How, exactly, does a Leonardo da Vinci mural believed to be three times the width of The Last Supper get lost? This is a mystery that Maurizio Seracini has been trying to solve since 1975.

After graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of California San Diego, Seracini was approached about a project in his hometown of Florence. The mission: to search for da Vinci’s unfinished fresco, The Battle of Anghiari. While several artists of da Vinci’s time refer to the work — and a letter from 1549 places it atop a grand staircase in the Palazzo Vecchio — the piece has been lost to modern audiences. It is believed that when Giorgio Vasari renovated the Palazzo Vecchio’s Hall of 500 in 1560, he might have covered da Vinci’s fresco with his own, The Battle of Marciano. While Vasari is known to have preserved the works underneath his own by leaving a gap in the wall, it is nearly impossible to prove without damaging Vasari’s fresco, now more than four centuries old itself.

In this fascinating talk from TEDGlobal, Seracini explains how he and his teams have approached finding da Vinci’s lost mural over the years — by constructing 3D models of the hall before its renovation, and using lasers and radar to chart the gaps in the walls. But beyond that, Seracini shares how the search for the mural opened up a new application of his engineering skills — using tools like multispectral imaging, sonogram and x-ray to study and restore art.

As Seracini shares in this talk, many famous pieces of art have secrets laying just below their visible layers — unseen sketches, details changed over time, proof that artists other than those credited were actually the ones who put paint to canvas.

“Technology has helped to write news pages of art history — or at least update them,” says Seracini, who hopes museumgoers will someday get to see these hidden layers through an augmented reality app. “This is what we’re trying to do — we’re trying to give a future to our past.”

To hear more about Seracini’s quest for The Battle of Anghiari, and about the other art mysteries he’s unraveled along the way, listen to his incredible talk. Below, check out some details you’d never know were behind these classic paintings.

As Seracini notes in his talk, much has been written about the symbolism of the tiny unicorn in Raphael’s Lady with the Unicorn. However, x-rays of the painting show that the unicorn was originally a dog. In fact, Raphael likely painted the woman without anything in her hands at all — the dog and unicorn were likely added by other artists. [3Pipe.net]

Underneath the varnish of Leonardo da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi lay a slew of sketches that haven’t been seen for 500 years. Da Vinci sketched out a large number of faces that were left unpainted, as well as a group of horses. He even sketched out a tiny elephant. While da Vinci appears to have drawn all these sketches, it is possible that someone else painted the final work. [Calit2.net]

Boticelli’s Allegory of Spring shows a classical composition of mythological figures in a garden. But deeper analysis shows that many of the figures — including the three Graces dancing in the circle in the foreground — were shifted from how the artist originally sketched the work. [UTSanDiego.com]

Leonardo da Vinci’s The Annunciation shows Archangel Gabriel appearing before the Virgin Mary. But apparently, the piece was a joint effort between Leonardo and his mentor, Andrea del Verrocchio. While Leonardo painted Gabriel and the background, Verocchio is believed to have painted the rest of the work. The difference between the two artists is clear under an x-ray, as Verocchio used lead-based paint while da Vinci did not. [Maurizio-Seracini.Blogspot.com]

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Check out these articles in UCSD Magazine, The New York Times and National Geographic, which give more information about Seracini’s quest for The Battle of Anghiari. And head to the website for Seracini’s Center for Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3) to find out more about what he is working on now.

Museum exhibitions offer a complex conundrum. While museum-goers walk through, looking at art and objects of extreme historical importance, the context of a piece’s creation is often reduced to a small plaque on the wall. This is an issue that Thomas P. Campbell, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, thinks a lot about. In this moving talk from TED2012, Campbell explains how he and his curatorial staff focus on creating exhibits that tell a story, and that bring alive to viewers the layers of history underneath the art.

The importance of Campbell’s mission, and indeed that of all museum curators — to preserve cultural artifacts from the distant past lest they be destroyed — is especially salient now given recent events in Aleppo.

War is raging in Syria, and the death toll has risen to over 30,000. As the Syrian military and rebel forces fight for control of the nation’s future, there have also been irreparable cultural casualties. Last week fires burned through Aleppo’s treasured Al-Madina souk, a medieval marketplace believed to be the largest and oldest of its kind and an essential part of the old city. In the fire, 1500 shops from the 14th century were destroyed. The old city, a UNESCO World Heritage Centre site, also contains Aleppo’s spectacular citadel, a 13th-century structure whose wooden doors were recently burned down.

In light of this senseless destruction, I think of these words from Campbell’s talk, about how he builds a space in which people can be surrounded by physical objects and structures that place them in a lost and unfamiliar world.

