Scientists have made a colored view of an early rejected painting underneath Vincent van Gogh's 'Patch of Grass' painting, using advanced X-ray techniques, a Dutch university said on Wednesday.

The very detailed image shows the face of a woman and may give art historians a better understanding of the way Van Gogh developed as a painter.

"It is estimated that one third of Vincent van Gogh's early paintings have been painted on top of existing ones. Van Gogh literally recycled his own canvasses," scientist Joris Dik of the Delft University of Technology said.

Conventional X-ray techniques give a colorless, partial view of the hidden painting and only show vague contours of a person behind 'Patch of Grass', the university said.

By recycling his work Van Gogh painted many layers over the original painting but the scientists managed to scan all the different elements in those layers of the relevant area with X-ray fluorescence.

"We can make a virtual 3-dimensional model of the painting and start to peel off all the layers one by one. Then we get a nice detailed view of the hidden face," Dik said.

Van Gogh painted 'Patch of grass' in 1887 in Paris and it hangs in the Kroller-Muller museum in the Dutch eastern city of Otterlo.

Tineke van der Struik, Paul Casciato

Mapping Technologies Used Could Lead
To Other Important Art Discoveries

It was midnight in the great hall of the Palazzo Vecchio here, and scientists were stalking the cold ghost of a vanished masterpiece. Armed with an infrared reflectometer, they searched for hidden traces of a mural by Leonardo da Vinci that helped change the course of Western art. The fabled artwork may be concealed within the walls, masked for centuries by overlays of paint, plaster, brick -- and a thick patina of misinformation.

For 30 years, Maurizio Seracini, a pioneer in forensic art analysis, has been experimenting with noninvasive imaging techniques to find the da Vinci mural -- should it still exist -- without touching or disturbing the equally priceless frescoes painted over it. Dr. Seracini's fascination with da Vinci's missing masterwork -- The Battle of Anghiari -- spurred a revolution in the science of art diagnostics, harnessing an array of medical and military technologies, ranging from radar mapping and X-ray fluorescence to ultrasound probes and ultraviolet scans.

"If we succeed, we will not only have a way to find the Leonardo," Dr. Seracini says, "but we will have a technology that could detect murals world-wide."

The search is expected to climax next year when, with support of the Italian government, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues plan to radiate one wall with a high-energy neutron beam that may reveal the mural for the first time in 450 years.

It is hard to imagine a more public experiment. The building itself is the ancient heart of the city. "You are working in the symbol of the Renaissance in Florence, in a monument that is in use practically every day," Dr. Seracini says. "It is like working on a stage."

In preparation, Dr. Seracini and his colleagues at Editech, the art- and architectural-diagnostics firm he founded in Florence, have been analyzing the building inch by inch. Their pace quickened when a radar scan revealed a gap between the fresco-covered bricks and the original stone wall -- one large enough to preserve anything painted on the older hidden surface.

On this night, art diagnostician Letizia Guffi and architectural historian Stefano Corazzini worked in the cool darkness with an infrared camera, seeking structural features that might have framed the mural. No one actually knows where in the main hall it was located.

The cavernous ceiling loomed like the night sky. Here and there, marble statues cast moon shadows. With their sensors, the scientists looked beyond the present onto an earlier era. "We can see the textures of the old walls, arches and windows under the plaster. We can see if they are bricks or stone because one is cooler than the other," Dr. Guffi says.

The tourists and city functionaries have vanished for the day. The two researchers work in complete darkness. The warmth of even a flashlight beam could wash out the heat-sensitive infrared traces.

Until recently, art scholars were confident they knew the fate of da Vinci's mural of war. The painting, so tradition says, had been botched by Leonardo's own hand, abandoned in shame and then obliterated by an imperious Medici duke.

In 1977, however, Dr. Seracini, then a young apprentice to noted UCLA art scholar Carlo Pedretti, noticed a curious thing. He was inspecting the vast battle fresco by Giorgio Vasari that since 1563 has covered the long wall once occupied by da Vinci's work. There, in the clash of armies depicted near the ceiling, he was startled to discover that Vasari had painted two words in white on a tiny green banner all but invisible to view from below: "cerca trova."

