Posted on 01/14/2005 8:26:14 PM PST by wagglebee
FLORENCE, Italy, Jan. 14 - Researchers at a military geography institute here say they have discovered - hiding practically in plain sight in their building - what might have been a workshop for Leonardo da Vinci.
They have also homed in on fading frescoes that they think might have been painted by Leonardo or by a workshop student 500 years ago, although that hypothesis has not been put to the test by art historians or by scientific analysis.
Italian museum officials are hoping that the discovery of the frescoes and five small rooms where Leonardo might have lived and worked, in a building just off the Piazza of the Santissima Annunziata in central Florence, will help flesh out the life of the artist, inventor and scientist, who embodied the ideal of the Renaissance man.
"Every piece of information helps us to understand not only the person but the historical climate at that time," said Annamaria Petrioli Tofani, the director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. But she cautioned against jumping to conclusions about authorship before rigorous analysis.
"It's an absolutely interesting discovery," said Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, in Vinci, who said he was convinced that Leonardo worked in the space and considers it possible that he lived there, too.
It seems like the stuff of a mystical thriller, with army boots clicking on one side of a wall and robed monks shuffling in sandals on the other: for years, it seems, the possible importance of the frescoes was obscured by a simple wall separating the military institute from a monastery.
On one side of the wall, a fresco of three birds hovers over the harsh fluorescent light of an emergency exit at the Institute for Military Geography. On the other side, a larger, ruined fresco sits at the foot of a Renaissance staircase in a 14th-century monastery.
All it took to connect the two was observation, said Roberto Manescalchi, 51, a cartographer at the military institute. "It was always here," he said. "All we had to do was look."
Even if Leonardo did not paint the frescoes, Mr. Manescalchi and the other researchers say, it is possible that a workshop student did. To bolster their argument, they turned to historical accounts of Leonardo's presence at the convent in the early 1500's.
Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance painter and architect, referred to Leonardo's use of rooms in the building in his 16th-century "Lives of the Artists." And the researchers suggest that the faded images of birds - one diving, another gliding and a third alighting on a tree branch - are similar to drawings found in the Codex Atlanticus, an atlas-size collection of Leonardo's artistic exercises, naturalist observations and anatomical drawings.
On the wall-size fresco in the monastery a void - the result of peeling - is shaped much like the kneeling angel in Leonardo's "Annunciation," a painting that hangs in the corner of room 15 of the Uffizi Gallery.
The discovery, announced by the researchers at a news conference on Monday, was reported earlier this week in the European press. Mr. Manescalchi said he was now being inundated with requests for viewings by art historians and conservators.
Some art historians expressed skepticism. "Without having seen the frescoes, anything we have to say is just babble," said Keith Christiansen, a curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Isn't it surprising that Vasari didn't mention it?" Mr. Christiansen asked about the frescoes. "You would have expected him to."
David Rosand, professor of art history at Columbia University and an Italian Renaissance specialist, also urged caution. Even if testing shows that the frescoes date roughly from the time of Leonardo's stay in Florence, he said, "most likely it's just wishful connoisseurship."
The wall separating the frescoes was built in 1857, after the Archduke of Tuscany forced the convent to close.
Mr. Manescalchi said he first came upon the larger fresco after asking to borrow an old architecture book from the neighboring monastery. In the course of his search, he happened on a Renaissance staircase that he recognized as the work of the Florentine architect Michelozzo di Bartolommeo. The stairwell had fallen into disuse, becoming little more than a warehouse for extra mattresses, headboards, beams and brooms.
At the foot of the stairs, however, was a large fresco that immediately reminded Mr. Manescalchi of Leonardo's "Annunciation." When he noticed that the wall to the left of the fresco had the same shape as the wall to the right of the bird fresco in his institute, he said, he felt that he was on to something.
He found a 15th-century drawing of the convent by Brunelleschi, the renowned Florentine architect, and noticed five interconnecting rooms spread over three floors that jutted out from the convent. Perhaps, he thought, they had served as a guest house for lay people. Using the drawing as if it were a map and calling on his cartographic skills, Mr. Manescalchi went to the institute's roof and began to match chimney to chimney, window to window and shingle to shingle until he found the rooms he was looking for.
Today they serve as offices for the military institute, including Mr. Manescalchi's. Six computers, including one now showing images of the frescoes, sit in a room that researchers say might have served as Leonardo's laboratory. Leonardo is said to have worked late and slept late, and to have always worked near his bedroom.
Only two Leonardo frescoes are known to have survived, both in Milan: a depiction of entwined willow trees in the Sala delle Asse (or "Room of the Tower") in Sforza Castle and "The Last Supper," both from around 1498.
Mr. Vezzosi of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci said he now believed that the artist worked and probably lived in the guesthouse of the convent in Florence sometime between 1500 and 1503. More than 500 years later, Leonardo remains a popular subject of scholarship, of fiction ("The Da Vinci Code") and of museum exhibitions around the world.
"There is a great excitement around Leonardo these days," said Carlo Barbieri, the curator of an exhibition of more than 1,000 works from Leonardo's Codexes at Lincei National Academy in Rome.
"It is a start," he said of the frescoes' discovery. "Now there will be a debate between the art historians."
GGG Ping
GGG PING
There is some good privately owned Da Vinci stuff in the US. Bill Gates bought one of Da Vinci's diaries several years ago.
Paid $30 million, well, I think it was really the Gates foundation, then donated it to a museum out there. If any more come on the market, they'll probably fetch $50 million or more, each -- they're not makin' 'em any more. ;')
Just an update to the ping message. Thanks wagglebee.
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