National Geographic Society and City of Florence Team Up on Project with UCSD-Based Culture Heritage Center
CISA3 Director Maurizio Seracini Named National Geographic Fellow
San Diego, CA, March 10, 2008 -- The UCSD-based center that is leading the scientific search for a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece has a new partner in the effort: the venerable National Geographic Society.
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The City of Florence announced this week a five-year agreement with the Society to explore the history and culture of Florence in the pages of National Geographic magazine and books, and the National Geographic Channel on TV. The initial collaboration brings National Geographic into the search for the Battle of Anghiari , a mural painted by da Vinci that disappeared nearly 500 years ago, but is believed to exist behind a brick wall and fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio.
In 2007, Florence and the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage revived the on-again, off-again project and named Maurizio Seracini to lead the effort. Seracini is the director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) at the University of California, San Diego. The center is based in the UCSD division of Calit2, in partnership with the Jacobs School of Engineering and UCSD Division of Arts & Humanities.
The National Geographic Society recently named UCSD's Seracini a National Geographic Fellow as part of its Explorers program, and in April, he will speak in Washington, D.C. at the Society on a panel of distinguished speakers about "The Future of Exploration".
Seracini participated in a news conference on March 3 with Florence's commissioner of culture and National Geographic executive vice-president Terry Garcia. In return for special rights to publish or broadcast articles and documentaries about Anghiari and other projects, the U.S. media giant will provide 50,000 euros annually to the City of Florence to "support Florence's cultural heritage" through restoration and other projects. According to city officials, the agreement "not only offers financial support, but also the possibility of following and telling the story of each stage of the search for the Battle of Anghiari ," which will be the focus of the first year of the collaboration.
In announcing the agreement, the City confirmed that National Geographic joins a select group of donors contributing to the Anghiari project. Funding to support the City's involvement in the project also comes from: the Kalpa Group and its president, brewing heir Loel Guinness; the Renato Giunti Foundation (Giunti is the owner of the oldest artbook publisher in Italy); and the Friends of Florence Association. In addition, UCSD's participation and much of the work currently being done by scientists and engineers under Seracini's leadership is being funded by the UCSD-based institutions and Friends of CISA3, a group of private donors supporting CISA3 activities in Florence and elsewhere.
In joining the project, National Geographic committed to producing a major documentary in collaboration with Italy's largest public TV network, RAI. "The film will be distributed in 166 countries and in 34 languages on the National Geographic Channel and its affiliated international land and satellite broadcasters," according to a City of Florence news release. Production has already begun on the video project.
In outlining the overall search for da Vinci's masterpiece, the City confirmed that the project is focused in four areas, and each is led by a member of the advisory committee appointed last October by the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Francesco Rutelli. The first is an archival search of all records and pictorial materials from the time of and since da Vinci painted the mural - archives that could contain tell-tale clues about the creation of the Battle of Anghiari and its subsequent fate. (It disappeared when the Hall of the 500 in the Palazzo Vecchio was renovated and enlarged by Giorgio Vasari, a known admirer of Leonardo's work.) The archival team is led by Boboli Gardens director Alessandro Cecchi.
Separately, a group led by Cristina Danti from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure - Italy's top agency in charge of restoration and conservation - has developed the best available understanding of the colors and pigments used by Leonardo at the time, based on existing knowledge of his other large murals, including The Last Supper. Based on that report, the Opificio will simulate da Vinci's style and materials, when it sends a delegation to UC San Diego as early as this summer to create a mock Leonardo mural on a test wall to be built at the headquarters of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), where Seracini and CISA3 are based.
"This reproduction will go to the University of California, San Diego where, under the direction of professor Seracini, will be created a mock wall that will reproduce the wall and pictorial structure of the east wall of the Hall of the 500, using original bricks, stones and mortar from the same hall," said city officials. Those materials, discovered in a basement below the Hall of the 500, were shipped to Calit2 and will be used to build the mock wall to simulate as closely as possibly the existing structure of the wall where the Battle of Anghiari is believed to have been painted. With the fake mural in place, Seracini's team will test a "neutron activation analysis technology to 'read' and detect any hidden components (of Leonardo's materials)."
Finally, the Electronics and Telecommunications department at the University of Florence, led by professor Carlo Atzeni, "will conduct imaging on the walls of the Hall of the 500 with a new georadar technology that reads the gaps and could be able to pinpoint the original position of the walls and any voids in those walls, with a goal of revealing the structure of the Hall."
Other multispectral imaging -- including laser scanning, radar and infrared -- is being conducted by UCSD structural engineering professor and Calit2 visualization professor Falko Kuester and a team of graduate students under the CISA3 banner.
"The completion of these studies should ultimately lead to a verifiable scientific answer on the current existence of the Leonardo mural," according to the City of Florence news release.
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Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology
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Media Contact: Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu