Nanosecond Neutron Analysis for the search of the lost Leonardo’s masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari

Between 1505 and 1506 Leonardo Da Vinci painted his masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari, in Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of 500 in Florence. The unfinished mural remained visible until 1563, when architect Giorgio Vasari undertook a renovation of the Hall and all traces of the Battle of Anghiari were lost. However, scholarly interpretation and scientific evidence suggest that the mural could be on the eastern wall, hidden behind a brick wall built in 1563 by Vasari. This paper discusses the possibility of using NNA/APT (Nanosecond Neutron Analysis/Associated Particle Technique) to establish the presence of the masterpiece by identifying behind the Vasari’s wall chemical elements from the gesso preparation layer of the mural and possibly from its pigments. This paper reports on the experiments run with a simple NNA/APT system and the Monte Carlo simulations that have been carried out in order to outline the experimental setup of an advanced NNA/APT able to detect and locate the tiny amount of gesso and pigments.