Secret Scouts and The Lost Leonardo

by Mr.

  The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced it wasn’t likely. Knowing Jack, he had eaten dinner in front of the TV with his brother and father, endlessly surfing channels until they went to bed. They wouldn’t see the email until after school.

  Suddenly remembering that her father had looked at the sketch again the previous night, she perked up. Why didn’t she think of that earlier? Just when she was about to say something, she glanced to the side. Lisa’s eyes were closed.

  Annoyed, Sophie sank back into her seat. Unbelievable. Wasn’t she at all curious? How could she sleep for two hours straight after everything they’d experienced over the past few days?

  Imagine if everything in the book was true. Imagine if it was possible to travel to the past, or to the future. The discovery of America, prehistoric times, Indians, the Crusades, flying cars!

  Leonardo! If she could, she would visit Leonardo da Vinci. Who was this guy exactly? And how did he know so much? After that, she’d travel to the future, if that was possible. Would there be flying cars and people living on Mars?

  She glanced at the dashboard. Ten o’clock. Time was dragging by very slowly. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw something move and she looked over at her sister. Lisa was rubbing her eyes.

  “Dad!” Sophie shouted. “Did you take another look at the sketch last night?”

  Her father turned down the music so that they could hear him in the back seat.

  “I didn’t remove the sketch from the frame. I really want to avoid damaging it… I did, however, discover something.”

  Both Lisa and Sophie immediately leaned forward.

  “It’s difficult to see through the glass, but I tried to examine it more closely with a magnifying glass. There are irregularities around the edges…” He paused for a moment, “which could indicate that it is not actually a single sketch, but part of a folded sheet.”

  “Meaning?” Sophie asked.

  “I’m not entirely sure, but it could be a larger sketch that has been folded in two, see what I’m getting at? Or a few pages taken from a book. In the early days the pages of a book were actually large sheets of paper all folded up.”

  Sophie and Lisa exchanged a quick look but said nothing. They didn’t need to speak to know what the other was thinking.

  “I’ll remove it from the frame on Monday and then we’ll know for sure.”

  “Dad, yesterday we were talking about Leonardo da Vinci. Could it be an original?” Lisa asked.

  “And how come he was so clever? How did he know all those things? And was everything he wrote actually true?” Sophie asked in quick succession.

  Her father lifted a bottle of water to his lips, took a few sips, and switched off the radio. Even from the back seat they could see he lived for moments like these. Nothing gave him a bigger kick than telling stories. Especially to Sophie and Lisa.

  “Okay, Leonardo da Vinci.” Their father cleared his throat before continuing. “Leonardo lived in Italy more than five hundred years ago. We call that period the Renaissance, which means rebirth. During the Renaissance, interest in art and culture suddenly blossomed, as it was deemed very important.

  He was born in 1452 in a small village called Anchiano. He lived there with his mother when he was a child, but at the age of five or so he moved a few kilometers down the road to the Tuscan town of Vinci to be with his father.

  His father was a wealthy man who provided Leonardo with a good education from a very young age. Leonardo studied difficult subjects like Latin, geometry and math, for example, and as a result he knew a lot more than other kids his age. However, even though he was extremely intelligent, he never finished school. He loved drawing and painting the most, as well as other subjects that allowed him to draw and sketch, too. Actually, he spent all of his time drawing.

  The first artwork he completed on his own was a painting called The Annunciation. He painted it somewhere between 1472 and 1475. It took him three years to finish. The painting shows the Angel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she is to give birth to the baby Jesus. In the two years that followed…” Their father paused for the first time. “Actually, no one knows anything about what Leonardo got up to between 1476 and 1478. Like he just disappeared from the face of the earth. Then in 1478…”

  “Wait, what do you mean disappeared?” Sophie asked, leaning even further forward.

  “Hey, you’re still listening!” their father replied, chuffed.

  “Sure, Dad. Don’t we always?” Lisa laughed.

  “It’s not that he disappeared as such. It’s just that there is no record of him during this period. Then again, that in itself isn’t so strange considering it was more than five hundred years ago.”

