Word: vasari
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...California Art Collector Norton Simon, because Simon refused to buy unless he could take the painting outside the country for a thorough pre-purchase examination. Simon's skepticism was understandable. A strip at the bottom of the painting has been obviously repaired. And while the 16th century biographer Vasari mentions that Leonardo did such a painting, there is no record of what became of it or whether it is the same picture that became the property of Franz Josef's ancestors...
...record all the gos sip, true and untrue; he also took time out to describe the works he most ad mired. Among them were Giotto's 14th century frescoes, presumably on the life of the Virgin, in Florence's Badia church. Particularly singled out by Vasari was the panel showing "Our Lady when she is announced...
Scholars had long had to take Vasari's word for it, since the frescoes seemed to have disappeared without a trace. But one who had not forgotten about them was Ugo Procacci, Florence's superintendent of galleries and formerly the Uffizi Gallery's chief restorer. While bundling off Florentine art treasures for safekeeping after the outset of World War II, he was struck by a five-paneled altarpiece in the Church of Santa Croce. Underneath the thick overpainting, his restorer's eye told him, might lie a masterpiece. So even in the haste of the moment...
...Heart Skipped." Could the polyptych be by Giotto and come from the Badia? Vasari had described such a work on the high altar. Later cleaning proved Procacci's hunch correct; handwriting analysis narrowed the date of the sticker to about 1810. Procacci was then able to reconstruct what had happened: the altarpiece had been removed in 1810 by Napoleon's troops from the Badia; then in 1815, through a clerical mistake, it had been returned instead to Santa Croce. Digging through the old floor plans of the Badia, Procacci made a second discovery. The church had been rebuilt...
...over 300 years, had been found. "Our expectations were enormous," he remembers. But the rays heralded a false dawn. Says Procacci: "When we saw that the face of the angel was missing, it broke our hearts." Procacci is convinced that the face of Mary in the Annunciation fresco that Vasari so admired was similarly cut out before the wall was covered in the 17th century...