Seek; you will find.

Skeptical colleagues discounted the discovery. Yet they were the only words on the six enormous frescoes that cover the walls today. To Dr. Seracini, it could mean only one thing: The da Vinci mural must still be there, concealed behind Vasari's paintings. "We are talking about the masterpiece of the masterpieces of the Renaissance," says Dr. Seracini, "way more important than The Last Supper or the Mona Lisa."

Da Vinci and those who commissioned the work left no direct account as to why the master gave up on the mural. Whatever its technical flaws, the painting's inventiveness and savage passion dazzled artists throughout Europe for a half century before it disappeared from view. "One writer at the time says it is the most beautiful thing in existence, twice as beautiful as the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel," says Syracuse University art historian Rab Hatfield, a member of the Italian commission overseeing the project.

Dr. Seracini, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, wasn't the first art scholar to be seduced by the mystery of Leonardo's missing mural. No one, however, has pursued it with such technical acumen.

Not long ago, art conservationists had only a trained eye to guide their work. Today, sophisticated scientific techniques are becoming part of every art expert's tool kit. This spring in Vienna, for instance, restorers relied on X-ray fluorescence to analyze the solid gold of a priceless 16th Century sculpture. In France, University of Michigan physicists probed the walls of a 12th Century chapel with nondestructive terahertz beams. In Pittsburgh, NASA scientists used molecules of atomic oxygen to wipe a Warhol painting clean of the lipstick smear left by a vandal's kiss.

Before he turned to art, Dr. Seracini trained in bioengineering at UC San Diego and became expert in medical imaging during postgraduate work in electrical engineering at Padua University. He has used the tools of science to diagnose thousands of major paintings and sculptures -- from Botticelli and Caravaggio to Giotto and Raphael. With ultraviolet imaging, he proved in 2002 that much of a celebrated da Vinci masterwork -- The Adoration of the Magi -- had been painted over by someone else. "For me a work of art is like a patient," Dr. Seracini says.

For the past eight years, private philanthropist Loell Guinness, an heir to the Guinness brewing and banking interests, has underwritten Dr. Seracini's studies through his Swiss-based foundation, the Kalpa Group. "I was fascinated by the use of technology to find and preserve a masterpiece," says Mr. Guinness.

The portable neutron-beam scanner that Dr. Seracini and his team plan to use in the main hall next year is still in development. Months of technical trials are ahead of them.

As they prepare, the scientists take heart from what they know of the artist who covered da Vinci's mural so long ago. A master artist and architect himself, Vasari was loath to destroy the work of another.

Called upon to make major structural changes to the nearby church of Santa Maria Novella, Vasari took pains to preserve its frescoes behind a stone façade, even though he had no reason to expect they would ever again see light of day. Almost 300 years later, they were found by accident during routine church renovations -- in almost pristine condition.

Would Vasari have done any less for a painter he so admired? "We think he would have done the same for the masterpiece of Leonardo," says Dr. Corazzini.

ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Husband and wife Francisco and Casilda Figueiredo are among the last exponents of a traditional Portuguese handicraft -- making ornamental ceramic penises.

For more than three decades, the couple have carefully shaped thousands of ceramic male organs, moulding them into upright shapes and painting them in life-like colours for export to Germany, France and North America.

Francisco and Casilda, aged 68 and 65, still toil away in a humble village workshop in the Caldas da Rainha region, about 100 km (60 miles) north of Lisbon, but say the tradition is dying out.

"The days of the ceramics trade here are numbered, I see no possibility of survival," Francisco said as he prepared moulds of the couple's top-of-the-range two-foot phallic-shaped bottles in his workshop. "It will never be like it was in the past."