  “I think it’s strange,” Lisa said, indicating to her sister that they should remember this little detail.

  “Okay, maybe a bit strange. I looked it up yesterday just to be sure, and it’s true. Do you want me to stop or do you want to hear more?”

  “More!” they said in unison.

  “After that period, Leonardo received increasingly important commissions and lived and work in different places: Florence, Venice, Milan…”

  “Dad, I need to pee, can we pull over somewhere?” Sophie interrupted.

  “Sure, Sophie. I’ll take the next exit. Then I’ll tell you about The Lost Leonardo, that’s a good stepping stone to your sketch,” he laughed.

  “The Lost Leonardo?” Sophie and Lisa looked at each other with wide-eyed amazement.

  Sensing their enthusiasm, their father was now completely in his element. “Okay. So around 1505 Leonardo was working on an important commission in the Hall of the Five Hundred. That’s one of the rooms in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, named after the five hundred members who governed the city at the time. One of the murals he painted was a large masterpiece called The Battle of Anghiari. And – you guys will like this – that too is a mystery. No one knows what he painted exactly. The story goes that during a major renovation a few years later they built a new wall in front of the wall with the Leonardo! On the new wall is an impressive mural by another famous artist, Giorgio Vasari.”

  “And this is where things get really interesting. Not so long ago, in March 2012, professor Maurizio Seracini and a team of experts drilled a bunch of small holes into the wall and used miniscule cameras to see what was behind it. Their search revealed a black pigment that is identical to the black pigment used on the Mona Lisa, which Leonardo painted during the same period in Florence. You know the Mona Lisa, right? The Mona Lisa is one of the most famous paintings in the world and hangs in the Louvre, the largest museum in the world. We’ll definitely go see it this weekend, because the Louvre is in Paris.”

  The girls sitting in the back seat looked at each other jubilantly. Their weekend in Paris had suddenly became even more interesting than it already was.

  “Because of the black pigment, they now assume Leonardo’s greatest masterpiece ever is hidden behind that wall. The only problem is that they don’t quite know how to get a good look at it without damaging the Vasari, which is also a unique painting. And that’s why they don’t know what he painted exactly. They believe it depicts four horsemen engaged in battle.”

  “Why did they build another wall in front of it?” Lisa asked, fascinated.

  This is an image of the mural by Georgio Vasari, behind which professor Maurizio Seracini and a team of experts found traces of The Lost Leonardo in 2012. On this Vasari mural, 40 feet above the ground, a Florentine soldier waves a little green flag with the words ‘cerca trova’, which mean ‘seek and you shall find’. Is this a sign?

  “From what I understand, no one knows for certain why, but they think Leonardo was experimenting with oil-based paint on stone and that the paint began to run. The story goes that Leonardo hung up fire baskets to help the paint dry faster, but this didn’t prevent the colors from running, especially at the top of the painting. They say the painting remained visible for a few decades, until the Hall
of the Five Hundred was renovated somewhere around 1570. There’s even a legend that claims that whatever Leonardo painted on the wall should forever remain hidden from human eyes. Who knows?”

  Lisa looked at her sister in eager anticipation. A secret room in their house, a book by Leonardo, Prattle’s weird sketch, and now they hear that Leonardo went missing for almost two years and that there’s a lost masterpiece, too! Was Sophie thinking the same thing?

  “I really need to pee now,” Sophie said. “And I have a mega earache.”

  Lisa rolled her eyes.

  Her father mumbled something in agreement and took the next exit in search of a gas station.

  Sophie, Lisa and their parents went and sat together at a picnic table in the sun, where they tucked into some fresh croissants. They were only an hour outside of Paris and expected to arrive at Uncle Hans’ place around 12:30.

  “Okay, so we’re going to the Louvre to check out the Mona Lisa?” Lisa suddenly asked.

  “Sure, only logical given your sudden interest in Leonardo,” their mother laughed.

  Back in the car, Sophie immediately returned to her question. “Didn’t Leonardo also write a few books about his inventions and stuff? How did he know all those things?”