“The web … gives us a way of reaching out to audiences around the globe, but nothing replaces the authenticity of the object presented with passionate scholarship,” says Campbell. “Bringing people face to face with our objects is a way of bringing them face to face with people across time, across space, whose lives may have been very different to our own, but who, like us, had hopes and dreams, frustrations and achievements in their lives.”

Below, two rooms from the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic Art wing that particularly embody this spirit.

The Damascus Room. Last year, after nearly a decade of renovations, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its new Islamic wing. The gallery includes, among other things, a newly configured Damascus Room, a reception room built in A.H.1119/ 1707 A.D and designed in the Ottoman style. In the new gallery, the Damascus Room (which reminds one of the stunning Aleppo Room at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin) has been properly relocated to a corner adjacent to the gallery of Ottoman art. As Campbell discusses in his talk, walking through the gallery, one feels the scope of Islam as it spread across Asia, the Middle East and Europe, traversing fourteen centuries of rich and varied manifestations of the geometric, non-representational design characteristic of Islamic art. In the new wing, one feels transported.

The Patti Cadby Birch Court. This courtyard brings a moment of respite to the visitor without interrupting the architectural flow of the gallery. The columns are originally from the 14th-century Nasrid dynasty, while the rest of the courtyard was built by Fez craftsman, inspired by design from 14th- and 15th-century Morocco.

In recent months the Turkish government has made a concerted push to reclaim a number of antiquities it believes to have been illegally stolen from Anatolian land. If the objects in question are not returned, Turkish museums threaten to halt the lending of further treasures. In particular, officials claim that 18 pieces in the Met’s Norbert Schimmel collection were illegally excavated. Campbell responded that the objects in question were legally acquired in the 1960s before they were later sold to the Met.

“We are in the business of celebrating Turkish culture,” says Campbell. “It is the great displays in London, Paris and New York, more than anything else, that will encourage people to go to Turkey and explore their cultural heritage, and not just the sun and beach.”

Whether we look at the ashes from the bloody clashes in Syria or the political battles over Turkey’s antiquities, it’s clear our cultural heritage is still something worth fighting to keep.

At TEDxSummit, Walters Art Museum curator William Noel gave this fascinating talk on revealing the lost codex of Archimedes. The TED Blog caught up with him to talk about the digital future of a traditionally closed institution: the art museum.

As with the Archimedes codex, the Walters Art Museum’s online collection operates under the Creative Commons license. I can’t imagine that many museums join the Walters in this respect; why did the museum decide to opt for that license as opposed to something more restrictive?

The decision was actually driven by our experiences with the Archimedes manuscript and making all that data available under a Creative Commons license. When we started imaging our manuscripts at the Walters, we did the same. We just think that Creative Commons data is real data. It’s data that people can really use. It’s all about access, and access is about several things: licensing and publishing the raw data. Any data that you capture should be available to be the public. For our manuscripts, that’s what we’ve done.

The other important thing is to put the data in places where people can find it — making the data, as it were, promiscuous. That means putting it on Flickr, Pinterest, that sort of thing; these are forums people are used to using and commenting on, which they already use to build datasets of their own.

The Walters is a museum that’s free to the public, and to be public these days is to be on the Internet. Therefore to be a public museum your digital data should be free. And the great thing about digital data, particularly of historic collections, is that they’re the greatest advert that these collections have. So: Why on Earth would you limit how people can use them? The digital data is not a threat to the real data, it’s just an advertisement that only increases the aura of the original, so there just doesn’t seem to be any point in putting restrictions on the data. There is the further fact that the data is funded by taxpayers’ money. So it didn’t seem fair to limit what taxpayers could do with the data that they paid for.

I’m not in a position to speak for other institutions, but sometimes you can’t digitize your collections because you don’t have the money, and that’s fair enough. But what I would say is that getting the public, both scholars and the general public, to pay for digital images … this is sort of an open secret, but in the vast majority of cases, this is not a business model that works. There really wasn’t a reason not to do a Creative Commons license, and it was foundational to what we wanted to do. One of the issues is that a lot of people who are in a position to make decisions vis-à-vis a special collection don’t really understand the difference between a digital object and the real object. That’s a structural problem that will change; I really passionately believe this.

One last thing: Data is going to die if it’s not used, so you want your data to be as easily usable as possible, and a Creative Commons license is an integral part of that.

You ask in your talk “what’s in it for the institution?” Being a publicly funded institution means something a lot different than being privately funded. Can you expand on what you think is “in it” for the institution to use Creative Commons licensing?

