The History Blog

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was copied by other artists and his students starting almost as soon as it was made in the first decades of the 16th century. Some of them have been advanced as Leonardo originals, at least in part (see the Isleworth Mona Lisa, for example), and others have always been known to be copies. One of these known copies is in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Prado experts thought it was painted relatively early in the 16th century by an anonymous artist, but with its black painted background, bright red sleeves, and relatively flat shadowing compared to the velvety depth of da Vinci’s original, the Prado’s Mona Lisa didn’t get much attention. They also thought the wood was oak, which was used by northern European artists.

Last year curators took a closer look in anticipation of an upcoming loan to the Louvre. They found that the panel was actually walnut, a commonly used wood for oil paintings in 16th century Italy. Using infrared reflectography, they then found that underneath that dull black background was a beautiful Tuscan landscape almost identical to the one behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa.

IR also revealed the copy’s underdrawings, sketches that painters make before they start with the paint. The Louvre took IR images of the Mona Lisa in 2004. When the Prado curators compared the two sets of underdrawings, they found that they matched, suggesting that the copy was made contemporaneously with the original, following the changes to the composition as the master drew them before the final version was painted. There are documentary sources that attest to Leonardo having his students paint alongside him in the studio, but this is the first time we have IR evidence that strongly indicates contemporaneous painting.

Conservators have spent the past year removing the black overpaint — probably added in the 18th century to make it match other pieces with a black background in a gallery setting — and revealed the refreshed Mona Lisa copy in a presentation two weeks ago at London’s National Gallery.

The Prado’s technical specialist Ana González Mozo describes the Madrid replica as “a high quality work,” and in the paper she presented at the London conference, she provided evidence that the picture was done in Leonardo’s studio. The precise date of the original is uncertain, although the Louvre states it was between 1503 and 1506.

Bruno Mottin, the head conservator at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, believes that the most likely painter of the Prado copy was one of Leonardo’s two favourite pupils.

Mottin proposes that it was either Andrea Salai, who originally joined Leonardo’s studio in 1490 and probably became his lover, or Francesco Melzi, who joined around 1506. If the Prado replica is eventually attributed to Melzi, it suggests a late date for the original.

There is at least one other copy of Mona Lisa attributed to Salai and it doesn’t look as good as the Prado’s copy to my eye, although that could be the picture. He also painted Monna Vanna, a nude parody of Mona Lisa.

Salai’s reputation was more about his bad boy living than about the skill of his painting. Leonardo complained about Salai all the time in his notebooks, describing him as a “ladro, bugiardo, ostinato, ghiotto” (thief, liar, obstinate, glutton) whom Leonardo had to bail out of scrape after scrape. Still, he must have had something going for him since da Vinci lived with the youth from the time he was 10 years old until he was 35. Leonardo even left his enfant terrible property and paintings after his death in 1519, including the real Mona Lisa which Salai sold to King Francis I of France.

The Prado’s discovery might shed some light on details of the original. There are areas of the Prado Mona Lisa that are in much better condition than on the original — the spindles of the chair, for example, and the veil around her left arm — and Lisa herself looks considerably younger without that yellow cracked varnish that darkens and muddies her facial features in the original.

The copy is in the final stages of conservation. It will be displayed at the Prado in a few weeks, then it will go on loan to the Louvre for its exhibition with Leonardo’s Saint Anne (March 19 – June 25) where it will be back in the same room with Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for the first time in 500 years or so.

Okay, so you weren’t able to get to England or sell your kidney to buy a scalped ticket for the sold out blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery. For the many of us all over the world in that sad boat, we will have to content ourselves with a viewing of an HD documentary on the exhibit: Leonardo Live (which isn’t live for us but was broadcast live originally).

Captured live on November 8, 2011, LEONARDO LIVE provides a virtual walk-through of the exhibit, with exclusive commentary from scholars and curators. Hosted by highly respected art historian Tim Marlow and presenter Mariella Frostrup, the exhibition brings together the largest number of da Vinci’s rare surviving painting and some international loans. While numerous exhibitions have looked at da Vinci as an inventor, scientist or draughtsman, this is the first to be dedicated to his aims and techniques as a painter.

When I last blogged about this, the screening dates hadn’t been published yet. Now they have and you can buy your tickets in advance. It opens in 450 theaters around the country on February 16. Since most of the screenings are a one-night-one-showing-only event, I suggest you book early. You can plug your zip code into this site to get a listing and map of the theaters nearest to you that are showing the movie.