  Her father was delighted to settle into his role again and happily continued his story. “During the Renaissance they had a wonderful name for people like Leonardo: Homo Universalis. A ‘universal person’. Someone who was good at everything. He had a well-maintained, athletic frame, was extremely clever, and had many different interests. He wasn’t what you would call a scientist, as such, but he did study nature and people very closely.

  His observations and beliefs covered a wide range of topics. He didn’t eat meat, for example. He thought that people who ate meat made their bodies into tombs for animals. That was a highly unorthodox way of thinking for the time.”

  “I think I like this Leonardo guy! Eating meat is not good!” Sophie said, a bit too fanatically. No one reacted to her outburst, however. Too often in the past their conversations about meat had turned into endless discussions.

  “He tried to understand certain phenomena by making detailed drawings of things and describing situations,” their father continued unperturbed. “In order to paint the perfect body, for example, he first had to know how a body was built – what muscles look like underneath the skin, the precise movements of joints. The only way to do that during his time was to dissect corpses.”

  Sophie and Lisa looked disgusted.

  “Leonardo secretly dissected corpses to inspect their insides. He often stole bodies that had recently been buried. He carried them to his atelier where he could study them without being bothered. The smell of decomposing flesh must have been unbearable, but his desire to understand the human anatomy was obviously greater than the repulsive smell. Fortunately, he wrote down many of his observations and thoughts. Today, those manuscripts are priceless. So if Mrs. Prattle’s sketch is authentic, then you are both filthy rich!”

  Hearing their father’s optimistic assessment, Sophie and Lisa gave each other a high five in the back seat.

  “So actually… what made him so smart was that he looked carefully at things and thought things through logically,” Sophie said.

  For a moment everyone was quiet.

  “That’s right,” her father eventually said. “We’ll visit the Louvre tomorrow, first thing, then you can see some of his paintings with your own eyes.”

  “Cool!” Lisa said enthusiastically. For the first time in their lives Sophie and Lisa were looking forward to visiting a museum.

  “But first Uncle Hans,” their father said.

  The car slowed and turned off the freeway. As they approached Paris, Sophie and Lisa stared out the window in awe. They recognized a few buildings from the last time they had visited Hans. The sunlight reflected off the gently rippling waters of the Seine. A few minutes later they saw the top of the Eiffel Tower appear between buildings.

  In the distance they saw Hans waiting for them on the side of the street.

  Hans and their father had met as art history students. The summer after their first year they borrowed an old car and toured Europe, visiting all the important museums. France beckoned, but it was too far from home. A year later, Hans decided to go anyway. He moved to Paris, the city that stole his heart.

  Sophie and Lisa had known him all their lives. Every year, they visited Paris, and every once in a while he made the trip in the opposite direction. The week before Sophie and Lisa had moved into the farmhouse on Lantern Lane, Hans had stayed in the house alone. That way, he had joked, he could break in the guest room and help out with the last remaining odd jobs.

  Their father parked the car alongside the curb. Hans motioned to him to drive forward a little further. He pulled a device from his pocket and frantically started pushing the buttons. Eventually they heard a peeping sound and the property’s two heavy brown doors began to creak open.

  Sophie and Lisa had to laugh at him. He was dressed in dark blue jeans and a light blue short-sleeved shirt, the buttons of which were clearly ready to pop. A pair of blue and white polka dot suspenders ending in brown leather loops were doing their best to hold up his jeans. Hanging from his neck and resting on his bulging midriff was a blue cotton scarf. He looked at them cheerfully through his black horn-rimmed glasses. He had a rapidly receding hairline and the few hairs he still had stood wildly on end, as if he hadn’t used a comb in years.

  Hans walked alongside the car as they pulled into the garage. After some more frantic button-pushing, he managed to shut the doors again. For a moment it was completely dark in the garage. They had descended a ramp and were now underneath the house with no access to daylight. All of a sudden a bizarre neon installation began flashing in the corner of the garage.

  “Isn’t that cool?” Hans said to their father. “Hey girls, très spécial, right?”

