserving the Codex, saying it would be highly expensive and that there were no public funds for the project.
Msgr. Marco Navoni, a historian at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where the documents are housed, said Friday, “We need to find sponsors to come forward to help pay for analysis to establish the necessary therapy, and then do the treatment.”
The Codex, which consists of 12 leather-bound volumes, is kept in a vault at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana where temperature and humidity are constantly monitored. The mold was first identified in April 2006 by Carmen Bambach, a curator of drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and confirmed by conservation experts from the Florence-based state conservation institute, Opificio delle Pietre Dure.
Until more scientific analysis is done, the cause of the mold will remain unclear, said Cecilia Frosinini, the deputy director of the Opificio.
She said the mold could be the result of several factors, including exposure during any exhibition or study, or the unintended consequence of a restoration that began in 1968 and ended in 1972.
The Codex Atlanticus, so named because it was originally compiled as a single volume of miscellany comparable to an atlas, is the largest collection of Leonardo’s sheets. Formed at the end of the sixteenth century by the sculptor Pompeo Leoni, it is viewed by some scholars as a treasured but lamentable compilation, given that Leoni dismembered some of Leonardo’s notebooks to create it.
Over the centuries it has offered rich insights not only into Leonardo’s art, but also into his fascination with science, technology, architectural projects and urban planning.
A Da Vinci Fingerprint
New York Times
December 2, 2006
The key to Leonardo Da Vinci may be his fingerprint. An Italian anthropologist said he had pieced together Leonardo's left index print from marks on dozens of his papers. This finding could help attribute disputed paintings and manuscripts, and also provide a range of elusive biographical information, from the food Leonardo ate to whether his mother was of Arabic origin, The Associated Press reported. The image of the fingerprint is drawn from 200 marks, most of them partial, on about 50 papers Leonardo handled, said Luigi Capasso, director of the Anthropology Research Institute at Chieti University in central Italy, who said his research took three years. He said the prints could include traces of saliva, blood or food. Analysis of this information could help clear up questions about Leonardo's origins, like the theory that his mother was not an Italian but a slave who came to Tuscany from Constantinople. Mr. Capasso's work, first presented last year in a Czech magazine, Anthropologie, is on display in an exhibition in Chieti through March 30. ''It adds the first touch of humanity,'' he said. ''This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius.''
December 2, 2006
The key to Leonardo Da Vinci may be his fingerprint. An Italian anthropologist said he had pieced together Leonardo's left index print from marks on dozens of his papers. This finding could help attribute disputed paintings and manuscripts, and also provide a range of elusive biographical information, from the food Leonardo ate to whether his mother was of Arabic origin, The Associated Press reported. The image of the fingerprint is drawn from 200 marks, most of them partial, on about 50 papers Leonardo handled, said Luigi Capasso, director of the Anthropology Research Institute at Chieti University in central Italy, who said his research took three years. He said the prints could include traces of saliva, blood or food. Analysis of this information could help clear up questions about Leonardo's origins, like the theory that his mother was not an Italian but a slave who came to Tuscany from Constantinople. Mr. Capasso's work, first presented last year in a Czech magazine, Anthropologie, is on display in an exhibition in Chieti through March 30. ''It adds the first touch of humanity,'' he said. ''This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius.''
A Real-Life Mystery: The Hunt for the Lost Leonardo
February 9, 2007FLORENCE, Italy — Maurizio Seracini claims not to be pleased that he is the only person mentioned by his real name in “The Da Vinci Code.” A scientist turned art detective, he has no need for any manufactured mystery around Leonardo. For 32 years he has chased a real one — and he seems now, finally, poised to solve it.
It is a long, and satisfyingly complex, story. But it can be summed up with one question: What happened to “The Battle of Anghiari,” a grimacing crunch of men and horses considered by some experts to be Leonardo’s greatest painting?
Mr. Seracini thinks he knows, and he was recently given permission to restart his search, which involves using the most modern detecting equipment to peer through a 500-year-old wall in the Palazzo Vecchio here. On that wall, in 2002, he found a tantalizing crevice behind a Vasari fresco where the Leonardo may be.
If he succeeds, he could bring to light what one Leonardo scholar calls potentially “one of the great art finds of all time.” Or he could find nothing. Or he could find the painting wrecked by time and its own defects. In any case, after three obsessive decades Mr. Seracini is very much on the hook.
“I have to say, there is enough here to make you scratch your head — scratch it to the point of losing your hair,” Mr. Seracini, a dapper 60 with, so far anyway, a full head of white hair, said as he stood in the room where he believes the painting is hidden. “It’s very intimidating.”
One of the few certainties is that the painting, or at least a part of it depicting a fight for a standard, did exist on the wall of the Palazzo Vecchio, the old home of the Medicis.
“Friday the 6th of June, 1505, at the stroke of the 13th hour,” Leonardo wrote in one of his notebooks, “I started to paint in the palace.”
His younger rival, Michelangelo, had also been commissioned to paint his own battle scene on the opposing wall. Michelangelo left for Rome and never began painting it.