For some fascinating background on the Herculean effort it took to put together this unprecedented exhibit, read this article from the Telegraph. It took five years from idea to exhibition, and it would never have happened if Queen Elizabeth II hadn’t agreed up front to allow Luke Syson, the National Gallery’s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, to offer loans of important Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection in return for loans of Leonardo paintings.

So Syson started by negotiating the loan of the Lady with an Ermine from the Czartoryski Foundation in Cracow. Next he asked his colleagues at the Louvre for La Belle Ferronnière. With two such stunning portraits secured for the show, it would have been hard for Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan to turn down his request for Leonardo’s Portrait of a Musician, because with the addition of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks it looked like every surviving picture painted by Leonardo in Milan would be in the show.

Every picture he painted in Milan (the frescoes in the Castello Sforzesco and The Last Supper excluded, of course, on account of they’re attached to walls) is fully half the total number of the Leonardo paintings known to survive.

Amidst thousands of drawings of mechanical inventions, artillery, anatomy, the natural world, etc. made by Leonardo da Vinci and collected in the Codex Atlanticus are some fragments of a design that nobody paid much attention to for 500 years. In 1978, Da Vinci scholar Carlo Pedretti paid attention and identified the drawing as a handbag designed by Leonardo da Vinci around 1497.

Agnese Sabato and Alessandro Vezzosi of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci recently reassembled the design from the fragments. Vezzosi thinks Leonardo made several drawings of the same bag but they’ve been lost.

As a tribute to the city of Florence, a city that has long been famous for its exquisite leather work, fashion house Gherardini has brought Leonardo’s handbag to life. Designer Carla Braccialini designed the “Pretiosa” (meaning “precious” and yes, I am saying it like Gollum) bag based on Leonardo’s drawing, and artisans made it by hand using luxury materials like embroidered calf leather and an embossed brass handle.

Here is an all too short video of a craftsman making the “Pretiosa”:

Functional and beautiful, creative and provocative, the bag would have certainly stood out among Renaissance fashion.

“While the shape recalls the lectern in “The Annunciation,” painted by Leonardo in the workshop of Verrocchio, its patterns feature rotating spirals and floral motifs, scrolls and foliage in metamorphosis,” Vezzosi said.

Boasting a unique closing system, the bag was designed at the end of Leonardo’s first Milanese period, around 1497. At that time, the artist was painting the tapestries in the Last Supper and knots designs in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco.

“Pretiosa” was on display for just three days (January 11-13) at the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, the first art school in Europe which was founded by Cosimo I de’ Medici and Giorgio Vasari in 1563. Gherardini has made only 99 Preciouses. They will theoretically be sold in Gherardini boutiques starting in March, but I highly doubt anybody walking in off the street will be able to get their mitts on one.

This wasn’t Leonardo’s only foray into fashion design. Several of his forays into clothing and accessory design have survived, as have his writings on the subject. He had strong opinions on the fashions of his era, condemning excessive ornamentation, overly tight clothes and shoes.

An appreciation for fashion is not Gherardini’s sole connection to the Renaissance genius. Lisa Gherardini, born to a decayed aristocratic Florentine family in 1479, married successful silk merchant Francesco Del Giocondo when she was 15. In 1503, Francesco commissioned Leonardo da Vinci to paint a portrait of her. It took him so long to paint it that he officially gave up the commission in 1506, although he kept working on it for the rest of his life.

After his death in 1519, the painting was bought by King Francis I of France. Now Leonardo’s portrait of Lisa Gherardini, aka la Gioconda, aka Madonna Lisa, aka Monna Lisa, aka the Mona Lisa, smiles serenely at dense crowds of Louvre visitors. One hundred and twenty-six years ago, her relatives founded the Gherardini fashion house.

The Glastonbury Grace Cup, a 16th century oak tankard intricately carved with images of the 12 Apostles, the crucifixion of Christ, birds, beasts and flowers, is going on display at Glastonbury Abbey, its reputed ancestral home, for the first time since 1886.

Legend has it that the tankard belonged to the abbots of Glastonbury, the last of whom, Abbot Richard Whiting, was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1539 during the Dissolution of Monasteries. Whiting had been a supporter of King Henry VIII, even signing the 1534 Act of Supremacy that made the king the head of the Church of England, but when Henry’s men showed up to loot Glastonbury Abbey and confiscate its lands, Whiting tried to stop them so they executed him as a traitor on the spot.

