David Yoder is not an art historian. Nor is he a physicist. “In fact,” Mr. Yoder said, “I’m positive I would have failed any physics course.”
Mr. Yoder is a freelance photographer. But an article in Saturday’s Arts section chronicles the unusual marriage of art history and nuclear physics with which he is involved.
Mr. Yoder’s project, which is on Kickstarter, came from a decades-long, much publicized search for “The Battle of Anghiari,” the lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci thought to be hidden behind a wall-sized Vasari fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio.
Mr. Yoder wants to photograph the long-lost painting. His first task, however, is raising funds for the project, which is supported but not entirely funded by the National Geographic Society. The goal — a whopping $266,500 — sounds high, and it is. (Mr. Yoder called it “ambitious.”) The money will go toward imaging the painting, a complicated process that involves building and testing a gamma camera.
As the story goes, Leonardo began working on the painting in 1505 and abandoned the task the next year. In the 1560s, Giorgio Vasari covered the oil painting with a protective wall and painted a fresco on top. The art historian Maurizio Seracini has been searching for the lost painting since the 1970s.
When Mr. Yoder heard about the search, it captured his imagination. He wanted to find a way to photograph an image behind more than five inches of brick and plaster. So after much time on Google, he found the one person in the world who builds a copper crystal mosaic gamma-ray diffraction lens: the nuclear physicist Robert Smither, at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
The more time he has spent with the project, the more sure Mr. Yoder is of the painting’s existence. And despite the challenge before him, he’s excited. “Even in its day,” he said, “it was considered, I’m told, a turning point in the Renaissance. I would think that you could liken it to what King Tut was to archeology.”
By February, Mr. Yoder and his team will need to have purchased, assembled and tested a portable particle accelerator and germanium crystal detector.
Unfortunately, as he noted, “You can’t buy them at Wal-Mart.”