List of Slovenian painters

Transcription

I have a secret. It's about a hidden clue to a lost treasure. Do you want to hear more? I just triggered what I call the Treasure Hunt Instinct. It's in all of us, the desire to learn what is secret, to find what is lost and hidden, and to solve puzzles, riddles and mysteries. And for me, the Treasure Hunt Instinct is the greatest in the world of art. Today I'd like to talk about a real life treasure hunt. One that sounds straight out of an Indiana Jones' film. It's about a room in a palace in Florence, Italy, and a painting that once decorated one of its walls. That room was intended to serve as the venue for a duel between the two leading artists of Renaissance Italy. Michelangelo and Leonardo. And the story involves a hidden secret clue and a lost treasure. A vanished masterpiece by Leonardo Da Vinci. Now, when I talk about a Treasure Hunt Instinct I could be speaking about metaphorical treasures, for instance, what is the symbolism in these mysterious paintings? But today I'm talking about a literal treasure. A painting by Leonardo called "Battle of Anghiari" that vanished 500 years ago. I'm a professor of art history and a writer of books, both fiction and non-fiction, and whether I'm writing novels or history books, whether I'm teaching Art History, Art Crime or Writing, I like to dictate stories as puzzles that listeners and readers can play along to. If you imagine history is an enormous jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Historians will find archival documents or objects and they'll fill in some of the pieces to the puzzle, but they have to make educated guesses about what the completed picture would look like. A lost Leonardo painting is a major piece to that puzzle. For the art world, finding a lost Leonardo is like landing on the moon. There are only 22 extant paintings by Leonardo. This would be the 23rd. But it's not just about art and aesthetics. Were it found, the painting would become instantly the most expensive painting in the world, were it sold, worth well over 100 million Euros. But it also sheds light on one of the greatest thinkers of human history. Leonardo was an artist and a scientist, he's responsible for the invention of everything from modern surgery to machine guns, from tanks to helicopters to bicycles. So it's not just about the art. This is the Sala dei Cinquecento, or Hall of Five-Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio, in Florence, Italy. It’s an enormous room, it's probably about the size of half of a football field, and, at the moment, it's entirely decorated in frescoes by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari is the key in our search for the missing Leonardo. In 1505, Leonardo was commissioned to paint a battle scene called "Battle of Anghiari" on one of the walls of these rooms which you see here. He began but did not finish that painting. I'll get to that in a minute. Michelangelo was also commissioned to do a different battle scene called "Battle of Cascina" on the opposite wall. Michelangelo made a preparatory drawing, called a cartoon, for this battle scene but he never began the painting and the excuse he made was that the light on his side of the room was not as good as on Leonardo's side and he thought he would be at a disadvantage in this intentional duel between these two great artists. In 1563, Vasari was asked to remodel, restructure and repaint this room. He did so, and the Leonardo painting has not been seen since then. So the question is, what happened to it? Vasari was an enormous fan of Leonardo's work and it's highly unlikely that he would willingly destroy the work by this great master. Vasari is an interesting character. He is a 16th century painter and an architect, but he is best known for having written a book. The book is called "The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects" and it's a group biography, first published in 1550, of a large group of Renaissance artists, many of whom he knew personally. That book is still the go-to source for all students of Art History or Renaissance Italian Culture, and it's widely influential. And through that book, we learn the background stories for artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo. It is very unlikely that Vasari would knowingly destroy this work of art, so what might have happended to it? Well, there's a precedent for preserving a wall painting by creating a false wall over it, thereby preserving it but allowing a renovation to take place. So maybe that is what happened here. In 1975, an Italian art historian who was originally a scientist named Maurizio Seracini, whose talk you will hear right after mine, noted something that no one had ever seen before. In this entire room, absolutely enormous, covered in frescoes, there are only two painted words, "cerca trova" which is Italian for "seek and you shall find." Seracini, myself and other leading Leonardo scholars believe that this was a clue intentionally planted by Vasari to indicate where he hid Leonardo's lost battle scene. Those two words planted the Treasure Hunt Instict in Seracini but he was the first one to notice it in 500 years. This is the battle scene, "Battle