Grace Cup was smuggled out of the abbey and given for safekeeping to a Catholic branch of the Arundell family of Wardour Castle in Wiltshire, according to Arundell family lore. A hundred years later the tankard had another brush with the pointy end of British history, this time narrowly avoiding destruction when Cromwell’s Parliamentarian forces set siege to Wardour Castle in 1643 during the English Civil War. It was Lady Blanche Arundell, left alone at the castle with only 25 men-at-arms while her husband was off fighting with King Charles, who fended off the attackers for nine days and was able to hide the cup before she finally surrendered.

We can’t know for sure that the tankard came from Glastonbury Abbey. The decoration on the cup suggests that it may have been carved in Germany or elsewhere central Europe. One theory is that the cup was brought to Wardour by Thomas Arundell, 1st Baron Arundell of Wardour, returned from fighting for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II against the Ottoman Turks in 1595. Sir Thomas, nicknamed “the Valiant” for his bravery in taking down the Turkish standard and replacing it with the Imperial one during a battle in Gran, Hungary, could have picked it up during his travels.

However, Sir Thomas was in a shipwreck on his way home from the war and lost everything. He made it to shore with only the clothes on his back, so if the tankard was picked up by an Arundell on the continent rather than saved from the violence of the Dissolution, it probably wasn’t Sir Thomas after fighting the Turks.

Also, this kind of tankard is called a Grace Cup because it was traditionally shared around a table after a prayer of thanksgiving, aka saying grace. On the inside of the cup there are vertical rows of pegs that apportion an equal amount of beverage to each drinker. Add that to its religious decoration and it makes the abbey provenance plausible even setting aside the Arundell family stories.

The cup was tracked down and put on display in Glastonbury in 1886 to celebrate the founding of the Glastonbury Antiquarian Society. Now, to celebrate the society’s 125th birthday, Lord Talbot of Malahide, Arundell descendent and current owner of the cup, is loaning the Grace Cup to the abbey again. The exhibition opens December 14th and runs until January 31th.

The Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan exhibition at London’s National Gallery which stars seven of the 15 paintings by Leonardo da Vinci known to have survived, including the recently rediscovered Salvator Mundi, has been a blockbuster of epic proportions. Tickets sold out for the entire run almost immediately and are currently being scalped on eBay for hundreds of dollars apiece.

The vast majority of the world won’t have the chance to see the exhibit in person during its all-too-short run (it opened November 9, 2011, and closes February 5, 2012) and the paintings are so fragile and, in some cases, politically fraught — it took an enormous diplomatic effort to get them all together in the first place — that there will no travelling exhibit. Once the show closes the first week of February, that will be the end of it. We’ll probably never see those pieces together again during our lifetimes.

Be not forlorn, though, because we will at least get to see some killer HD footage of the exhibit, accompanied by commentary from curators, da Vinci experts, and, randomly, actress Fiona Shaw fresh off her stint as a dissociative witch with an atrociously fake Southern accent on True Blood. (Loved her in Persuasion, though.)

Billed as the first-ever tour of a fine art exhibition created for movie theatre audiences, “Leonardo Live” will afford art lovers a two-dimensional look via satellite at the sold-out exhibition, which cannot tour due to the works’ fragility.

Beginning February 16 2012, the da Vinci film will be screened in U.S. venues as well as in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and Sweden, roughly through the end of the month.

The exhibition, which has drawn crowds and seen tickets scalped for hundreds of dollars each, was filmed on the eve of its opening in London this fall. The 100-minute production provides a high-definition walk-through of the landmark show, in-depth commentary about featured pieces and extra content.

There is no list of scheduled showings yet, so if you want to receive email updates on when you can catch the movie in your area, sign up on the Leonardo Live HD website.

In unrelated Leonardo news, Italian police raided the Palazzo Vecchio yesterday after 400 art scholars from around the world signed a petition asking them to intervene to stop Maurizio Seracini — the only living non-fictional person to make an appearance in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code — from drilling holes in a Vasari fresco to find a Leonardo fresco he thinks might lie behind it.

It wasn’t much of a raid; the carabinieri questioned the team in the Salone dei Cinquecento and that was pretty much it. The aim of the investigation is to determine how this drilling plan was hatched (like, for instance, if National Geographic’s funding of the project in exchange for exclusive rights to broadcast any results might have placed undue pressure on the team to find something, anything, even at the cost of the Vasari) and whether the Vasari fresco was damaged or if there’s a risk that it will be damaged.

The search for the lost Leonardo da Vinci mural depicting the 1440 Battle of Anghiari in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio has taken a disturbing turn. When last we saw art historian Maurizio Seracini, his team of graduate students from the University of California at San Diego and his videographic Boswell, National Geographic photographer Dave Yoder, they were raising money via Kickstarter to develop a gamma ray camera that would be able to capture an image behind the wall that currently features a battle scene painted by Giorgio Vasari in 1563. They were unable to reach their $265,000 fund-raising goal so the gamma ray camera is out.

Instead, they will be drilling holes all the way through Vasari’s “Battle of Marciano” fresco so they can send fiber-optic cameras into the gap behind the wall and record images of anything that might be back there. Conservators have erected four stories of scaffolding in front of Vasari’s mural in the grand Salone de Cinquecento, the Hall of Five Hundred, of the Palazzo Vecchio, and drilled the first hole above the right kneecap of a soldier.

The fiber-optic glimpse behind Vasari’s wall has confirmed what radar and sonar data suggested: that there is indeed a gap behind Vasari’s wall. It’s just a fraction of an inch deep, but sufficient to contain a painting. The team has collected samples from the entry points so even if cameras can’t see any pigment, tests on the drilled material might indicate if there was something painted on the wall Vasari bricked over.

Six more holes are scheduled to be drilled this week. Each drill spot has been approved by conservators from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. They’ve chosen places that have already been damaged and are slated for restoration anyway or that are free of pigment, but not everyone was on board with the plan.

Cecilia Frosinini, mural paintings section director at Florence’s Opificio delle Pietre Dure art restoration laboratory, resigned in protest from the project.

“It’s an ethical question. I’m supposed to protect the artworks, and here there is an invasive intervention on the painting,” Frosinini wrote.

The lure of anything that might conceivably be a Leonardo, even a very, very long shot like this one, overrides the concern about invasive testing methods. We don’t know if there’s anything behind there at all. Vasari himself said that Leonardo’s painting never dried and ended up dripping away, and some art historians doubt that Vasari, who venerated Leonardo, would ever brick over his work and paint his own mural on top.

On the other hand, there is precedent. Vasari was commissioned to paint over a 1425-6 Holy Trinity by Masaccio in the church of Santa Maria Novella. Vasari had acclaimed Masaccio in his Lives of the Artists as the best painter of his generation because of his realistic figures and adept use of linear perspective, which had been invented by architect Brunelleschi just a couple of years before in 1424.

The Holy Trinity in particular was a ground-breaking work that re-introduced Roman barrel vaulting to the visual arts before it had been re-introduced architecturally, and used one-point perspective to give the viewer the impression of looking into a deep niche. It inspired many great artists who followed him, including Michelangelo and Leonardo. Instead of painting directly on top of the masterpiece, Vasari built a brick wall in front of it and painted over the wall. Vasari’s wall was removed in 1861, revealing the Masaccio.

The results of the “Battle of Anghiari” drilling expedition won’t be known for several months.

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London unveiled the results of a two-year restoration of Saint Cecilia, a Baroque masterpiece currently attributed to the school of Annibale Caracci. The 17th century painting was in such awful condition that it had been off public display and in storage since the late 19th century. In 2009, sufficient funds were raised to begin a full restoration and it’s taken this long to painstakingly repair tears, reframe and clean the work.

And thus at long last, the sons pay for the sins of the father, for the person who is most responsible for its deplorable condition was Sir Francis Bourgeois, the founder of the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He and his partner Noël Desenfans ran an immensely successful and high-end art dealing business. In 1790 they were commissioned by Stanislaus August, King of Poland (and former lover of Catherine the Great’s), to create a royal collection of important art that would rival those held by the other crowned heads of Europe. Desenfans and Bourgeois worked for five years to put together a world-class art collection from scratch for Poland’s new national gallery.

Unfortunately in 1795 King Stanislaus was forced to abdicate and the country was dismembered by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Thus Desenfans and Bourgeois were left with a national gallery but no nation to put it in. They spent the rest of their lives selling some of the pieces in order to fund the purchase of equally important pieces and to find a place where the collection could go on display in appropriate splendor.

