Evidence of Lost Da Vinci Fresco Behind Florentine Wall 114
Lev13than writes "Art historians working in Florence's city hall claim to have found evidence of Leonardo da Vinci's lost Battle of Anghiari fresco. Painted in 1505, the fresco was covered over by a larger mural during mid-16th Century palace renovations. Historians have long speculated that the original work was protected behind a false wall. Attempts to reveal the truth have been complicated by the need to protect Vasari's masterpiece, Battle of Marciano, that now graces the room. By drilling small holes into previously-restored sections of Vasari's fresco, researchers used endoscopic cameras and probes to determine that a second wall does exist. They further claim that the hidden wall is adorned with pigments consistent with Leonardo's style. The research has set off a storm of controversy between those who want to find the lost work and others who believe that it is gone, and that further exploration risks destroying the existing artwork."
Re:How is this news for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, will this affect the tech world in ANY way?
Fuck art and the pseudo-intellectuals who devote their wasted lives to it.
If you truly believe that art has no bearing, benefit, or other influence on technology than it is you who is the pseudo-intellectual.
Re:How is this news for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Photos (Score:5, Insightful)
The Obsession with Leonardo (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem now is that we're heading into "stuff that Leonardo stood on the other side of the road to is touched with his genius" obsession.
I recently went to the (London) National Gallery Leonardo exhibition, at which a substantial proportion of his surviving works were brought together (both Madonna of the Rocks, for example) and the paintings that survive in a decent condition are astoundingly good: you can argue the toss about the relative merits of Da Vinci, Velasquez, Rembrandt and the rest, but that's the company he's clearly keeping.
However, what you don't get in an exhibition of Velasquez to anything like the same extent is the huge slew of "school of", "preparatory sketch for", "disputed", "attributed" and so on. There's plenty of Velasquez (or Goya, or Titian, or at a slightly less major level Turner) to go around, and therefore there's not the same perceived need to drag up everything last scrap of paper. A lot of the stuff that's of disputed provenance (or even, in the case of Salvator Mundi, is of broadly accepted provenance) wouldn't be held in anything like the esteem it is on purely artistic grounds --- Salvator Mundi was sold without the attribution for less than fifty quid just over fifty years ago, for example, and even though otherwise sensible people can write of Madonna of the Yarnwinder "The merest touch of Leonardo's genius is better than almost anyone else's signature work" (http://goo.gl/f3B88) there's a real whiff of idolatry to this attitude. Clearly, if you want to be regarded highly as an artist, make sure a lot of your paintings decay and you have only a small pool of material for later enthusiasts to obsess over.
In this case, the chances of there being a recoverable painting are close to zero: there are accounts of the paint being melted off the wall with braziers. There's a copy by Reubens of the section that was completed, but a lot of the rest was lost anyway. The painting that's having holes drilled in it is a not inconsiderable piece. âoeBut if I had to choose, I would choose Leonardo,â rather gives the game away.
Re:Explore! Explore! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not the damage to the purported painting behind the wall, it's the damage to the integrity of a building whose decorations have been in situ for over four hundred years. They're not talking about drilling holes in a wall painted with magnolia emulsion to get at whatever lies behind, rather doing serious damage to frescos by Vasari. That requires that you believe the remains of a painting which Leonardo himself severely damaged with braziers and part melted off the wall are of more intrinsic worth than the long-standing paintings by a non-trivial figure than have been on the walls of that room since it was given its present form. There are other artists apart from Leonardo, you know.
Google Translate does a reasonable job of the Italia Nostra press release (http://goo.gl/KcLTn) which is worth reading. That television funding has been made available for the work is dubious, to say the least: they're not going to care about Vasari, are they?
Re:The Obsession with Leonardo (Score:5, Insightful)
Celebrity over talent. As I had a lengthy post about this on The Reg recently, I feel I need to comment.
It's a problem with the modern definition of art. Now "art" is about something by a celebrity that "makes you think". Historically, art was about talent - something you can't just reproduce. Now literally anybody could "recreate" one of the modern works in an afternoon and it would be *indistinguishable* from the original. Modern artists were asked to provide works for the 2012 Olympics here in London. I was genuinely of the belief that they were children's drawings for the same until I read the caption properly.
So even though Leonardo had obvious talent (and would NOT have been so famous otherwise), making works that only an expert painter could even approach, the modern art movement has to regard him as a celebrity in order to stay consistent. It's not about the "interpretation" of the "piece" rather than, say, the fact that it's a fucking good picture made with brushes and oils. Thus, you turn the value of the art from the talent used to create it to the celebrity name attached to it, and so any crappy sketch that could be attributed to him, some pillock will pay millions for so they can say "That's a 'da Vinci'". Not because it actually LOOKS good, or is a skilful piece of art.
Art *was* never about interpretation, but skill. It was never about celebrity, except as a recognised talent. Just because Turner did a shit in his toilet bowl does not make that shit art.
But, try and tell modern artists that and they laugh at you, mainly because they've redefined art to be something that they can be "good" at even if they are bad, and also something that they can claim you "don't understand". It started in the 1920's or thereabouts. Before that, if you did a crappy piece of art for your king, he'd have chopped your head off (or thereabouts).
Admire the SKILL of the artist, not the name or the "thought process". There are still skilful artists out there, but you won't find them in the Tate because they aren't "arty" enough.
Re:Explore! Explore! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Explore! Explore! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously?
Humanity has almost always had a love of genuine artifacts, and that desire is practically universal. And to suppose that we could record perfect information about the original is laughable and completely ignores the intrinsic value of the original painting.
Concerning this new painting, I would very much like to see the new one, but destroying the outer painting is a terrible idea. I think that if they can gather enough evidence of a valid painting existing, then they will be able to gather enough funds to recover it safely.
Re:The Obsession with Leonardo (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the point.
A guitarist today requires as much skill as a guitarist in the past. The music moved on but still requires skill to perform. Modern art is the equivalent of those "4 minutes of silence" tracks you get - takes NO SKILL to perform, or to reproduce in it's original media, but hailed as "artistic".
Taking a photograph is also considerably less skilful (though at least has SOME skill to it) than painting an image that *looks* as real as a photograph. Even today, if you can paint THAT well that people think it's real, people are astounded and think it's amazing. Because it takes skill. It doesn't take skill, beyond a printer's apprenticeship, to put up a poster from a photograph you took.
Pretension does not make art. Skill makes art. A measure of skill is reproducibility. If I can't make a picture look like the Mona Lisa using only the tools and techniques the artist used, then it requires skill to do. If, however, you have a few stripes or a splodge on a bit of paper that I *CAN* reproduce myself quite simply using the same materials, then it's not really skilful and thus, I would argue, no really "art".
This definition was the shared, global definition of art right up until the 20's, thus proving my point.