But both men produced preparatory cartoons considered not only among the finest ever created but exemplary of the two strains of Renaissance the men embodied: Michelangelo drew heroic bathing nudes; Leonardo worked the motion and fury of men and horses in action.
Vasari called Leonardo’s cartoon “most excellent and masterful for its marvelous treatment of figures in flight.” But Leonardo started much and finished little. Technical problems — he painted not on wet plaster like traditional fresco, but with oils on a wax-impregnated wall — haunted him.
Only a small portion was completed, though it was Leonardo’s largest painting, perhaps 15 feet by 20 feet, and as extraordinary as the cartoon. Several copies were made, one by Rubens. Even in 1549, a letter writer urged a friend to have a look, calling it a “marvelous thing.”
Beginning in the 1560s, Vasari, who also built what is now the Uffizi museum, began to restructure the room. He enlarged it and covered both walls with his own grand battle fresco. Leonardo’s painting disappeared.
But, of course, it was not forgotten.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Seracini, a former medical student studying bioengineering in California, took an art course at U.C.L.A. from one of the leading Leonardo experts, an Italian professor, Carlo Pedretti. In 1975, Mr. Seracini returned to Florence, his hometown, and by chance linked up anew with Mr. Pedretti, who had begun a search for the lost painting, theorizing that it still lay behind Vasari’s fresco.
It was then, on a scaffolding, that Mr. Seracini, a lowly but enthusiastic assistant, found on a flag in Vasari’s painting what he considered a possible sign from Vasari of what lay behind it: the words “Cerca, trova,” or “Seek and ye shall find.”
“I was puzzled, curious,” he said. “I said: ‘O.K., cool it. Maybe its nothing. Maybe it’s a coincidence.’ ”
Mr. Seracini admits that considering the words a clue is not scientific, and though they are friends, Mr. Pedretti dismisses Mr. Seracini’s interest in the words. They were a motto for one of the companies in the battle, he said, not some mysterious clue.
“We Italians are a little inclined to superstition,” he said.
That search ended without success in 1977. Mr. Pedretti dropped out of the active hunt. But Mr. Seracini never let it leave his mind as he developed a career using his engineering training and modern equipment to analyze works of art.
His most contentious finding also landed him his unwelcome place in “The Da Vinci Code.” In 2001, he proved that the paint in Leonardo’s “Adoration of the Magi” was not applied by the master himself but much later, and as Mr. Seracini said at the time, by someone who was “not even a very good artist.”
In 2000, Mr. Seracini took up work on the Anghiari painting again, using radar and then thermography on the walls. Two years later, he discovered a tiny crevice behind that panel. In short, Vasari may have preserved the Leonardo by building a wall for his own fresco an inch or so away from the original wall.
“Why would you destroy it when you knew it was done by Leonardo and it was still visible?” Mr. Seracini said, adding that Vasari had similarly preserved works by lesser artists.
In 2002, his work was frozen, and this being Italy, it is not entirely clear why. Mr. Seracini chalks it up to local politics that he prefers not to discuss. But late in 2006, the nation’s new culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, ordered the work begun again.
The challenge before Mr. Seracini is great. He cannot touch the Vasari, a treasure on its own, and instead must find a way to peer behind it with machines that do not yet exist. He has several theoretical methods, including a machine that would detect the pigment Leonardo used. There are records of the pigments, paid for by the city, of lead white, vermillion and a blue that might be lapis lazuli.
“This is a hell of a challenge,” he said. “How do you come here with equipment that doesn’t exist, solving a problem of seeing through walls without touching anything?”
Even if he finds nothing, Mr. Seracini said he had no doubt that his work would be worthwhile, if only from the standpoint of having developed the technology to say whether it is there or not. “I don’t have a reason not to find out,” he said. “I think it’s about time, since I started just 32 years ago.”
Mr. Pedretti and Martin Kemp, another top Leonardo expert, strongly support the research, though no one is sure what might be found. Vasari himself said the wall on which Leonardo painted was in bad shape even in Leonardo’s time.
“I think Maurizio’s optimism is greater than mine,” Mr. Kemp said. “But this is not to say I think that his investigation should not reach its full conclusion. If we stop here it will just be tantalizing.”
Mr. Pedretti said: “This would be a great thing. I would be happy with just a few square inches.”
A Portrait by Leonardo? Scholars and Skeptics Differ
The New York Times, August 23, 2008
VINCI, Italy — A 19th-century German School portrait that sold for $21,850 at a Christie’s auction in 1998 has now been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci by some art and scientific experts.
A spokesman for the mixed-media portrait’s Swiss owner, who wishes to remain anonymous, said offers to buy it have already started pouring in. He said the top bid so far was more than $50 million, by an intermediary acting on behalf of a Russian.
But the attribution has not gone unchallenged. The 13-by-9.4-inch work — which might be a betrothal portrait — did not cause a furor when it went on sale at Christie’s in New York. At the auction, it was bought by a dealer based in the United States, who sold it last year.
If it is in fact a Leonardo, skeptics say, it went unrecognized by experts at the auction house, as well as the specialized dealers who attended the sale, including the one who bought it.
“The market is a fairly efficient place,” said Hugh Chapman, assistant keeper at the department of prints and drawings at the British Museum in London. “This would be an amazing miss.”
Still, there are those who believe the work is a genuine Leonardo. “This profile is almost too beautiful to be true,” said Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, pointing to a photograph of the work that now hangs here. Scientific studies aside, he said, “the iconography and the aesthetic speak clearly” that it is a Leonardo. Mr. Vezzosi included the portrait in a Leonardo monograph he published in July.
Christie’s said in a statement that it “cannot comment on this particular work until it has been the subject of comprehensive and conclusive academic and scientific analysis.”
Other experts point out that modern connoisseurship — a convergence of wide-ranging technical examinations and the expert’s eye — remains an imperfect science. And building consensus around an attribution can be a long and challenging process.
The story of how a Swiss collector bought a pretty portrait in January 2007 and ended up with a work that might be by a Renaissance master is a “rags-to-riches story, except that the owner is not exactly in rags,” said Peter Silverman, a Canadian collector who is a friend of the owner.
Eighteen months ago, Mr. Silverman said, the Swiss collector showed the portrait to him, and he was the first to suspect that his friend might have made an amazing investment. “I saw it, but I didn’t dare speak the L-word,” Mr. Silverman said in a telephone interview.
The two collectors took the portrait to Lumiere Technology, a Paris-based company specializing in multispectral digital technology that had already digitized two works by Leonardo: the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and “Lady With an Ermine” at the Czartoryski Museum in Krakow, Poland.
“The first time that the owner gave me this drawing he didn’t say a thing; the author was secret,” said Pascal Cotte, Lumiere Technology’s chief technical officer.
Though Mr. Cotte carried out a series of tests on the work for nearly four weeks, he said, it did not take him long to come up with a name. “I went to the owner and said, ‘I have a feeling it’s a drawing by Leonardo,’ and he said, ‘We’re here for just that.’ ”
In June, Lumiere announced that its examination had led to the authentication of the work as a Leonardo.
Carbon 14-dating tests carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and released this month place the work’s date between 1440 and 1650.
But art dealers and art historians interviewed recently had mixed opinions about the portrait. Scientific tests “can be very useful, but they can’t guarantee an attribution because the first criterion is quality and that can’t be discerned through mechanical means,” said Jean-Luc Baroni, a London-based art dealer.
Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, saw the work last December and was struck by the left-handed shading — Leonardo was left-handed — as well as the physiognomy and the details. They all point in the direction of Leonardo, he said, adding, “I recommended that that avenue of inquiry be pursued among Leonardo specialists.”
After viewing the digitized images produced by Lumiere, Mr. Turner discounted the possibility that the work could be a fake. “Fakes fall apart, especially when you magnify them,” he said. “It’s difficult to produce anything that can convince people that they’re genuine.”
Carlo Pedretti, the Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, described the portrait as “a magnificent thing, worthy of Leonardo, even if strangely cool and lifeless.” If it really is by Leonardo, he said, it would be a discovery comparable to the “early 19th-century re- establishment” of “The Lady With the Ermine” as an autograph work.
That is reason enough to encourage further tests and consultations with art historians at scholarly institutions, Professor Pedretti said. “I am prepared to be fully convinced that it’s a Leonardo, but let’s say I’m still on the cautious side.”
Martin Kemp, a professor of art history at Oxford University, said, “Throw everything at it.” He said that he had not seen the original, which is kept in a Swiss vault, but that based on the digital images he was “pretty convinced that it’s the real thing.”
Other experts are more skeptical. Carmen C. Bambach, curator of drawings and prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and one of the world’s leading Leonardo specialists, said in an e-mail exchange that based on the photograph of the portrait the “work does not seem to resemble the drawings and paintings by the great master.”
Others have noted that it would be the first work by Leonardo on vellum. “It makes the portrait harder to compare to a more validated Leonardo,” said Claire Farago, an expert in the intellectual tradition of Leonardo who teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She pointed out that there were many painters working in Leonardo’s circle emulating his style.
In the end, Mr. Chapman of the British Museum said, “there will be a scholarly opinion, but it takes time to make its way through the system. The scholarly world needs time to digest this thing; it can’t make a snap decision.”
Still a lot is at stake, in terms of both prestige and money.
Leonardo is a star at auctions in part because little of his work goes up for sale. A silverpoint study of a horse and rider by him sold at Christie’s in London in 2001 for $11.5 million. “I get on a weekly basis things that are more or less close to Leonardo that the owners are convinced are some great lost original,” Professor Kemp said.
Noting that a Leonardo would most likely sell in the double-digit million-dollar range, he said, “You could see why they indulge in wishful thinking.”
Mr. Silverman, the collector, said the owner had no immediate plans to sell the work.
But until a definite attribution is made, its market value cannot be pinned down. “If one expert says yes and the other says no, it makes it unsellable, ” Mr. Baroni, the art dealer, said. “No one will buy until you have certainty. If you are buying a Leonardo you want to be convinced it’s a Leonardo.”
The Science of Art: The Leonardo Cover-Up
'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.
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.''
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 résumé 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 Valéry 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 Niccolò 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?''
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