Art diagnostician Maurizio Seracini has waited 30 years to get to the bottom of his biggest mystery yet: whether Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest lost fresco lies behind a wall in the Palazzo Vecchio here.

Seracini’s team of 30 will scan the palazzo’s 177-foot-long wall in mid-November, looking for the Battle of Anghiari, a work so magnificent it has been called the “school of the world.” The $1.5 million search expedition will jump-start a multidisciplinary conservation program at the University of California at San Diego’s Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology.

Since founding the art- and architectural-diagnostic center Editech in 1977, Seracini — a fourth-generation Florentine — has synced studies in engineering, art history and medicine to examine more than 2,000 buildings and artworks. He augments standard archival work with the use of ultrasound, X-rays, infrared, thermography and ultraviolet devices.

Editech’s notable discoveries include the original positions of the Three Graces in Botticelli’s Allegory of Spring and the hasty cover-up by a lesser hand of Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, which earned Seracini a mention as the only real-life character in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Wired News caught up with Seracini at his office. From behind a no-nonsense desk in a historic palazzo with high ceilings ribboned with frescoes, he talked about the relationship between technology and art.

Read full article (Wired, October 24, 2007)

There will be only a brief time allotted to indulge in aesthetic nostalgia, since the new Uris Center for Education opening today at the Metropolitan Museum will very soon — with its crisp grandeur, open spaces, natural light, technological tools, state-of-the-art studios, WiFi-equipped library, teacher-training rooms and 82-member educational staff — sweep away all recollection of its past.

Today’s inaugural events are scheduled to begin at 8:30 a.m. with a ribbon cutting to be attended by politicians, donors and others; the ceremony will be followed by a public daylong sampling of the center’s range and wares: a bazaar of arts education for all ages. These events will allow little time to dwell much on an era that came to an end three years ago, when the center was closed for this ambitious $75 million, 25,000-square-foot reconstruction.

But art education is a strange and surprising enterprise. It makes memories as important as celebration, traditions as crucial as innovation. And in itself, the new physical setting, however impressive, doesn’t guarantee anything, particularly for those who in the last two decades have shepherded their children through the Uris’s once ramshackle and cramped setting, watching them begin to feel as if the great museum above their heads was partly their own, worth exploring well into adulthood.

Read full article (New York Times, October 23, 2007)