Da Vinci’s famed Adoration of the Magi was hiding a dark secret beneath its layers of paint. Italian art diagnosticien Maurizio Seracini had unveiled the unsettling truth, which the New York Times Magazine carried prominently in a story titled “The Leonardo Cover-Up.”
Seracini had revealed beyond any doubt that while the Adoration’s gray-green sketched under drawing was indeed Da Vinci’s work, the painting itself was not. The truth was that some anonymous painter had filled in Da Vinci’s sketch like a paint-by-numbers years after Da Vinci’s death. Far more troubling, however, was what lay beneath the impostor’s paint. Photographs taken with infrared reflectography and X ray suggested that this rogue painter, while filling in Da Vinci’s sketched study, had made suspicious departures from the under drawing… as if to subvert Da Vinci’s true intention. Whatever the true nature of the under drawing, it had yet to be made public. Even so, embarrassed officials at Florence‘s Uffizi Gallery immediately banished the painting to a warehouse across the street. Visitors at the gallery’s Leonardo Room now found a misleading and unapologetic plaque where the Adoration once hung.
THIS WORK IS UNDERGOING
DIAGNOSTIC TESTS IN PREPARATION
FOR RESTORATION.
Leonardo da Vinci remained a great enigma. His artwork seemed bursting to tell a secret, and yet whatever it was remained hidden, perhaps beneath a layer of paint, perhaps enciphered in plain view, or perhaps nowhere at all. Maybe Da Vinci’s plethora of tantalizing clues was nothing but an empty promise left behind to frustrate the curious and bring a smirk to the face of his knowing Mona Lisa.
[The series continues]
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