French scientists crack secrets of Mona Lisa

AP – This recent undated photo provided Friday July 23, 2010, by the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research)
By ANGELA DOLAND, Associated Press

Jul 16, 2010
PARIS – The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze — a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality. Specialists from the Center for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France found that da Vinci painted up to 30 layers of paint on his works to meet his standards of subtlety. Added up, all the layers are less than 40 micrometers, or about half the thickness of a human hair, researcher Philippe Walter said Friday. The technique, called "sfumato," allowed da Vinci to give outlines and contours a hazy quality and create an illusion of depth and shadow. His use of the technique is well-known, but scientific study on it has been limited because tests often required samples from the paintings. The French researchers used a noninvasive technique called X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to study the paint layers and their chemical composition. They brought their specially developed high-tech tool into the museum when it was closed and studied the portraits' faces, which are emblematic of sfumato. The project was developed in collaboration with the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. The tool is so precise that "now we can find out the mix of pigments used by the artist for each coat of paint," Walter told The Associated Press. "And that's very, very important for understanding the technique." The analysis of the various paintings also shows da Vinci was constantly trying out new methods, Walter said. In the "Mona Lisa," da Vinci used manganese oxide in his shadings. In others, he used copper. Often he used glazes, but not always. The results were published Wednesday in Angewandte Chemie International Edition, a chemistry journal. Tradition holds that the "Mona Lisa" is a painting of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo, and that da Vinci started painting it in 1503. Giorgio Vasari, a 16th-century painter and biographer of da Vinci and other artists, wrote that the perfectionist da Vinci worked on it for four years.

The Virgin of the Rocks: Da Vinci decoded

Everyone agrees it is a masterpiece. But who painted The Virgin of the Rocks – Leonardo or his students? Jonathan Jones joins the National Gallery on an epic quest to find out
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2010/jul/14/da-vinci-virgin-of-the-rocks
July 13, 2010
The Guardian, UK

