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A fizzle in the collection of Berlin ’s Bode Museum had long been attributed to theRenaissanceartistLeonardo da Vinci , mostly because the cleaning woman ’s features resemble those of face in da Vinci ’s painting . However , there was no evidence directly connecting da Vinci to the sculpture of the goddess Flora — a Roman deity of flowering plants — and its ancestry have been hotly contested among nontextual matter experts for over a C .
Now , researchers have definitively locate the public debate : da Vinci was not Flora ’s Divine .
For more than a century, the Flora wax bust incited arguments about whether or not it was carved by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci.
The wax female chest was craft mostly from spermaceti , a waxy substance produced in the heads of sperm whale . This find prompt the scientists to apply a new calibration method acting in society to accurately date the objective , let on that Flora was n’t produced when da Vinci was alive ( 1452 to 1519 ) . Instead , the bust was most likely carve during the nineteenth century , the researchers reported in a newfangled study .
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Flora has a serenely smiling human face and support about 28 inches ( 70 cm ) grandiloquent , weighing approximately 62 hammer ( 28 kilograms ) . In 1909 , the wax statue was acquire by Wilhelm von Bode , the founding director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum ( now the Bode Museum ) in Berlin , who purchase the tear at auction and assign the artwork to da Vinci , according to the Bode Museum .
However , within two years of the bust ’s acquisition , scholars across Europe published more than 730 article questioning the sculpture ’s provenance . chemic analysis of the wax , guide in the 1900s , could n’t find the statue ’s years but did detect traces of spermaceti , which was rare inRenaissanceart objects and was more mutual in 19th - century sculpture . Another evaluation fence that the cast method did not reflect Renaissance technique , and one investigation found 19th - century newspaper and forest fragment in the back of the bust ( however , these could have been added during late modifications after the flop was grave , the field of study source wrote ) .
" There are also historic documents that support a 19th c. ascription , include a statutory resolution by the son of Richard Cockle Lucas [ a nineteenth - one C British sculptor ] posit that his father made the Flora bust in 1846 , " the scientists account .
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“Cannot be attributed to Leonardo”
In the new study , the researchers conducted a chemical analysis , which showed that the bout was mostly made of spermaceti , mixed with some beeswax . The researchers then dated wax sampling from the bust by mensurate the decay of carbon-14 — a radioactive flesh ofcarbon — fine-tune those calculations to reverberate that the wax total from animals in a nautical surround . By comparing their wax analytic thinking to carbon-14 measurement from other marine source , they were able to create a date range for the bust that was more precise than late carbon-14 estimates , according to the study .
" All of the analyzed constituents of the Flora bust are dated after 1700 A.D. , " the researchers write . " The outcome dates the Flora material to the 18 - 19th c. , which proves that the bout was not bring forth during the Renaissance , and therefore can not be attributed to Leonardo . "
Spermaceti ’s far-flung habit in artwork objects dates to the eighteenth century , and reflects a general utilisation of sperm cell heavyweight products at the clock time — a result of thewhalingboom during the Industrial Revolution . Though it was " reasonably unsatisfying " to prove that da Vinci was n’t Flora ’s creator , the investigation did provide worthful insights , demonstrating a link between cultural objects , diligence and human beings ' fundamental interaction with the lifelike populace , the researcher reported .
The findings were print online April 15 in the journalScientific Reports .
Originally published on Live Science .