Institutions with special collections, particularly museums — libraries perhaps less so — want to improve their brand and raise visitorship. One way in which they can do that is through advertising. And what better way to advertise than by making instantly available, or as available as possible, images of their collections? Because that’s how they get known. What I say in a very abbreviated form in my talk is that people go to the Louvre because they’ve seen the Mona Lisa; the reason people might not be going to an institution is because they don’t know what’s in your institution. Digitization is a way to address that issue, in a way that with medieval manuscripts, it simply wasn’t possible before. People go to museums because they go and see what they already know, so you’ve got to make your collections known. Frankly, you can write about it, but the best thing you can do is to put out free images of it. This is not something you do out of generosity, this is something you do because it makes branding sense, and it even makes business sense. So that’s what’s in it for the institution.

The other main reason to do it is to increase the knowledge of and research on your collection by the people, which has to be part of your mission at least, even in the most conservative of institutions. People can find out more about your materials, work on them, and add knowledge to your collections. And that’s good for everybody, not just institutions. That’s what history is, and that’s what makes history alive.

These days we’re not trying to preserve Archimedes’ intellectual property. When do you think a piece of art or text becomes the property of the public, as opposed to belonging to the author or the artist?

There are plenty of legal precedents for establishing the estate of authors and painters and that sort of thing. One of the great luxuries of being a fan of the Middle Ages, like me, is that I don’t have to worry about it. I only have to make sure that the digital images that I capture of these things are available under free licensing and there’s no restrictive copyright on the images. I’m just very glad I’m not advocating for this in the 20th century. Institutions that have modern collections are in a fundamentally different position.

The right of the artist is one reason people might resist the “freeing” of data.

My answer to that is sure, but of course it shouldn’t be applied to the Middle Ages! Actually libraries containing special collections of medieval materials are normally very careful to write restrictive copyright on their materials. Part of this is historical; that is to say, when images of these manuscripts were published in books, it didn’t have to behave like digital data, and it didn’t have to be free for people to use in all sorts of ways and in different contexts. The images were just reproduced in other books. But those days are fast running out, and digital images need to be free, so that people can do what they need to do with them and what they want to do with them. That’s the great thing about digital data!

So part of that is historical: You used to restrict the use of your books to try and make money off reproductions in other books. It was expensive, but it wasn’t crippling. Today these copyright restrictions are now crippling scholarship and access by the general public. The other thing is that a lot of these collections are in national institutions, university libraries, and they are the prized cultural heritage of these institutions. The policymakers in those institutions don’t like the idea that reproductions of these images can be available for free. It feels to them like you are denigrating your greatest asset. That’s a state of mind that belongs to my grandfather — for whom I have great affection, but to whom I don’t listen much anymore.

When you can access something for free, a piece of music or a piece of text, what is the incentive to pay for it, to get in your car to go see something?

Because you want something that is not a collection of ones and naughts made sense out of a style sheet. You want to go to something that is made literally of flesh, rather than organized energy that is going to disappear at the press of a keystroke. There is nothing like touching history, smelling history, reading it from a 700-year-old book. There are lots of things that digital data can do, things that medieval manuscripts cannot do — aggregating, virtually putting together a medieval library of things which are not disparate, searching it once it’s been transcribed — but there’s a lot digitizing an object can’t do. And for that, people are going to have to go and consult or see the original. (But the way the public is going to see that the original is there is by first seeing a digital avatar on the web. That’s the point.)

Do you think there’s a place in the future for that mentality which wants to preserve cultural heritage by keeping it behind closed doors?

It’s not over. Much more survives from the Middle Ages than people think, and the job of digitizing our medieval heritage is truly enormous, so it’s going to take time. At the end of the day there might be some holdouts, but they’re going to be utterly marginalized and, frankly, derided. And they won’t be allowing their great cultural treasures to contribute to the course of historical study.

Where is the Archimedes palimpsest now?

The vast majority of it has been returned to its owner, who is anonymous. An exhibition opens in Hildesheim, Germany on Sunday, June 3, and several leaves of the palimpsest will be there. In early 2014 there’s going to be a exhibition including 20 leaves at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

What’s the next step for you?

We’re still digitizing our medieval manuscripts. We just got a new grant to digitize 100 manuscripts of Flemish treasures. One of the things that we’re going to do is try and make our data as promiscuous as possible, to advocate for it, to integrate it with other initiatives that are being built on the user end. And my personal goal for the future is to make as much medieval data as possible available in its raw form to be used for any non-commercial purpose.