The bottle sells for 15 euros (11.8 pounds)

The tradition is said to have started in Caldas da Rainha

when King Dom Luis, who ruled from 1861 to 1889, suggested that local potters make something more interesting.

A renowned caricaturist, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, gave the initial inspiration, prompting Caldas da Rainha to expand on its tradition as a pottery centre.

"Nobody knows exactly what started the tradition, they say it was Dom Luis, but I don't know if it's true or not," said Francisco.

The traditional craft has faced a slow decline as buyers in Portugal and beyond become more liberal and the figures lose their ability to provoke.

The couple produce ceramic mugs with a penis sticking out of the bottom or the side, penis-shaped bottles and ceramic soccer figures with the male organ popping out from under a flag.

Francisco said that during the peak of their business they were producing 1,000 bottles a month.

"There were many people making ceramics, but now locally there is just us," said Casilda. "We exported to Germany, Canada and France. Today we just sell to visitors and local shops."

Axel Bugge

Some see these ancestral homes as little more than firewood but others are delighted to have such historic gems

When Loan de Leo found her dream house in the Vietnamese countryside, it was exactly what she had wanted. The soaring tiled roof, held aloft by the original timber beams, showed no signs of sagging or buckling. Its 19th-century wooden doors, carved with lotus flowers and water buffalo, were in pristine condition.

The fact that the house was used by the local People's Committee was only a minor detail — and, as it turned out, Communist Party officials wanted to put up a modern concrete building. "Before you tear it down, let me have the pieces," de Leo pleaded. Saving them the effort of reducing the house to scrap wood, "they practically gave it to me," she recalled.

De Leo, a Vietnamese-Italian businesswoman, hired craftsmen to take the house apart. She photographed each piece, and workers numbered every plank before packing them.

Similar scenes involving ancestral homes and community houses are occurring throughout the Red River Delta. Many of the old buildings have ended up as kindling, but some are being rescued by locals and expatriates.

In de Leo's case, moving the house to Hanoi, about 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, away, was easy. The real question was where to reconstruct it.

As a foreigner, de Leo was not allowed to own property in 2000, the year she found the house. (The National Assembly is expected to vote soon on extending ownership rights to some foreigners.) Her landlord, however, agreed to let her graft the old Vietnamese home on top of the single-story French colonial villa where she was living. While the marriage of the two houses seems implausible, it produced one of Hanoi's most remarkable homes.

The original villa was, essentially, undisturbed. So when visitors ascend the creaky wooden stairs, there is no hint of what lies at the  top.

The old house, which totals about 54 square meters, or 580 square feet, is entered through black lacquer doors. Massive dark columns, each carved from a single tree, support the vaulted timber frame of the roof, which is about 5 meters, or 16.5 feet, at its highest point. The sun streams in through the skylights, illuminating the roof's supporting ribcage.

Doors that in the past led to a courtyard now open to the second-floor verandah, where de Leo has her morning coffee.

The carvings throughout the house were commissioned by the original owner, a Mandarin who served in the Court of Hue.

"If you look up there, you see the words: 'Built in the fifth year of the Emperor Thanh Thai of the Nguyen,'" said de Leo, translating the Chinese characters carved into a beam overhead. Thanh Thai reigned from 1889 to 1907, which makes the house more than 100 years old.

De Leo uses the house as a formal dining room, adding an imposing altar with a somber Buddha and a display of her extensive collection of Vietnamese ceramics, many dating to the 15th century. For guests, it is like dining in a museum. For de Leo, it is a house that found a  home.

The French clothing designer Valerie Gregori McKenzie fell in love with the traditional houses of the Red River Delta in the late 1990s when she traveled the countryside to meet with  artisans.

She mentioned to a friend that she would like one for her garden in Hanoi. "Then one day he showed up and said: 'I have it! Where do we put it?'" she said, recalling the day in 1997.

Dismantling and moving the structure actually was a simple process, Gregori McKenzie said, because the houses were designed to be moved in case of flood or just because the owner wanted to relocate. In all, it took seven men 20 days to reassemble the house, which has about 54 square meters of living  space.