The hand of the master .... The Virgin of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. Photograph: David Levene
The first clue to consider in deciding who painted The Virgin of the Rocks is the hair of the angel. That angel, sitting to the right, has long been recognised as the loveliest figure in this painting. Last week, I stood staring at the minutely precise spirals that knot and unknot on her head. It was the last in a series of visits to the National Gallery's skylit restoration studio, high above Trafalgar Square, where for the past 18 months The Virgin of the Rocks has been cleaned. What I saw, with sudden clarity, was the intimate similarity between the angel's fine curls and Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of foaming rivers and swirling clouds, done at the same time in his life.
The Virgin of the Rocks
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From there, turn your gaze to the angel's sleeve: its fine pattern of interlinked gold hoops is evidently from the same hand; the grasses and leaves lower down the painting have likewise grown from the drawings of plants in Leonardo's sketchbooks. Follow the many varieties of foliage – thin grass, tangled thorn, splotches of moss – into all the nooks and crannies that give this painting its atmosphere and name, and you have no doubt you are looking at a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. This may not seem so surprising. It may not even sound like news. After all, since it was bought by the National Gallery in 1880, The Virgin of the Rocks has been exhibited as a "Leonardo". But the small print was more complicated. If you read further into the gallery caption or catalogue, this painting's attribution turned out to be ambiguous. For a long time, the National has believed its Leonardo to be mostly the work of assistants, with only the basic design and some perfect parts – above all, that angel – recognisable as his handiwork. What a difference a cleaning can make. In its official statement yesterday, the gallery was naturally cautious ("it now seems possible that Leonardo painted all the picture himself"); but talking to me over several weeks in the workshop, in front of the painting, the National's experts made it clear they believe this to be a pure and unsullied painting by Leonardo's own hand. "We now have a picture which I believe is entirely by Leonardo," said Luke Syson, curator of Italian Renaissance paintings and the man who has spearheaded this restoration. If he is right, this is a Leonardo to rank alongside The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. The Virgin of the Rocks exists in two versions: this one in London, and another in the Louvre. Why did Leonardo, who so rarely finished anything, completely redo this particular work? In 1483, he was commissioned to paint the central panel of a carved altarpiece for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan. He had just moved there from Florence; he was 31. As a calling card, it turned out to be typically bold. The pious fraternity did not get a painting alluding to the virgin birth of Christ's mother, her "immaculate" freedom from sin; they got Mary introducing the young Saint John the Baptist – the toddler to the left, with her hand on his shoulder – to her son Jesus, who sits across from him, a foot or so away from his mother. The scene is a grotto in a wilderness. Through chinks in the towering rocks we glimpse blue and green waters, dappled vegetation, mountains receding into a glowing sky. It's a painting that has haunted me since my first visit to the National Gallery. Once you've seen it, everything else in this collection looks like flat daubs. There's something about the Leonardo that gets to the deepest part of your brain. The view of sky and water through rocks stimulates the unconscious; the picture is like something you have dreamt. Perhaps this is why Leonardo was willing to paint it twice – because in this cavernous landscape he hit on a topography that perfectly reproduced the effect he claimed you could get by staring at a wall. (In his notes on painting, Leonardo advises the young artist to use what he admits may seem a ridiculous method to get visual ideas. If you stare at the stains and marks on a wall you start to see faces, landscapes, battles, he wrote.) Look at The Virgin of the Rocks with narrowed eyes. Are the dark rocks and holes not like stains and marks in a wall? Is there not an abstract, random, blot-like quality to their arrangement? In this painting Leonardo created a rocky wall to dream on.
He spent 25 years of his life on this image, from the original commission in 1483 to the last work on the second picture in 1508. A lot of things happened in that quarter-century. Leonardo painted The Last Supper, started the Mona Lisa and The Battle of Anghiari, tried and failed to fly, filled notebooks with inventions and theories. Wars raged and rulers fell. Still The Virgin of the Rocks held him. It was commissioned in a world that ended somewhere over the horizon beyond Ireland. When it was finished, if it ever was, it was in a world that included America.
The first version was probably painted quite quickly, but the painting that now hangs in the Louvre never decorated the Confraternity's altarpiece. It may instead have been sold to Ludovico Sforza, ruler of Milan. A letter written in about 1494 suggests that Leonardo was not satisfied with the pittance he was getting from the Confraternity. This was art, not some workmanlike icon; Leonardo sold it on to a generous bidder. He then took an insultingly long time to produce a replacement for the church. That second replacement painting was still in Milan in the 18th century, when it was bought by the British artist Gavin Hamilton; in 1880, it was bought by the National Gallery. The modern take on the Virgin of the Rocks, the gallery believes, has been influenced by a botched job in its own conservation department more than 60 years ago. In 1948, the painting was varnished. The concoction applied was an "unstable combination", says Larry Keith, the new director of conservation, "[one] that was rapidly yellowing". The painting was still hypnotic; but it's true that two years ago, when it was last on public view, there was a flatness to much of it – only the angel seemed to have the vitality of Leonardo's own paintings. Since November 2008, Larry Keith has done the actual, hands-on work of restoration, liaising closely with Syson and the gallery's scientific department. "You reap the benefits of a collective endeavour," he says. Every decision he makes is based on the best analyses available. The result is what he calls a "conservative" restoration; it's hard to see how anyone could accuse them of luridly jazzing up Leonardo's painting, although that won't stop diehard enemies of restoration from finding fault. Perhaps they will object to the painting's spectacular new frame, made from fragments of a 16th-century original in order to recreate its original altarpiece setting.
In Leonardo's brushstrokes
Conservative this restoration may be in style, but its implications are revolutionary. "I do believe the net effect is to get out of the way, so that you can see the picture properly," says Keith, who never paints for his own pleasure (artistic originality would be a vice in a restorer, he says). In removing the ugly varnish, what became instantly more visible were "values and volumes". A far richer variety of solid forms, depths and colours emerged. Keith's retouching – gently and carefully repairing gaps in the paint – respected this new fullness and liveliness. As Syson watched and advised, his opinion of the picture changed by the day. "I've written, as a lot of people have, that this picture is collaborative," Syson tells me. "That seemed quite plausible from what you could see in the pre-cleaned version. But then Larry started cleaning at the top-right corner, and it immediately started to look very free – not like the work of a pupil."
A few days later, Syson calls me to qualify this claim. He stresses that, after an intense period working so close to a painting like this, your view of it is not the one you might have coming to it cold. There will, he acknowledges, still be debate. But the terms of that debate are now very different.
My own opinion is that this is all Leonardo. When I first saw the "new" painting in March, it seemed to have been freed from an amber prison. Every part of it swam with hesitant, playful creativity. How could I have missed, in the past, such brilliances as the tangle of sharp thorny branches behind the angel? That bush, at once natural observation and fantastic improvisation, is obviously Leonardo. So are most of the grasses and leaves that perforate every crevice. But the key to rethinking this picture is to grasp that it is not finished. It is not a neatly executed copy made to satisfy a commissioning body. Behind John the Baptist are brown, palm-like leaves that look exactly like the silhouettes of desert trees in Leonardo's unfinished painting The Adoration of the Magi: another purely Leonardo touch, and a sign that he never completely finished this painting, either. It was worked on over a long period, in fits and starts, as Leonardo left Milan, came back, then went away again. Syson says it finally struck him: why did the painting take so long? Because work could only go ahead when Leonardo was there – because he, not an assistant, was doing the painting. Parts of the painting are jewel-like, others are vague, but this does not seem to be a question of master and pupil. It looks more like the difference between Leonardo bringing something to perfection, and Leonardo leaving those palm leaves to complete later. The first time I saw the cleaned picture I thought, wow, it's a true Leonardo. Then hearing someone else say it – for all Syson's expertise and eloquence – brought out the cynical journalist in me. I had to see it one last time, to look at it as objectively as possible. I started with the angel's hair, those rivers of light. Then I looked at the angelic sleeve, the grasses and leaves, the palms, the Virgin's hair, which for the first time I recognised as another riverine braid straight out of a Leonardo drawing. I looked at the tendons of her outstretched hand (think of Leonardo's anatomical studies), the profound facial expressions. Why did anyone ever doubt this was anything but a great Leonardo? This is the passionate play of a genius at work: ceaselessly experimental, provocative, brave. The Virgin of the Rocks is a missing link between his paintings and the uninhibited playfulness of his drawings. A treasure is reborn.

