In what is certain to be the coolest Kickstarter project in Renaissance Florence – and maybe in history – Dave Yoder is raising funds on behalf of the National Geographic Society to non-destructively peer behind the Giorgio Vasari mural in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio to determine, after 35 years of mystery, whether there truly is a mural by Leonardo hiding behind it.

This excites me because for me, as unlikely as this sounds, it’s personal.

Anyone who ever studied Renaissance art has always known that Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari on the walls of Florence’s council chamber. That’s no mystery, because every other Italian artist who could borrow a mule headed up there to watch. They sketched it, they talked about it, they wrote about it; Leonardo’s own sketches for the mural, and the many sketches by admiring painters, have left us no doubt that the painting, probably unfinished, remained on the Palazzo Vecchio wall for about forty years before it was covered by Giorgio Vasari’s still-surviving fresco.

It was back in 1979 that I first read about new evidence that suggested Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari was still there, under the Vasari. I was preparing for a trip to Europe and I fully expected that by the time I got there, Vasari’s painting would be rolled up on a huge aluminum cylinder – because you really can remove a fresco that way – and that The Battle of Anghiari would be peering out from behind it… and I’d be able to get a glimpse of the lost da Vinci.

(So, okay, I was a little optimistic. It was only a few months, after all. The thing is that as indebted as we are to Giorgio Vasari for his Lives of the Artists, one Vasari painting is about as significant as 1/1000 of a da Vinci sketch. That sounds excessive, but Vasari himself might have agreed with me.)

Fortunately for everyone, there weren’t any sledgehammers lying around when I got to the Palazzo Vecchio and found to my complete astonishment that nobody was doing a thing about it.

Thirty-odd years later, that seems to be changing. There’s a strong possibility that before Vasari painted his own fresco he raised a curtain wall in front of the da Vinci, to preserve it; we now know that he did exactly the same thing to protect Massacio’s Trinità in Santa Maria Novella.

The Battle of Anghiari, considered by the painters of his own age to have been one of da Vinci’s greatest works, may have been sitting untouched and in complete darkness behind Vasari’s brick wall since 1563.

And that’s where Kickstarter, bless its little fund-raising heart, comes in: there’s a plan underway to use gamma ray photography and, I kid you not, a small particle accelerator to look through the Vasari, through the wall it’s painted on, and back behind it to take a photograph of the original wall – to examine its pigments, so they can be compared with those that da Vinci used, and hopefully even to create a visual image of the painting that may be there. Without a sledgehammer, or a giant aluminum cylinder.

They want to take a photograph through the wall. I am amazed by this.

The project’s goal is $266,500 – and those funds, if successful, will be used like so: