DaVinci Mania

It's been a good season for lost DaVinci treasures. First there was the discovery of a secret DaVinci workroom where he may have worked on the Mona Lisa.

The hidden room where Leonardo da Vinci might have begun painting the Mona Lisa has been discovered, researchers say. A team of researchers from Italy's Military Geographical Institute says it has found the workshop in an old friary in the heart of Florence. The workshop was hidden in a part of a building that once belonged to the friary of the Santissima Annunziata, which the institute later took over. It contains frescoes containing "impressive associations" with other examples of Leonardo's work, says Alessandro del Meglio, Roberto Manescalchi and Maria Carchio, the researchers who made the discovery. "The workshop has been long sought. It was always there, all we had to do was look," Manescalchi says.

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Then came word that a famous lost painting might have been found.

The long-lost "Battle of Anghiari," considered Leonardo da Vinci's best work, could lie hidden behind a wall of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, say art experts. Maurizio Seracini, a world-renowned expert in art diagnostics whose investigations are referred to in Dan Brown's best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, said a recent conference he had found a suspicious cavity behind the council room's east wall. The wall now houses a mural by 15th-century painter, architect and writer Giorgio Vasari.

Of course the problem here is, if the masterpiece is found, how can it be retrieved without destroying Vasari's work.

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Now there's this:

A new picture by Leonardo da Vinci has been discovered, the National Gallery in London has said.

It said experts using infra-red techniques found a drawing under the surface of the Virgin of the Rocks painting which hangs at the gallery.

It believes the drawing shows a woman kneeling with one arm stretched out.

Experts believe the Italian Renaissance painter was planning a picture of an adoration of the child Christ but abandoned the idea.

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I wonder if this has anything to do with the popularity of that damn book.