'The Lost Painting': The Caravaggio Trail

National Gallery of Art/Associated Press

Caravaggio's "Taking of Christ," painted in 1602 and misplaced after nearly four centuries; the figure holding a lantern at right is thought to be Caravaggio himself.

By BRUCE HANDY

The New York Times
November 13, 2005

Historians take windows where they can find them, and in certain circles this entry from a 17th-century ledger bears particularly vivid witness: On Jan. 2, 1603, a Roman nobleman named Ciriaco Mattei paid 125 scudi - the liras of the day - for what his bookkeeper described as "a painting with its frame of Christ taken in the garden." The artist in question, Michelangelo Merisi, known to most of us as Caravaggio (after his hometown outside Milan), was then among the most famous, innovative and copied painters in Rome - the Picasso of his day, more or less. But tastes change, and the realism that was bracing and revelatory to his contemporaries left a bad odor in the 18th and 19th centuries. By the turn of the last one Caravaggio had become but a footnote in art history. And so, another window: on April 16, 1921, according to the notation on a catalog from a now defunct auction house, "The Taking of Christ," misattributed at the time to a minor Dutch painter, was sold at auction in Edinburgh, for a mere eight guineas, a silk purse pawned off as a pig's ear.

THE LOST PAINTING
By Jonathan Harr.
Illustrated. 271 pp. Random House. $24.95.