  Hans spoke English with a French twist, but they could understand him well enough. He grabbed their father’s hand and embraced him, and for a moment didn’t look like he was ever going to let go.

  “Great to have you here for the weekend!”

  Sophie and Lisa continued to stare at the neon contraption on the wall. What was Hans after buying this time? Mounted on the wall were four separate columns, each column comprising twenty-five slogans, all in different neon colors. Weird catchphrases consisting of a single word followed by either ‘and die’ or ‘and live’ combined to form variations like ‘love and die’, ‘cry and die’, ‘sick and live’, ‘kiss and live…’

  “Bruce Nauman,” their father said, shaking his head. “Hans, how did you get your hands on this?”

  “You really don’t wanna know. It’s such a grande story.”

  “I could’ve made that myself,” Lisa joked.

  “Undoubtedly! That’s what makes it so great!” Hans thundered. “Come on upstairs and we’ll have a bite to eat. I’ve prepared my exquisite homemade hotdogs!”

  In the meantime, he walked to the car and, without asking, opened the trunk and pulled out the suitcases.

  “The stairs is there in the corner, you remember don’t you? Oh, and… attention! Don’t panic when you open the door. It’s harmless.”

  Sophie and Lisa ran ahead up the old stairwell that connected the garage to the floors above. After running up two flights they stopped. This must be the ground floor, but there wasn’t a door. They continued on up until they reached the first door. There was a key sticking out of the lock. Sophie hesitated, but Lisa nipped in front of her sister and turned the key.

  “Wait! You don’t know what’s behind the door. Hans said that we should be careful!”

  “And also that it was harmless,” Lisa replied decisively. “He probably just bought a dog. Hopefully this time it’s a live one.” Lisa had to laugh at her own joke.

  She turned the key and slowly opened the door a crack. She could see into the hallway, but didn’t see anything on the marble floor
. No puppy waiting, wagging its tail. Lisa was just about to open the door a bit further when something jumped up against it. She caught a glimpse of a small beige claw covered with black spots reaching around the door. Startled, Lisa jumped back. Sophie also retreated in fright down the stairs.

  “HELP!” they screamed as they stumbled over each other in an attempt to get away from the door. A loud laugh could be heard from the garage.

  “Ah, bon, so you’ve met Rajah?” Hans shouted.

  Sophie and Lisa’s parents ran up the stairs to see what all the commotion was about. They saw something that looked like a small tiger peering at them from the door opening.

  “Shoooo!” Their father shouted and he threw his arms in the air to chase it away. Frightened, the creature ran back inside.

  “Hans, have you gone completely mad? A tiger! He could have attacked the kids.”

  Hans stood on the stairs, still convulsed with laughter. “Relax man, calme. Haha, that was hilarious. Come on girls, don’t worry, he’s completely harmless.”

  “A tiger? Cute...” Sophie said, more than a little irked.

  “Relax everyone. Come on, up you go. Let’s go eat some hotdogs. And it isn’t a tiger. It’s a small Bengal cat. It’s fantastic, man! Just un normal cat, but it looks like a petit tiger.

  Hans walked upstairs, still grinning, the others following cautiously behind. Rajah appeared again from the living room. He walked between their legs purring.

  Sophie and Lisa then got another fright when they saw a woman standing next to them, as if she had appeared out of nowhere. They found themselves looking directly into the eyes of a small woman – she was no more than four-and-a-half feet tall – with black hair and even darker eyes.

  “This is Wei-Wei, from Vietnam. She speaks French and un petit peu English. She’ll bring your bags to your room.”

  The little woman smiled amicably and made a short bow. She grabbed their bags and disappeared again without a sound.

  “I met her in the Bibliothèque nationale de France here in Paris. Six months ago, they weren’t going to renew her contract. Budget cuts. So I offered her a position at my house. Wei-Wei is a Buddhist, you know… always trying to avoid bad behavior. The perfect foil to my own ways, or so I thought.” Hans surveyed the room with a look of satisfaction on his face.