Silvano Vinceti: no 1 art detective? - Telegraph
he summer of 1606 wasn’t a good one for Caravaggio. Still smarting from the rejection of his overly voluptuous altarpiece Madonna of the Palafrenieri for St Peter’s, he was under pressure to complete the long overdue Death of the Virgin for the Santa Maria della Scala.
When this altarpiece was rejected, in turn, for its irreligious starkness, the humiliation tipped him over the edge. Within days he killed his old rival Ranuccio Tomassoni, promptly fleeing Rome and zigzagging the Mediterranean for four years with a papal death penalty on his head.
In 1610 fate would finally catch up with him, and Caravaggio died aged 39 in mysterious circumstances. So mysterious that his remains have never been found, the cause of death never established.
Was it malaria? Was it murder? And if the latter, was it by a relative of Tomassoni’s or by a Knight of Malta (whose order Caravaggio had joined and escaped in 1608, after wounding one of its elite in a brawl)? For 400 years, these questions had been asked but never answered.
Art history’s most gripping life-story was without a denouement. Until last year, that is. Step forward art’s self-styled super-sleuth, Silvano Vinceti.
Convinced he had discovered the painter’s remains in an obscure cemetery crypt in Porto Ercole – the coastal Tuscan town where Caravaggio reportedly died – Vinceti sent them off for lab-testing and, within a few months, carbon-dating and DNA results came back positive (with syphilis given as the cause of death).
Ever the showman, Vinceti wasted no time in choreographing some celebrations. On a glorious June day, Caravaggio’s remains were sailed back to Porto Ercole on a 17th-century tall ship and rapturously greeted.
Off stepped Vinceti, master of ceremonies, declaring with a triumphant punch in the air: “When we began, everyone thought we were mad, but now look.”
To a harbour full of hushed expectation, he then proudly held aloft Caravaggio’s remains. Vinceti couldn’t find quite enough of the old boy to justify a coffin, so the solitary five bones were laid on a red velvet cushion inside a little glass box.
It wasn’t the skeletal full monty everyone had imagined, and sceptics like Tomaso Montanari, art history professor at the University of Naples, queued up to accuse Vinceti of “concocting an elaborate tale for the 400th anniversary of Caravaggio’s death”.
But Vinceti continued undeterred, rounding the ceremony off by transferring the remains to Forte Stella, Porto Ercole’s hilltop fortress, where they’ll remain on permanent display.
Six months on from Caravaggio’s big day, I meet Vinceti in Rome. You might not remember it, but you’ll definitely have come across Vinceti’s name before. And if you take your art history seriously, you’ll have laughed at his madcap discoveries.
A bestselling writer and broadcaster, Vinceti has carved out a lucrative niche for himself as the solver of art’s great mysteries. When it comes to cracking cases and codes, there’s nothing in The Da Vinci Code to touch him. Yet Vinceti is keen to dismiss the Dan Brown comparison from the off. “Brown writes novels, and his theses are fantasies. I, by contrast, make findings based on historical investigation.”
Funnily enough, just two days after I meet him, Vinceti is all over the papers again. His latest findings are the letters L and V – Leonardo da Vinci’s initials – in Mona Lisa’s right eye, which he spotted after digitally magnifying the canvas. Might art’s great enigma have finally been decoded? The painting must be a self-portrait. A theory first posited... inThe Da Vinci Code.
“From our preliminary investigations, it seems the artist wrote [the initials] there with a tiny brush and magnifying glass,” Vinceti said, leaving us all on tenterhooks for the results of his final investigations.
He duly revealed those findings two weeks ago. After scrutinising Mona Lisa’s nose, mouth and eyes in comparison to those of Leonardo’s St John the Baptist, he reckons the model for both paintings was the same: Da Vinci’s young male apprentice, and possibly lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti. (The LV initials are to be read as the artist’s signature rather than as a proof of self-portraiture.)
Such is the sway the Mona Lisa holds over public imagination, the story was lapped up worldwide. Vinceti’s theory is, though, as old as the hills. Few experts are taking it seriously. The Louvre top brass dismiss the theory as nonsense, yet Vinceti has offered to visit them and “open their eyes to the truth” any time they like.
Critics, such as Franco Cardini, history professor at the University of Florence, accuse Vinceti of vain sensationalism and “a wicked manipulation of the mass media”.
Yet Vinceti says: “Italy has a hugely rich cultural tradition, but in the modern era of video games, our children risk not knowing it. I simply hope to regenerate interest in history, through solving its mysteries. Luckily nowadays the scientific techniques are suddenly available to solve them.
“These are revolutionary times,” he enthuses. “Before, historians just had dusty old documents at their disposal. Now there's a whole new world of scientific proofs open to them. Old stories will get new twists.”
Vinceti can be accused of many things, but insincerity isn’t one of them. However far-fetched his conclusions, they do seem rooted in passionate belief.
Vinceti, 61, worked for years as a producer at RAI, the Italian state broadcaster, churning out unexceptional arts documentaries.
Then, in 2002, he set up the National Committee of Cultural Heritage, a private body of volunteers aimed at “solving the great enigmas of Italy’s past” – which usually involves digging up a famous Italian who met a murky demise. Vinceti knocks out a book about each case and sometimes a television documentary.
His subjects are mostly artistic (Caravaggio; Mona Lisa; Giotto, whose supposed remains are to be exhumed from Florence’s Duomo this summer) or literary. He’s currently hunting the remains of 19th-century poet Giacomo Leopardi - who Vinceti refuses to believe is buried in the Parco Vigiliano above Naples, as commonly held.
In 2003 he opened the tomb of Petrarch, only to find the skull of a young girl within. And he’s also found strong traces of arsenic in the bones of Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola – proof, he’s convinced, of poisoning, probably by a Medici.
The burning question is, though: who the heck gives him permission to open up these graves? Shouldn’t some authority be ensuring great men rest in peace?
“Each case is decided locally – by the church of burial [and local government] – and also by any descendant the deceased may have,” he says. “But not once has anyone ever turned me down. No matter what resistance I encounter initially, I just put in call after call, day after day, until these people cave in.”
Vinceti has a highly compelling personality, it’s true, but Italy is a nation strewn with red tape. It’s hard enough getting permission to dig up an artichoke, let alone a corpse. The fact is, he owes much of his success to the complicity of tourist-hungry town councils.
Take Arqua Petrarca (the resting place of Petrarch) or Porto Ercole. These are minor settlements with major claims to fame. Their leaders understood as well as Vinceti the opportunity a good exhumation brings. After last year’s hoopla in Porto Ercole, the tiny Tuscan town is suddenly on the map to art pilgrims worldwide.
Vinceti is no scientist – the University of Bologna’s (Unibo’s) science and anthropology departments carry out all tests and analysis for him – but he is press-savvy.
His modus operandi is to grab the media spotlight repeatedly during each investigation – in the case of Caravaggio this meant first identifying the town of burial; then, the precise cemetery; then, 20 sets of bones that matched the painter’s age and sex; and lastly, the one set that “definitely” were his.
On the back of such successes, the Italian Ministry of Tourism has signed Vinceti up as a freelance consultant. “It’s very informal. We’ll be working together to find new ways of promoting areas of cultural interest across Italy,” he says.
In other words, even central government is now hoping to cash in on Vinceti’s bright ideas.
He says he doesn’t watch shows like CSI and Bones, but admits it’s no fluke that their rise over the past decade, like his, has coincided with “huge developments in forensic investigation and people’s fascination with it”.
But I wonder if Vinceti’s success isn’t also a symptom of celebrity obsession taken to its unsavoury extreme. Not content to follow famous people’s every movement in life, we now even claim rights over them in death. With morbid prurience, we demand proof of how and where they met their ends.
Always fans of a good conspiracy theory, the Americans have dug up and examined the remains of Jesse James, Billy the Kid, Abraham Lincoln and Lee Harvey Oswald. The opening of a mass grave in Granada, Spain, is imminent, too, to see if it contains the republican poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was dug up in November, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez last summer opened the tomb of Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin American independence.
There’s often a political element to these exhumations, but mostly they’re just a fetishisation of famous bones. “Not in my case,” Vinceti retorts. “For me, bones are an archive of information, a scientific path back into history.”
OK, but Vinceti isn’t an archaeologist studying how civilisations once lived. A better comparison might be made with the thirst for saints’ relics in the Middle Ages. Yet, even relics were a focus of devotion, venerated so that a saint would intercede with God on one’s behalf.
