Adoration of the Magi - New World Revealed

If you have read and loved Da Vinci Code, the best selling novel that has spawned a whole cottage industry of museum tours and books, this piece of news will intrigue you. Maurizio Seracini, an associate professor at the University of Cagliari, and head of Editech, a conservation company in Florence has been able to prove that the top layer of the Adoration of the Magi is not by Leonardo. Chemical analysis and microscopic examination has shown that the painting's surface layer in the painted areas dates from the period between 1530 and 1580, i.e. between fifty and a hundred years after Leonardo abandoned the work.

Mr Seracini has examined the painting minutely using a technique that exploits the fact infra-red light passes through paint but reflects off the under-drawing. He and his team have conjured from below the amber-brown layer with which much of the panel is covered a collection of Da Vinci's drawings that were hidden for more than five centuries. They contain numerous previously invisible - or barely discernible - details. "You get a wonderful sense of Leonardo's creative ferment," said Martin Kemp, an art history professor at Oxford University and one of the few experts who has seen the partial results of Mr Seracini's work. "The amount of brainstorming going on underneath the painting is remarkable."

In an exclusive interview to Guardian, Mrs Seracini revealed details on whats in the under-drawing. Some will electrify conspiracy theorists.

The Adoration of the Magi was commissioned in 1481 by the monks of San Donato in Scopeto, near Florence. A year later, da Vinci moved to Milan, leaving it unfinished. It has been in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1670.

Why did Leonard not complete The Adoration of the Magi ? Why did he make the underpainting using a mixture of lampblack and watery glue and then seal it with lead white? Did he suspect that his work would not stay the way he intended it, and may have deliberately preserved it that way? Is there a hidden messge in the scene? These are questions that will plague scholars the world over.