Roger Viollet/Getty Images

And then, of course, the wheel turned again: today, the dirty feet of Caravaggio's models don't distract us from his formal beauty - gosh, we're inured to Nan Goldin - and we live in an age when anyone with a Metropolitan Museum of Art wall calendar will instantly recognize Caravaggio's mature style, gorgeous and stark with its dramatic angled lighting, deeply shadowed backgrounds - did Caravaggio invent film noir? - and muscular, often contorted figures. Fold in the fact that (a) he lived a short and violent life (he was known to the police, as they say, eventually fleeing Rome after killing a man in a fight over a gambling debt), and (b) it's hard to miss the homoeroticism of so much of his work, and you have all the ingredients for a 21st-century museum superstar. Indeed, the painter's current renown is such that Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a best seller on the subjects of what has happened to "The Taking of Christ" since 1603 and who has cared enough to find that out.

To Caravaggio scholars, whose discipline became academically viable when the artist's reputation rebounded in the 1950's, "The Taking of Christ" was a famously vanished work, known only through copies made by the artist's followers. Harr's rich and wonderful book, "The Lost Painting," is an account of how, in 1990, the original was found. I'm tempted to quick-key a cliché and say the book reads like a thriller, because it's as gripping as a good one and even kicks off with the ritual opening: a brief prologue suggesting the high stakes of the game afoot, followed by the introduction of an unlikely and unprepossessing but, in the end, surprisingly resourceful heroine. She is Francesca Cappelletti, a 24-year-old graduate student in art history at the University of Rome who is about to stumble upon Something Really Really Big.

In truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling non-fiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, "A Civil Action," was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up his tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake, though he does betray one small weakness in this regard: whenever his subjects are out and about, the sun always seems to be slanting low across the rooftops of Rome or bathing the church domes of the city in a golden light while the swallows of spring circle and pirouette overhead. On the other hand, if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk, you'll forgive these rote if poetic contrivances and enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when - one of my favorite moments in the whole book - Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable.

The foreground pleasures are those of a police procedural. In order to gain access to the archives of a noble Roman family, Francesca chats up a dotty old marchesa using all the cunning of a Columbo snuffling around for an inadvertent clue. It is in that archive, while researching the provenance of another Caravaggio painting (a young, nude and flirty John the Baptist with his arm around an interested ram), that she and her colleague, Laura Testa, discover the 1603 ledger entry, which becomes the first important signpost leading to the identification of "The Taking of Christ." As the players in this drama multiply - and given the career stakes, everyone involved seems remarkably decent; the book could have used a good villain - we are treated to an art historian's version of "C.S.I." Canvases are X-rayed and scanned with infrared light, paint surfaces are examined for telltale traces of the painter's M.O. - the way Caravaggio, who didn't work from preparatory sketches, scored the ground of his paintings with the nonbusiness end of his brush to work out his compositions. Terms such as craquelure - an old painting's characteristic "web of fine capillary-like cracks" - are tossed around. As with any version of "C.S.I.," there is even a decent yuck moment here during a sequence in which the book's second main character, an art restorer named Sergio Benedetti, mixes up a pot of glue with eye-of-newt ingredients: "a quantity of pellets of colla forte made with rabbit-skin glue, an equal quantity of water, a tablespoon of white vinegar, a pungent drop of purified ox bile." Harr notes that Benedetti prefers this recipe to another calling for an entire ox skull.

The author has a wonderful ability to bring this sort of tradecraft to life. For instance, there is this description of another restorer, Andrew O'Connor, cleaning the surface of a filthy painting:

"He used cotton swabs and began with distilled water, barely dampening the swab, to remove the superficial dirt. Occasionally he wet a swab in his mouth. Saliva contains enzymes and is often effective at removing dirt and some oils. In Italy he'd seen restorers clean paintings with small pellets of fresh bread. The process of cleaning old paintings has a long history, not all of it illustrious. In previous eras, paintings had been variously scrubbed with soap and water, caustic soda, wood ash and lye; many had been damaged irreparably. An older restorer once described paintings to O'Connor as breathing, half-organic entities. 'It's a good thing they can't cry,' this restorer said, 'otherwise you would go to museums and have to put your fingers in your ears.' "

THE LOST PAINTING
By Jonathan Harr.
Illustrated. 271 pp. Random House. $24.95.

