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Hunt for lost Leonardo Da Vinci painting to resume in Florence
Well - a real mystery.
ROME (Jan. 14, AP) - A real-life Da Vinci mystery, complete with tantalizing clues and cunning art sleuths, may be one step closer to a solution, as researchers resume the search for a lost Leonardo masterpiece believed to be concealed behind a wall in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.
The search for Leonardo Da Vinci's masterpiece began 30 years ago, when art researcher Maurizio Seracini noticed a cryptic message painted on a fresco.
Some researchers believe a cavity in one of the walls of a museum may have preserved for more than four centuries Leonardo Da Vinci's unfinished mural painting of the "Battle of Anghiari."
Well - a real mystery.
The search for the Renaissance masterpiece began about 30 years ago, when art researcher Maurizio Seracini noticed a cryptic message painted on one of the frescoes decorating the "Hall of the 500" — once the city's seat of power.
"Cerca, trova" — "seek and you shall find" — said the words on a tiny green flag in the "Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley," one of the military scenes painted by 16th-century artist Giorgio Vasari.
Between 2002 and 2003, radar and X-ray scans allowed Seracini and his team to find a cavity behind the fresco that is the right size to cocoon Leonardo's work, which was long thought to have been destroyed when Vasari renovated the hall in the mid-16th century.