Guardian Unlimited | Arts news | Art detective exposes hidden images to fuel Da Vinci Code conspiracies: "Art detective exposes hidden images to fuel Da Vinci Code conspiracies
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John Hooper in Rome
Tuesday September 20, 2005
The Guardian
Da Vinci's Adorationof the Magi
'A whole new world under the surface' ... Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi
Amid the obsessive scholars and scheming prelates who inhabit Dan Brown's global blockbuster, The Da Vinci Code, there is a real person.
Maurizio Seracini works in a high-ceilinged, colourfully frescoed palazzo just across the river from the Uffizi gallery in Florence. His premises are packed with machines that look as if they belong in a hospital or laboratory.
Brown calls him an 'art diagnostician', which is not a bad description for someone who probes paintings with state-of-the-art-technology, often to advise museums, dealers and collectors on their restoration.
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The Da Vinci Code revolves around the contention that Leonardo Da Vinci's paintings are full of symbolic allusions to a secret claimed to have been preserved by successors of the defunct medieval order of Knights Templar - that Christ married Mary Magdalene and had a family whose descendants are alive today. What attracted Brown to Mr Seracini was his epic investigation into what lies below the surface of the Adoration of the Magi, a work the art detective believes was sketched by Da Vinci, but painted over by someone else."
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