"The roof structure is locked with a small clef, or key, that needs to be removed in order to unlock all the wooden parts," Gregori McKenzie said. Moving "the wood is not a problem, but a few thousand old bricks and tile is."

Her house came from a hamlet in Ha Tay Province, about 40 kilometers from Hanoi. Gregori McKenzie said it originally belonged to the village chief's grandfather, who was a teacher, and it reflects his love of learning.

"You can still see on the left panel of the verandah some beautiful carvings of a schoolmaster with his student sitting with a large dragon over them, watching," she said.

One of the most ambitious undertakings was the restoration of a 22-meter-long community house that To Hanh Trinh found in Nam Dinh Province, about 90 kilometers south of Hanoi. It had been used by a Christian community, but its members were going to burn it to make way for a modern church.

"For one month, I tried to find a truck to bring the 9-meter-high beams," said Trinh, who owns several restaurants in Hanoi.

The only solution was to bring the house down by barge, and then it had to be adapted to fit her property.

Trinh has brought four houses, including the community house, to Hanoi. Three are used at Moon River, a retreat she opened in 2003 on the Red River; the fourth is a guest room at her  home.

Trinh paid $700 for the community house in 2001, including moving and assembling costs; the same house today would sell for about $50,000, if you could find one. But considering the cost of timber and their sheer beauty, said Trinh, they are still a bargain.

What will happen to the houses if their owners leave Vietnam?

Trinh, who is married to an Australian, said Vietnam was their permanent home, so the houses would be passed to their children.

De Leo's lease stipulates that she can remove the Mandarin house if she leaves; but because de Leo and her husband, an American, plan a long life together in Vietnam, she hopes to never have to make such a decision.

Gregori McKenzie is going to take the house with her, but only as far as central Vietnam. She has been using the old house as a sewing room and office for her clothing shop, Song. Now, the designer is going to move it to the seaside town of Hoi An, where she is building a weekend retreat.

As much as she loves the house, and as easy as it is to move, she said she will never take it to Europe. The Asian style would not fit there, Gregori McKenzie said — and she thinks that ultimately the house is not hers to keep.

"I would like to bring it where ever I go," she said. "But I think it belongs to Vietnam."

Martha Ann Overland

A Dutch school director preparing an exhibition on Anne Frank has found a holiday postcard signed by the Jewish teenage diarist, a museum said Wednesday.

The card, sent in 1937, was addressed to one of Frank's best friends, Samme Ledermann, and postmarked from just across the Dutch border in Aachen, Germany, said Maatje Mostard, of the Anne Frank Museum.

Decorated with a clover-covered bell atop a snowy field and wishing "good luck for the new year" in German, the card was signed "Anne Frank" with no other handwritten message.

Mostard said the museum has seen another such card, mailed the same day from the same town, where the 8-year-old Frank was visiting her grandmother. "We know it's an original," she said.

The teacher, Paul van den Heuvel, found the winter greeting while gathering material on Anne Frank for his school. He came across the greeting in a box of cards in his father's antique store in the town of Naarden.

The museum was informed of his find by a journalist on Tuesday.

"I don't know what he will do with it. We hope we can get it for our collection," Mostard said.

The museum, which encompasses the small Amsterdam apartment where the Frank family hid from the Nazis for 25 months, has the largest collection of documents and papers on Anne, whose diary is the most widely read book relating to the Holocaust.

Anne, her parents and sister and four other Jews hiding there were arrested in August 1944 and deported to Auschwitz. The sisters were later sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where Anne died of typhus in March 1945, two weeks before the camp was liberated. She was 15. >>>>

Lucian Freud's one-time muse was paid £20 a day to sit for a painting expected to fetch more than £17m.

But Londoner Sue Tilley said she did not do it for the money and had "lovely lunches" with the artist.

Freud's 1995 work, Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, looks set to become the most expensive painting by a living artist when it is sold in New York next month.