In contrast, isn’t Vinceti’s practice irreligious and plain disrespectful? “The contrast isn’t so simple,” he replies. “Yes, I’m an atheist, but there are things the Church does that are just as dark and disrespectful as anything I do.”
He’s alluding here to the long-held Catholic custom of inspecting the remains of candidates for canonisation. One might indeed see Vinceti’s actions as a post-religious version of this for the celebrity age.
In the introduction to his latest book, The Final Resting Place of Caravaggio, Vinceti admits that 18 months ago he “knew next to nothing about the painter”.
Small wonder he puts academic noses out of joint. Caravaggio’s remains had been missing for 400 years, scholars have dedicated entire careers to studying him and then Vinceti swans in shouting eureka.
“They’re just envious,” he says. “These snooty old art historians are bound to their universities and their disciplines, with stale thinking that hasn’t moved on in 25 years. I’m a lone ranger who belongs to no one, a Sherlock Holmes armed with the latest technologies.”
Vinceti’s ventures are entirely self-funded, and he vows this will always be the case, no matter how far he gets his feet under the Ministry of Tourism table. But critics argue that Unibo’s lab-tests aren’t rigorous enough to stand up Vinceti’s grand theories.
Take the case of Caravaggio. No death certificate or burial record survives, but a bishop’s letter that surfaced last year in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s biography Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane all but confirms the painter died in Porto Ercole. He’d rushed there to intercept a boat carrying three lost paintings of his, which he hoped would buy a papal pardon for Tomassoni’s murder.
Caravaggio led such a tempestuous life we imagine he must have met a similar death, but it was most likely a heart attack, brought on by syphilis, that finished him off. A quick burial followed – nobody knew where.
Vinceti, however, sensed a sensational scoop after reading an article in the Corriere della Sera in 2009. In it, a Porte Ercole local recalled the closure in 1959 of the town’s old San Sebastiano graveyard and the transfer of its remains to a municipal cemetery.
Specifically, she remembered spotting one set of bones (Caravaggio’s?) wrapped in the distinctive black cloak of a Knight of Malta. Vinceti visited the cemetery immediately and discovered a disorderly heap of bones, three metres high, dumped in its crypt.
Sadly no cloak was found, but after dividing the bones according to the age and sex of the deceased, the Unibo scientists narrowed their search to 20 sets. Carbon dating then got it down to nine sets of early 17th-century origin, one of which bore high levels of lead (a sign of paint-use?).
Finally, after DNA results on this set, Vinceti proclaimed: “We’re 100 per cent certain we’ve found Caravaggio’s remains.” The sceptics, though, found holes aplenty in Vinceti’s conclusions. For a start, the childless painter has no known surviving family, so it was with mere namesakes from his home region in Lombardy that his bones’ DNA was compared.
“No one’s ever going to find Caravaggio’s bones,” Graham-Dixon says. “The whole thing was a gimmick to coincide with the anniversary of his death. He may now be of great value to Porto Ercole’s tourist board, but back in 1610 Caravaggio was a man of no importance there. He was buried quickly in some unmarked grave. It’s laughable to think we’ll retrieve his corpse from among the thousands of other corpses [in Porto Ercole].”
Even Vinceti admits he “got lucky”, in finding Caravaggio at the first point of looking.
“Vinceti’s genius is in PR, making the world take notice of his extraordinary flights of fantasy,” Graham-Dixon adds. “The English tourist board should sign him up next. Think what he could discover from Shakespeare’s remains or Jane Austen’s.”
The Middle Ages, Renaissance and Baroque were such turbulent times in Italy, though, that Vinceti is far from finished in his homeland. Next up is Giotto, the godfather of Italian Renaissance painting, whose death remains a mystery and whose tomb is rumoured to contain the bones of a local sausage-maker.
And then, of course, there’s Leonardo da Vinci, the holy grail. Vinceti would love permission to dig up his remains at Amboise Castle in the Loire Valley. “From the measurements of his skull, we could digitally recreate Leonardo’s face and confirm the Mona Lisa wasn’t a self-portrait.”
He allows himself a conspiratorial grin. “That is, of course, if the remains in the tomb are actually Leonardo’s.”