of Anghiari" but we know only through a copy made by Rubens about a 100 years after Leonardo's painting was first made. Below, you see the "Battle of Cascina" in the preparatory drawing format that Michelangelo made although he never made the painting. Now why would Leonardo not have finished this? Well, Leonardo was notoriously hyper-active, in terms of his imagination. He once said that his one regret was he had never finished a single painting. That's a little bit of an overstatement, but not by much. He was constantly being called away on other projects and that may have been the reason why he abandoned this one, but according to his own diary there may have been a more melodramatic and meteorological reason. His diary dated the 6th of June 1505 reads, "Just as I lowered the brush, the weather changed for the worse and the bell started to toll... The cartoon –that's the preparatory drawing– was torn, water poured down and it rained very heavily until nightfall, and the day was as night." So that is his rationale for having not finished the painting. Giorgio Vasari is really the key to our understanding of Renaissance artists and also our search of the lost Leonardo. Through Vasari we learn about the rivalries between leading Renaissance artists of the 16th century and the most famous of them, Leonardo and Michelangelo. But there were other rivals at the same time. The big four rivals were–, I'll get to the others in a minute. Leonardo and Michelangelo are probably the most famous artists in the world, and they are responsible for arguably the four most famous artworks in the world. We have Leonardo's "Last Supper" and "Mona Lisa" and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling and his David sculpture. But if I were to ask you who the other leading Renaissance painters were the big rivals of Leonardo and Michelangelo, who they were, you might refer back to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But if you did, you would only be half right, because Raphael, one of the ninja turtles, was indeed the third among the four rivals, but the fourth was Tizian, and for some reason the creators of the Ninja Turtles decided that Donatello sounded like a better fourth character, but there you go. Donatello in fact lived more than a generation before the other four, so he doesn't really fit into the same category. Through Vasari we also learn about some of the interesting stories about these rivalries. For intance, there's a funny story about the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Michelangelo was not interested in painting at all. He loved sculpture and architecture, he was a poet, he was an archaeologist, he was the curator of the Papal antiquities collection, and 'oh, by the way' he happened to do painting. Leonardo, likewise, was not particularly interested in painting. He was a scientist, he earned most of his money as a military engineer, and by performing a stringed instrument called the "lira da braccio". Painting was rather low on his list of priorities. But Michelangelo did not like painting. He also never trained in the art of fresco painting and a fresco is painting in an egg-based tempera paint on a wet plaster wall, a specialized technique that lasts for hundreds of years, but you have to be trained in it. Raphael knew that Michelangelo had never trained in frescoes, and he thougth that he would set up a sort of trap for Michelangelo. He convinced the Pope to give Michelangelo a comission to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling assuming that Michelangelo, who was not interested in frescoes and didn't really know how to do the technique, would goof up and then Raphael would be the leading painter of Renaissance Rome. There's a story that, finally, Michelangelo reluctantly accepted the comission but his parameter was that no one would be allowed to see the work in progress, only once it was finished. Raphael snuck into the Sistine Chape by night to see what his rival was up to, but the Pope also wanted to see where his money was going and there's a story that he waited until Michelangelo was up at the top of a scaffolding and he snuck into the room, but Michelangelo saw the Pope sniking in and started shouting and throwing brushes down and hitting him with brushes to chase him out of the room. And these are the stories that we learn from Vasari and, of course, the joke was on Raphael because the punch line is that the Sistine Chapel became the most famous fresco in the world. Here are some other works by Michelangelo. Michelangelo's greatest legacy, in terms of the history of art, was having established a style that became the definitive style right after his career. In the middle part of the 16th century, the followers of Michelangelo were called the Mannerists, and these were artists who admired what Michelangelo did, particularly the intentional elongation and distortion of bodies for dramatic effect. Michelangelo and Leonardo were the first artists ever to really know what the inside of the human body looks like. They dissected cadavers illegaly by night in the basement of the Ospedale di Santo Spirito, in Florence, in order to study musculature. While Leonardo was interested in the science