painted blue, an unusual color for trees of any kind. On the right side, the most credible self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci as a 30-year-old can be seen, according to several critics. (See Angelo Paratico.) Much of the composition of this painting was influenced by an earlier work of the Northern artist Rogier van der Weyden. The relationship between figures, space and the viewer's standpoint, the high horizon, slightly raised viewpoint, space receding into the far distance, and a central figural group poised before a rock formation in the middle of the landscape are all copied from van der Weyden's Entombment of Christ (1460, Uffizi). Other painters involved Owing to the painting's unfinished status in 1481, the commission was handed over to Filippino Lippi, who painted another Adoration of the Magi, completed in 1496, in substitution of the one commissioned to Leonardo. It is also housed in the Uffizi. Domenico Ghirlandaio completed a separate painting, expanding upon Leonardo's theme, in 1488. In 2002 Maurizio Seracini, an art diagnostician alumnus of the University of California, San Diego, and a native Florentine, was commissioned by the Uffizi to undertake a study of the paint surface to determine whether the painting could be restored without damaging it. Seracini, who heads Editech, a Florence-based company he founded in 1977 focused on the "diagnostics of cultural heritage", used high-resolution digital scans as well as thermographic, ultrasound, ultraviolet and infrared diagnostic techniques to study the painting in ultra-fine detail. He concluded that the painting could not be restored without damaging it and that only the underdrawing is by Leonardo. Another artist (or artists) was responsible for all of the existing paintwork on top of the underdrawing. Seracini stated that "none of the paint we see on the Adoration today was put there by Leonardo." As a part of his diagnostic survey on the Adoration of the Magi, Seracini completed more than 2,400 detailed infrared photographic records of the painting's elaborate underdrawing, and scientific analyses. The new images revealed by the diagnostic techniques used by Seracini were initially made public in 2002 in an interview with the New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger. In 2005, nearing the end of his investigation, Seracini gave another interview, this time to the Guardian reporter John Hooper. Seracini finally published his results in 2006: M. Seracini, "Diagnostic Investigations on the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci" in The Mind