LOS ANGELES (MCT) — University of California-San Diego researchers announced Monday that they had reached a new milestone in their decades-long search for a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci, saying they had found the type of material used by the Italian Renaissance master on a hidden wall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.
The announcement was met with immediate skepticism by other experts who noted that the results needed to be independently verified.
The researchers said that samples taken from the stone wall in the palazzo, now covered by another fresco, appeared to contain a black pigment used by Da Vinci on his masterpiece “Mona Lisa” and other surviving paintings.