Related

First Chapter: ‘The Lost Painting’ (November 13, 2005)

It is this empathy for the passions of these scholars and artisans, Harr's respect for their dedication and his keen understanding of their workaday worlds - he clearly spent a lot of time with his subjects - that elevates "The Lost Painting" into something more provocative than just your average missing-Caravaggio narrative. A good thing, too, since the timing and circumstances of the discovery of "The Taking of Christ" deflate much of the book's suspense; halfway through, it's all over but the backfilling. Fortunately, the hunt for the canvas is a bit of a MacGuffin; the deeper mystery is the nature of capital-A art itself. In that vein, early in the book, Harr offers a sketch of Sir Denis Mahon, the greatest living expert on Caravaggio:

"Sir Denis believed that a painting was like a window back into time, that with meticulous study he could peer into a work by Caravaggio and observe that moment, 400 years ago, when the artist was in his studio, studying the model before him, mixing colors on his palette, putting brush to canvas. Sir Denis believed that by studying the work of an artist he could penetrate the depths of that man's mind. In the case of Caravaggio, it was the mind of a genius. A murderer and a madman, perhaps, but certainly a genius."

Windows on history, windows on men. Ledger entries and masterpieces, both with their "tells." So what does "The Taking of Christ" reveal about Caravaggio? It is one of the artist's most intimate religious paintings - a tight medium shot in Hollywood terms, the action filling the frame with a choreographed immediacy Michael Bey must admire if he's ever seen it. Jesus, off center, calmly accepts his fate, hands clasped, gaze downcast. Judas has just kissed him, the apostle's face inches from his master's, his left hand still gripping Jesus' shoulder, the two locked in a complicated embrace of love and betrayal while a pair of Roman soldiers move in - the decisive moment, in Cartier-Bresson's term. And on the far right Caravaggio has painted himself, raising a lantern: the artist symbolically illuminating the scene. But left hanging, as many critics have pointed out, is the question of Caravaggio's literal role in the scene: mere bystander or member of the arresting party? Is he faithfully illustrating God's design or implicating himself in Judas's treachery? Caravaggio frequently painted himself into his works, often behind a patina of self-loathing, at least to post-Freudian eyes. (In perhaps the most dramatic example, a painting of the victorious young David, he used himself as the model for Goliath's severed head, a look of nauseated despair on his face as his blood drains from his severed neck.) It is this conflicted quality that roils so many of his paintings of martyrdoms and miracles; he may have intended his high-beam lighting to dramatize God's divine love and judgment, but coupled with the dark backgrounds and deep shadows, the effect, as in "The Taking of Christ," can also be isolating, each figure swaddled in its own gloom. These are literally dark nights of the soul - Christianity, before the advent of feel-good megachurches, was full of them - and that's one reason the artist speaks so powerfully to modern audiences: three centuries before Munch, Caravaggio had found a visual language for dread.

So, yes, certainly a genius, and an attractively tortured one at that, though Harr records Benedetti's observation that Judas's left arm is too short, a clumsy error of perspective on Caravaggio's part: "It looks like he painted the shoulder and then didn't have enough room for the arm." Of course: nobody's perfect. Maybe Caravaggio was hurried. Maybe he was lazy. Maybe he didn't notice. But it is that teasing interplay between craft and inspiration, between a painting's physicality and its import, between what is knowable about art and what, ultimately, is not, that resonates throughout "The Lost Painting" and underscores a satisfyingly ironic coda: In 1997, seven years after it had been painstakingly restored, its provenance documented, and its place rightly restored among Caravaggio's canon, "The Taking of Christ" was discovered to be infested with biscuit beetles, a common household pest, which were feeding on all that rabbit-skin ox-bile glue that had been used to repair it. Despite the heroic efforts recounted here, ashes-to-ashes can hold true, it seems, for paintings as well as their painters. There's beauty in that, too.

Nighthawks State of Mind

Jeremiah Moss
July 2, 2010
The New York Times

IN 1941, Edward Hopper began what would become his most recognizable work, one that has become an emblem of New York City. “‘Nighthawks,’” Hopper said in an interview later, “was suggested by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet.” The location was pinpointed by a Hopper expert, Gail Levin, as the “empty triangular lot” where Greenwich meets 11th Street and Seventh Avenue, otherwise known as Mulry Square. This has become accepted city folklore. Greenwich Village tour guides point to the lot, now owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and tell visitors that Hopper’s diner stood there. But did it?