Desenfran died first in 1807. Bourgeois died in 1811 and left the collection to Dulwich College stipulating that the paintings were to go on public display. The Dulwich Picture Gallery was founded that year in accordance with the terms of the will and became the first public art gallery in the United Kingdom. (There was no National Gallery until 1824.)

Saint Cecilia used to hang in Desenfans’ and Bourgeois’ gallery/home. At the time it was attributed to seventeenth-century Bolognese painter Annibale Carracci himself. They hung it next to a Sir Joshua Reynolds painting but since Saint Cecilia was smaller than Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, just for the symmetry of it Bourgeois added wide strips of canvas around the former so that it would look like the two paintings were the same size.

The additions that Bourgeois made, however, eventually started to disintegrate and come away from the original seventeenth-century canvas. Well-known art critic Mrs. Jameson, writing in A Handbook to the public galleries of art in and near London (1842), made the rather scathing observation that she had ‘seldom seen a picture so shamefully maltreated – so patched and repainted…[Sir Francis Bourgeois’s] hand is clearly distinguishable’.

By the end of the century it wasn’t fit to be seen. Now look at it:

Now that it’s so clean and pretty, the question of attribution might be more fruitfully explored. The Gallery has a great deal of data from the conservation process that could help experts pin down whose hand painted Saint Cecilia.

The also have a rather nifty website, btw, with an extensive collection of videos about the paintings in the collection, visiting exhibits and the history of the collection. Check out the Masterpiece of the Month videos. It started in January of this year and will run until December, so you can watch them all back to back.

Deep Sea Productions divers have discovered what they believe to be the wreck of the 17th century Swedish royal warship Svärdet, or “Sword” in English. The 82-foot ship was found on the seafloor between 160 and 320 feet deep off the coast of the island of Öland, not far from where the wreck of the 16th century Swedish warship Mars was discovered earlier this year.

Built in 1642, the Svärdet sank with near-legendary drama during the Battle of Öland on June 1, 1676, along with its sister-ship the Kronan, or “The Crown.” Built in the 1670s, the Kronan was the flagship of the Swedish fleet, one of the world’s largest seagoing vessels and one of its most heavily armed. Both it and Svärdet were richly decorated in a style known as a “gaudy” ship, designed to intimidate the enemy with size and fanciness. It didn’t work in this case.

When Admiral of the Realm Lorentz Creutz, the Kronan‘s commander, ordered the ship to turn hard south with open gunports and too much sail, the ship flooded and capsized. Then for a reason never fully explained the gunpowder magazine exploded, taking most of the bow with it and the ship sank taking over 800 men with her, including Creutz, other high-ranking naval officers and the navy’s chief doctor.

Taking advantage of the confusion caused by the Kronan‘s sudden implosion, the allied Dano-Norwegian-Dutch fleet surrounded the Svärdet, attacking it on all sides. Its commander, Admiral Claes Uggla, held off the four attacking vessels, including the flagships of the Danish and Dutch fleets, for two hours. Finally Svärdet lost its mainmast and was pierced below the waterline. Uggla refused to surrender, even after they were hit by a fireship which did its duty and infected the Svärdet with its flames. He and his entire company went down with the ship.

The Battle of Öland is the largest naval battle the Baltic has ever seen. The wreck of the Kronan was rediscovered in August of 1980 after decades of searching by a team headed by Anders Franzén, the marine engineer and amateur historian who had found the Vasa in 1956. Finally finding its sister is therefore enormously exciting.

Malcolm Dixelius, head of Deep Sea Productions, is cagey on its exact location. It was not discovered in Swedish waters, so Swedish conservation law does not apply.

“The Baltic Sea is very complicated… Different countries interpret the laws in different ways,” he said.

“What is important is that we know where it is and we will help scientists to investigate it. We are working with colleagues who found the Mars, since these two ships are fairly close to each other and have a common history,” he added.

The Mars sank in 1564 and was found last spring. Both the Mars and Svärdet “are untouched,” Dixelius said.

“No one has been on them. Both the Vasa and Kronan were stripped in the 1600s. Here all the cannons are still there. They probably knew in the 1600-1700s where these wrecks were, but couldn’t get at them, because they were so deep,” he said.