Ms Tilley - who is now a job centre manager - joked she had now become a broadsheet pin-up.

Ms Tilley - nicknamed Big Sue - told the BBC's Today programme: "I can't quite believe it, to be honest.

"I only found out on Thursday afternoon. You know, I didn't have any idea it was going to happen, so I'm a bit in shock.

"I was reading on the internet...all the things about it. And I was just going 'Oh my god', I could hardly believe it was about me."

'Lovely lunches'

Referring to her portrait gracing the front-page of Saturday's Financial Times, she said: "Am I the first naked pin-up in the history of the FT?

"Half the time I don't really think it's me. But then this morning I was looking at it again and I was going: 'that's my funny little face!'

"The painting took nine months, but that was about two or three days a week.

"When I started I got £20 a day. I don't mind though.

"The best thing was I got lovely lunches. I got taken to the River Cafe most weekends. It was worth it for that.

"It was the experience, it wasn't the money at all.

"It was just fantastic. You know, so many people would love to have that experience, to work with such a great artist, and chat to them, find out about them and see what they were doing.

"Because you see the painting every day, you know moving along and what he's doing and how he works on it.

"And also what I used to love was there were other paintings there as well, of other people.

"He [Lucian Freud] has about four on the go at the same time, so each time you went you'd see how far he's moved along on the other paintings as well."

When Ms Tilley was complimented by the Today presenter on being more attractive in the flesh than in the painting, she replied: "I think all his models are, it's not just me. That's why I don't worry too much, because I think even the thin girls look odd."

'Scabs and spots'

Ms Tilley has modelled for Lucian Freud on several occasions. She recalled a time overhearing a critique of her in another Freud painting.

"The man was so mortified. It was the Whitechapel Gallery. There'd been a big exhibition on and my painting had just been finished, so they put it in for the last week.

"So I went with my friends to see it, and there was this man - you know those so-called art lecturers who think they know everything - 'yes, this painting was painted because Lucian hated women, so he put the dog high up and the woman was lying on the floor. The poor thing with all her scabs and spots'.

"I started laughing. He was going 'excuse me madam' and I said, 'well actually that's me'.

"Poor man, he thought was going to fall through a hole in the floor.

"He said: 'oh but you're really pretty in real life.'"

The painting is on show at Christie's in London before being auctioned in New York. >>>>

• Freud painting 'will set record'
• Auction 'sets modern art record'
• Bacon portrait sells for £14.3m
• Freud portrait breaks art record

Take a second look at that signed Picasso print you bought on eBay.

A ring of art counterfeiters has sold thousands of prints since 1999 bearing the forged signatures of Picasso, Miro, Dali and other famous artists to buyers around the world.

"Thousands of people will learn they ... bought a fake," said Chicago-based U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who announced indictments on Wednesday charging two Americans, a Spaniard from Barcelona, and two Italians from Milan and Monsummano with multiple counts of fraud.

U.S. authorities will seek to extradite the Europeans.

Sale prices ranged up to $50,000 for counterfeit prints that came with forged artists' signatures and fake certificates of authenticity that were sold in galleries, at art shows and through Internet auction site eBay, Fitzgerald said.

The counterfeits were produced in Spain and Italy, with the volume of fakes such that two of the alleged conspirators warned another one not to flood the market.

While buyers are stuck with the bogus works, prosecutors offered a Web site where they can provide details of how they were scammed: www.usdoj.gov/usao/iln.

Andrew Stern, Michael Conlon and Todd Eastham

Previously unknown portrait of Mozart has been found, and could be the most important portrait of the renowned composer ever to come to light, a British academic said Friday.

The discovery -- which could be worth several million dollars -- was owned by the family of Johann Lorenz Hagenauer, a close friend of the Mozart family in Salzburg.

"This is arguably the most important Mozart portrait to be discovered since the composer's death in 1791 and only the fourth known authentic portrait of him from his Vienna years," said Professor Cliff Eisen.