of it, Michelangelo was interested in how the body normally looked and then he distorted it intentionally for dramatic effect. These are selective works by Leonardo. Leonardo was more interested in the technology and the science behind art rather than art itself. He didn't start his own movement, but there are three primary techniques that we could point out that he developed and that became famous through his works. One of them is called "atmospheric perspective". If you look out into the distance, you'll see that objects very far away from you appeared to be hazier or blurrier that objects nearby, that's because we are literally looking through layers of atmosphere into the distance. And Leonardo was among the first to try to reproduce this in his paintings, which you see in the background, here. He also developed a technique called sfumatto, which is the intentional blurring of lines using a dry brush on semi-dry paint, to create a sort of milky, cloudy effect that heightens the sense of mystery. And also chiaroscuro. Chiaroscuro is the play of light emerging from darkness, and if you imagine for a moment that we turn all the lights out in this auditorium but only one spotlight remains on me, that would be a very chiaroscuro scene. But then imagine we turn all of the houselights on, in the auditorium. That general diffuse lighting was the way most paintings were lit prior to Leonardo's work. And the dramatic spotlighting was something that Leonardo developed and really reached its peak with Caravaggio, and you will see an example of his painting here, about a hundred years after Leonardo's career. Now, every once in a while a lost work by a famous artist like Leonardo will resurface and it might surprise you to learn that of all the works that we know of by all the old master painters, only about a third of them are extant, that means that two thirds of the oeuvre of each of these great artists is missing. It may be lost, literally missing, was destroyed, maybe mis-attributed, but we simply don't know where it is. But this categorization of lost gives us hope that such works might be found again and, in fact, in the last few years there are two reported Leonardos that were discovered. Here you see "Salvator Mundi" which is universally acknowledged as a great work by Leonardo, was found just a few years ago. But next to it, we have "La Bella Principessa." This was also discovered a few years ago, but it still divides Leonardo's scholars. About half think that it is a lost original, and half think that it's a copy. Michelangelo's occasionally surface as well, but the two more recent to surface are slightly suspicious. Both of them. Here we have an authenticated drawing by Michelangelo. Here is the painting that was recently discovered. It's clearly a painting based on that drawing. But while the owner of it thinks that it's a Michelangelo, I've never run into a Michelangelo scholar who agrees. It looks like a fairly mediocre copy of the original drawing by Michelangelo, and not one of his originals which we assume he did make a painting of it, but it's probably lost. Then, below, we have a wooden crucifix that was purchased by the Italian state for 4 million Euros, but I've also never run into a Michelangelo scholar who thinks that this is an authentic work. And, how do they decide? Well, one of the ways is to look at Vasari's life of Michelangelo from his book, and we learn that there's no record that he worked in wood, and this is a wooden crucifix, and also no record that he ever created a crucifix that matches this description. So it may be a sense of wishful thinking. Vasari is, therefore, the key to unlocking a lot of these art historical mysteries. And we return to him as we return to the Sala dei Cinquecento. In 2006, a 4 cm wide gap was found behind only that wall that has the "cerca trova" sign written on it. So there is something behind it, there is a false wall. In 2011, small holes were drilled through the external Vasari fresco to take samples from the wall behind it, and those samples of pigment were very similar to those used in Leonardo's Mona Lisa. So it's almost certain that "Battle of Anghiari" is hidden behind there. But the excavation is on hold because a number of art historians signed a petition to halt the excavation because they argued we should not knowingly destroy a portion of a priceless Vasari fresco in hopes of finding a lost Leonardo. They are also stressed that we don't know the state of the lost Leonardo. It's been in an aireless tomb for over 500 years and it may be just a crumble of pigment, so it might be anticlimactic when we do find it. But I would have a counter-argument for this petition. I would say that Vasari would very happily encourage the removal of a portion of his fresco in order to find the lost Leonardo. After all, he is the one who burried it and he is the one who left that clue, "cerca trova", for us to find. Those two words trigger the Treasure Hunt Instinct in us but it took us 500 years for us to notice them, and I think that Vasari's wish would be that we excavate his fresco to find the lost Leonardo. After all, he is the one who planted the clue when he wrote "seek and you shall find." (Applause)