The Baltic is a shipwreck lover’s dream. Its low temperatures and low salt levels act as excellent preservatives and make the environment extremely inhospitable to critters who enjoy eating wood, like shipworm. You can see the remarkable condition the ship is in in this footage of the wreck:

Archaeologists doing a survey of an English Civil War site in Newbury, Berkshire, have unearthed seven bullets from the First Battle of Newbury, a battle between the Royalist army led by King Charles and Parliamentarian force commanded by the Earl of Essex held on September 20, 1643. The team was doing exploratory work on Essex Street before sewer and water company Thames Water replaced a century-old cast iron water pipe in the area. They discovered the bullets in an adjacent field.

Mike Lang Hall, an archaeologist for Optimise, which is working on behalf of Thames Water, said: “This has been a very exciting find and it really is quite rare to find a collection of bullets like this dating back so many centuries in such an urbanised area.

Most of the bullets are consistent with use of a carbine rifle, a weapon that would have been a popular choice in the First Battle of Newbury, which we know took place on this street in September 1643.

The number of bullets in such a small area reflects the ferocity of the fighting – it is reported that sixty cartloads of dead were taken into Newbury for burial after the battle, in addition to those buried on the battlefield.”

The artifacts are now being studied at the Archaeological Surveys’ headquarters near Chippenham. So far they’ve confirmed that the bullets were probably shot from a carbine rifle and that all seven of them made contact with something solid at high speed. That something solid could have been topographical (ie, a tree) or anatomical (ie, a solider). Despite this and their advanced age, the bullets are in good condition, albeit misshapen from the impact.

The First Battle of Newbury was an important turning point in the First English Civil War. Up until then the Royalists had been winning, but even though King Charles had cavalry and got to the location first thus having his pick of the terrain, his soldiers were poorly trained and low on ammunition. Essex defeated all the King’s horses with mass infantry attacks and after a long, bloody day of fighting, the King beat a retreat under cover of night leaving Essex a clear path to take London.

The Royalists never recovered. Essex was welcomed by cheering crowds when he marched into London. They took the bull by the horns and parlayed that Parliamentarian fervor into prompt signature of the Solemn League and Covenant with Scotland on September 25, 1643. By January of 1644, Scotland would send an army to fight against King Charles.

With Scottish help, Parliamentary armies inflicted a string of defeats on the Royalists until King Charles surrendered to the Scottish army in May of 1646. They kept him for a year then handed him over to the Parliamentarians who expected him to accept the constitutional monarchy deal they offered. They did not expect him to cut a turncoat deal with the Scots himself so that in 1648 Scottish troops would yet again come south, only this time fighting for the King, and most importantly to them, to establish Presbyterianism in England. (Spoiler: the Scottish were as unsuccessful the second time as they had been successful the first. The King lost the Second Civil War too and his head with it.)

The bullets are still being examined, but will in due course go on display at West Berkshire Museum.

Two hundred works of art ranging from the High Renaissance to German Baroque to the Modern period have been discovered in the dirty backyard shed of a retired bricklayer in Szczecin, Poland. Only one work has been positively identified thus far, a 1903 lithograph by Jozef Czajkowski, and it provides a clue as to the provenance of the rest of the paintings: it is listed on the Art Loss Register as having been looted from the Silesia Museum in Katowice, southern Poland, during World War II. The oldest work, still not identified by name, dates to 1532.

The bricklayer, known only as Antoni M. since Polish law prohibits printing his family name at this juncture, is 92 years old and recently suffered a series of strokes. He cannot speak, so we don’t know how he got his hands on this collection. Preliminary investigations indicate that he found the art in the 60s while working on a construction site. He secreted it away and built a shed in his garden purposely to store the purloined paintings.

It’s not just a lean-to, either. According to police reports, the building looked like a bunker or a bomb shelter, with 30-inch-thick walls, a metal door and interior sliding walls. Unfortunately, he paid all that attention to security and none whatsoever to keeping conditions inside the bunker propitious for a massive art collection. The works were exposed to moisture and dust and are in very poor condition.

They’ve been transferred to the National Museum in Szczecin where Polish and Italian art historians are assessing the damage and working to identify each piece.

Antoni M. is under formal investigation for handling stolen art. Polish police are working closely with Interpol to trace the history of the works and figure out how they wound up in a backyard shed.

Here’s some raw footage of piles of art crammed into that filthy shed and then laid out in what looks like a conference room, maybe at the police station or in the museum.