SECRETS OF A PAINTING: Leonardo Da Vinci's The Adoration of the Magi — A Scientific Investigation by Maurizio Seracini, Edited by Loel Guinness

SECRETS OF A PAINTING: Leonardo Da Vinci's The Adoration of the Magi — A Scientific Investigation by Maurizio Seracini, Edited by Loel Guinness In 1989, shortly before a scheduled restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi, Florence’s Superintendent for Artistic Heritage approached the engineer Maurizio Seracini with a request to undertake an analysis of the unfinished masterpiece. Using the diagnostic procedures that would make him internationally famous, Seracini was able to peer behind the painting and the thick layer of dark varnish that coated it to discover, to his amazement, the sketches of over fifty human faces, a dozen animals and the shape of a building—unsuspected images drawn by the hand of the master himself that had remained invisible to the naked eye for over 500 years. Twelve years later, in the face of mounting international opposition to the restoration project, Seracini was asked to carry out a second, more thorough, study of the painting. Faced with a