Eisen, from King's College London, undertook extensive research to authenticate the portrait, which is painted in oils and measures 19 inches (48 centimetres) by 14 inches, showing the composer in profile in a red jacket.

After studying letters from Mozart and his family, archival documents and estate auction records, he believes it was probably painted in about 1783 by Joseph Hickel, a painter to the Imperial Court of Austria.

Family tradition has it that it was a gift to Mozart in return for dedicating a composition to a member of the Hickel family.

An American collector bought the portrait in 2005 and was unaware of its significance until the Hagenauer connection was established.

Professor Simon Keefe, James Rossiter chair of music at Sheffield University, in northern England, said Eisen had made a "persuasive case" about its provenance and the find was "inherently significant".

"Needless to say, it will encourage us to think afresh about Mozart's appearance," he said in a statement.

"Furthermore, it should soon as of right join the other two most famous pictures of the adult Mozart -- an unfinished painting by Mozart's brother-in-law Joseph Lange and a posthumous one by Barbara Kraft -- as the defining image of the composer in the public consciousness."

Born in Salzburg in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart took up residence in Vienna in 1781 where he composed his most famous works. He is generally considered to be one of the world's greatest composers.>>>>

Dermatographia Causes Weltlike Hives When Skin Is Scratched

Dermatographia Causes Weltlike Hives When Skin Is Scratched

Dermatographia, which literally means "writing on the skin," is a disorder that produces hivelike welts on the skin when scratched. Russell, 29, always blushed easily while growing up, but it wasn't until her teens that she noticed she could draw designs and patterns on her skin.

Art Imitating Life

"I just thought there's something really powerful in that because I have no control over it. It just happens," Russell said. "And I wanted to kind of capture that feeling of vulnerability and just that kind of fleeting thing that happens in the blush."

Using the blunt end of a knitting needle, Russell traces designs found on ancient Etruscan vases, the patterns in clothing and the wallpaper in her dad's dining room onto her skin. She even connects the dots of her freckles.

It doesn't hurt or itch, and the reaction lasts about 30 minutes.

Taking the wallpaper theme one step further, she has turned her skin into wallpaper by taking photographs of her skin, blowing them up, cutting designs out and hanging it.

"When my dad and I would take the wallpaper off the wall, it kind of has a skinlike quality to it because it's just this covering over the wall … an adornment. So I noticed that it was peeling off; it kind of took on this kind of feeling. It's like skin peeling off," Russell said.

From far away, it looks pretty and pink, but up close the hairs, freckles and blemishes that make up her skin come into focus.

Russell earned her master's of fine arts degree in photography from the University of Washington in Seattle. She said she was drawn to photography because she sees the world in a different way when it's in a still image.

"I can focus my attention on whatever's contained in that frame, and so I pay more attention to what's there," Russell said.

Skin 'Keeps Us Alive'

She calls skin an index of passing time; a history of what's going on at the surface and deep below.

"Skin in general, I think, is really fascinating because of what it is," Russell said. "It's our largest organ. It's permeable, but it's really strong, but it's also really vulnerable. It keeps us alive."

Russell has gotten all sorts of reactions to her art. People either think it's weird and disgusting or beautiful. Russell also received a rave review in Art in America. "Together, all of Russell's pinks resonate the nakedness of emotion and the body's vulnerability to it," Joanna Frueh wrote about Russell's 2006-2007 show at Magnan Projects.

More importantly, people are starting to buy Russell's work. Her art has gone for almost $4,500 at shows in Reno, Nev., Seattle and in New York at the Magnan Projects gallery.

Dara Metz, co-owner of Magnan Projects, said her gallery is really attracted to unique uses of material, so an artist who uses her skin as her canvas was definitely interesting.

"But really it's beautiful to me. She's creating something really beautiful out of something that is probably an unattractive or seen as an unattractive skin condition," Metz said.

And that's the key to Russell's art. She has taken a bothersome and embarrassing medical condition, discovered the beauty in it and made it a work of art.

TRACIE HUNTE