This Saturday, July 30, is the 500th birthday of the father of art history, Giorgio Vasari, and as such it's a perfect time to consider how the study of art has evolved from a humanist bastion of connoisseurship and rumor into a soft science, in which robots and x-rays jostle for space with a good deal of old-fashioned mysticism. Thecase that best exemplifies how art history has changed is one in which Vasari was intimately involved, and which the union of technology with art history seems set to solve: the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci'slost "Battle of Anghiari."

How did Brunelleschi win the commission to construct Florence's Duomo by balancing an egg on a slab of marble? What did a teenage Leonardo da Vinci paint that so impressed his master, the great Andrea del Verrocchio, that the elder artist gave up painting forever, deciding he would do best to stick with sculpture? Why did the mysterious Giorgione choose to die for love, and what did Masaccio smell like that won him his less-than-flattering nickname? What was the dirty joke, made at the expense of his sister, that caused Titan's best friend Pietro Aretino to literally die laughing?

These are among the funny, poignant, and memorable stories told in Giorgio Vasari's canonical 1550 "The Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects," a group biography of the greatest Italian Renaissance artists that, for five centuries, has been the standard primary source used in almost all of the world's art history courses, from introductory to post-graduate levels. Vasari has been called the father of art history, with his extensive opus regarded as the first to consider artistic movements, thechain of influence from master to pupil, the link between an artist's personal biography and the art he created, and many more creative phenomena that effectively established the way we study art history today. Along the way, it also secured the primacy of Florentine Renaissance art, and more broadly the art of Tuscany, in the popular conception of what constitutes the crowning glory of art history.

Vasari's "Lives" has been reproduced in countless editions, and subjected to numerous translations. It is the bible for every student ofRenaissance art around the world. But there are a number of problems with reading Vasari that can make his work misleading. He relied on hearsay, rumor, and anecdotes to fill out his biographies, and they are checkered with mistakes.  If he heard that Giotto had painted an altarpiece for a church in Orvieto, he inserted the information in his biography, without necessarily having the capacity or inclination to check. He also had an agenda: the readers of his "Lives" would be drawn to the conclusion that the art of Michelangelo — a son of Tuscanybefore his famous papal commissions in Rome — is the greatest achievement of which mankind is capable. Many would agree with his apotheosis of Michelangelo, his best friend, but the result is that Vasari's "Lives" dismisses artists from other regions, working in other styles, who did not fit his pro-Tuscan, pro-Michelangelo agenda.

The study of art history has, until recently, continued on the path begun by Vasari. Art history was anecdotal, stories passed from generation to generation without necessarily being corroborated. New scholarship came, on the one hand, from laborious archival research — the unforgiving trawl through dusty cellars and mildewed libraries for an overlooked document — and the educated but often biased and obstinateopinions of selected scholars who claimed to possess an almost preternatural gift for identifying authentic works, a skill known as connoisseurship. Perhaps most famous among these connoisseurs was BernardBerenson, who resided at Villa I Tatti on the outskirts of Florence, and whose certificate of authenticity, little more than his educated opinion, was once the only ironclad guarantee of a painting's authorship, and therefore its value. Nothing about art history could have been considered scientific.

But in recent decades, art historians have reluctantly begun to embrace science, thanks in large part to the surfacing of hundreds of misattributions by past experts whowere guilty more of wishful thinking than of anything untoward. The recognition that connoisseurship alone is not enough to guarantee authenticity has led art historians to turn to another method of assuring themselves, and the world, of the true past: scientific forensic investigation. Today, the pseudo-mystical torches of intuition and expert opinion join forces with advanced technology to shed light onsome of the great unsolved mysteries of the art world.

An exemplar of this new art history is Maurizio Seracini. Seracini, trained as a bio-engineer, is the director of Editech, a diagnostic center for cultural heritage in Florence. He uses state-of-the-art technology to build on old-fashioned detective work andconnoisseurship, most famously in his investigation of the Hall of FiveHundred in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, where he believes that Leonardo's lost battle fresco may be hidden.

Leonardo began the monumental "Battle of Anghiari," a torqued scene of riders and swordsmen, in 1505. He never finished the fresco, but it was of legendary grandeur, and is today known through a number ofcopies, the most famous of which by Rubens. Michelangelo was commissioned to do a second battle scene on the opposite wall of the room, called the "Battle of Cascina." He made a preparatory sketch but never executed the fresco, as he felt that Leonardo's side of the room had better light, and that he would be at a disadvantage in what was conceived as a "duel" of the two greatest living artists, each commissioned to paint one side of the great hall. In 1563 Vasari, a Renaissance man himself who often worked for the Medici, was commissioned to remodel the Palazzo Vecchio, altering the dimensions of the Hall of Five Hundred and covering the new walls with his own frescoed battle scenes. It seems unthinkable that Vasari, who so admiredthe work of Leonardo, would destroy the artist's fresco. But the mystery remains, as the "Battle of Anghiari" has never been seen since.

In 1975 Maurizio Seracini noticed a tiny bit of text hidden within Vasari's frescoes, the only text in the enormous room. It reads "Cerca trova," or "Seek and you shall find." He and many leading Leonardo scholars believe this to be a real clue from Vasari, indicatingthat he somehow preserved Leonardo's fresco while still fulfilling his commission — and that perhaps the "Battle" is still hidden beneath a false wall on which Vasari painted his own composition. Seracini plans to peer underneath Vasari's own priceless fresco, using technology ranging from infrared scanners to robotic cameras to neutron-activation analysis, to see if indeed the lost Leonardo survives.  

The mystery is still an open one — to date, Seracini is still trying to secure permission and funding to conduct his investigation of the buriedLeonardo fresco. With the excitement overthe newly-discovered Leonardo painting, "Salvator Mundi," that goeson display this October at the National Gallery in London, the cultural oxygen is suffused with hope that more lost artworks might one day be found. Now, what began with Seracini locating the "Cerca Trova" and betting that Vasari would try to save the Leonardo — actions from art history's past —may lead to art history's future, a union of connoisseurship and technology capable of resolving previously unanswerable questions.

Noah Charney is a professor of art history and author of internationally best-selling books, with the forthcoming "The Thefts of the Mona Lisa: On Stealing the World's Most Famous Painting" (ARCA Publications 2011) to be published in August. He writes a regular column forARTINFO called "The Secret History of Art."