The controversy of more than a century over the authorship of the bust of Flora on display at the Bode Museum in Berlin has been closed with the final conclusion that it was not the work of Leonardo da Vinci.
“It’s a conspiracy, it’s a hoax,” the director general of the Royal Museums of Berlin said in his defense when he was criticized for buying a counterfeit. Wilhelm Bode did not move an inch: the sculpture he acquired in 1909 was a still unknown production of the great Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci.
After a hundred years and numerous controversies, a group of scientists led by a researcher from the CNRS (French national research center) has just proved once and for all that the German scholar was wrong.
The so-called Flora wax bust has recently been subjected to radiocarbon dating (14th century), which provides an accurate date and incontrovertible result: it was made in the 19th century, almost 300 years after Da Vinci’s death, reports CNRS in a statement.
As the sculpture was made primarily of spermaceti, a kind of wax extracted from whales, researchers had to develop a new calibration method to accurately date the work of art.
Their results, which are published in Scientific Reports, show how carbon-14 dating can be applied to unusual materials.