Not long ago, one of the readers of my blog, Vanishing New York, sent in an old photo of the lot. There was no diner, only an Esso gas station and a White Tower burger joint that looked nothing like the moody, curved, wedge-shaped lunch counter in “Nighthawks.” An urban mystery had just revealed itself: If the diner wasn’t in the empty lot, then where was it? Being an obsessive type, prone to delve, I began searching for Hopper’s diner with the help of two of my readers. Multiple streets converge at Mulry Square, creating a shattered-glass array of triangular corners. The buildings wedge themselves into these tight angles, bricks tapering to near points, each structure bearing a Hopperesque resemblance. I snapped photos of every possibility and checked them against their ancestral images in the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. I made a trip to the city’s Municipal Archives, where I scanned the 1930s atlases of Manhattan known as “land books,” matched block and lot numbers to scratchy rolls of microfilm and scrolled through muddy 1940s tax photos. Slowly, I began ruling out suspects. The empty lot at Mulry Square held a gas station from at least the ’30s through the ’70s, not a diner. I had to rule out the buildings on nearby corners of the square as well: West Village Florist was a newsstand. Fantasy World was a liquor store. Two Boots Pizza, with its lovely prow wrapped in rounded glass and chrome, was the Hanscom Bake Shop. And the pie-slice of a luncheonette that stood behind the lost Loew’s Sheridan cinema was too blocky, too brick-y to be the elegant diner in the painting.

So I expanded my search, looking at nearly every curvilinear corner where “two streets meet” off Greenwich Avenue. With each rejected candidate, my hopes of finding the “Nighthawks” diner fell. After hours of hunting the archives, I was about to give up when I found a new clue in a 1950s land book. There in the map of Mulry Square, not in the empty northern lot, but on the southwest side, where Perry Street slants, the mapmaker has written in all caps a single revelatory word: DINER. I went into a state of panicky thrill. Sometime between the late ’30s and the early ’50s, a new diner appeared near Mulry Square. This was it. I could smell the coffee brewing. After decoding the block and lot number, written in script so small it required a Sherlockian magnifying glass, after retrieving the microfilm spool and scrolling to the specified location, I discovered ... nothing. The tax photo showed only that old Esso station. I scrolled back and forth to be sure, but found no photo of the southwest corner, no photo of the diner in question. Did the tax photographers forget to take its picture? Did they mislabel the lot? It’s possible that I started muttering out loud to myself in the quiet of the Municipal Archives, because people began to stare.

Back home, I dug through my bookshelves and unearthed Gail Levin’s “Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.” The book is autographed by the author — I had gone to hear Ms. Levin read in a bookshop that is now gone — and dated from a time when I was still new to the city and knew it largely, romantically, as a sprawling Hopper painting filled with golden, melancholy light. In the book, Ms. Levin reported that an interviewer wrote that the diner was “based partly on an all-night coffee stand Hopper saw on Greenwich Avenue ... ‘only more so,’” and that Hopper himself said: “I simplified the scene a great deal and made the restaurant bigger. Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” Partly. More so. Simplified. The hidden truth became clearer. The diner began to fade. And then I saw it — on every triangular corner, in the candy shop’s cornice and the newsstand’s advertisement for 5-cent cigars, in the bakery’s curved window and the liquor store’s ghostly wedge, in the dark bricks that loom in the background of every Village street. Over the past years, I’ve watched bakeries, luncheonettes, cobbler shops and much more come tumbling down at an alarming rate, making space for condos and office towers. Now the discovery that the “Nighthawks” diner never existed, except as a collage inside Hopper’s imagination, feels like yet another terrible demolition, though no bricks have fallen. It seems the longer you live in New York, the more you love a city that has vanished. For those of us well versed in the art of loving what is lost, it’s an easy leap to missing something that was never really there.

Jeremiah Moss is the author of the blog Vanishing New York.