I recently returned from an amazing trip to Vienna Austria, where I met Mr. Maurizio Seracini and worked as his assistant while he photographed a two hundred year old portrait of Ludwig Van Beethoven utilizing his infrared reflectography camera equipment. Mr. Seracini is the only real person and the science behind the book, "The Da Vinci Code". He is currently using special cameras and x-ray equipment that he developed to locate a long-lost masterpiece mural by Leonardo da Vinci. "The Battle of Anghiari" disappeared nearly 500 years ago when the Hall of the 500 in the Palazzo Vecchio was remodeled by Giorgio Vasari, starting in 1563. But was "Anghiari" destroyed? Did Vasari protect it behind his own new mural? And if the da Vinci masterpiece remained in place, did it crumble - or has it survived to this day?
He has studied more than 2,500 works of art and historic buildings, ranging from Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper” and Botticelli's "Allegory of Spring", to Da Vinci's "Adoration of the Magi". In 1983, he investigated 19 paintings by Raphael on the 500th anniversary of the artist’s birth, and in 1991 he analyzed 19 paintings by Caravaggio in his role as scientific director of an exhibition in Florence and Rome.
Our work was in effort to help document a series of numbers that I found on the portrait which I believed to be a 'date', and will be part of my thesis for my Masters Degree in Music History.
It was a great trip and I was able to see many of the places where Beethoven lived and worked, and I even had lunch at one his favorite restaurants. I also took the U-Bahn train to Kahlenburg where a number of Beethoven's summer residences stilll stand, including 6 Probusgasse in Heiligenstadt where he wrote his famous Heiligenstadt Testimony, revealing to his family his determination to continue despite his deafness.
I saw the Stephansdom Kirche, Karls Kirche and St. Peters Kirche among others, and took a tour of the catacombs and heard an organ concert in St. Peters.
Watch for more details in the next Evangel.
groß Gott!
Mark Alan Schulz
