Leonardo's Lost Princess: One Man's Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci

by Peter Silverman; Catherine Whitney

  True to his word, some months later Kemp sat in a large viewing room at the bank where the portrait was being kept and waited for the two security guards (whom he humorously described as having big shoulders and no necks) to retrieve the portrait from storage. They laid it on the table in front of him and retreated to a corner of the room to wait in respectful silence.

  There is a mythology about art experts like Kemp that they have an unerring instinct, like an energy vibration, that tells them they are in the presence of a Master. Would Kemp have that moment of recognition? He himself had once described a similar sensation when viewing the real thing. “It was what struck you—that first jump of recognition,” he said reverently. “If you didn’t get that interior feeling that grabbed you, perhaps you would not pursue the matter. But the process was also more organic—involving other criteria and contextual support to ask, ‘Does this belong, does it tell us about Leonardo?’ ”5

  When he viewed the portrait, he admitted to having a sense that there was something to it. “I immediately saw it was in a different league than others,” he said. “But I was still very, very cautious. I didn’t want to jump at it, because once you start believing, you can summon all the evidence you need.”6

  Kemp’s method was from the “doubting Thomas” school. He kept pulling back and saying to himself, “Let’s see what’s wrong with it. What tells me it’s not a Leonardo?” Because he was trained in scientific methodology, Kemp’s road to attribution was heavily paved with skepticism. Over the next few hours he became lost in the portrait, studying it from every angle.

  He left the vault feeling very positive. His initial interest had been fully corroborated in the presence of the real thing. The next steps involved further technical and historical analysis to see whether, on the whole, the portrait was consistent with Leonardo and to determine whether the subject could be identified. His process was organic, pulling in every imaginable piece to a giant jigsaw. And like a jigsaw, if a single piece didn’t fit, the entire puzzle would be ruined.

  He compared the process of review to a well-designed piece of furniture, like a cabinet, which through the construction process gradually becomes a functional whole. In the end, everything fits together. The drawers don’t stick, the legs don’t wobble. It is sturdy.

  Kemp decided to pursue the matter, and he is the one who dubbed the portrait La Bella Principessa (“The Beautiful Princess”), a title that stuck. The name, he explained to us, referred to a princess not in the royal sense but in the generic sense. “She is wearing a court costume with the colors of the court, and her long pigtail is the badge of court ladies of the time.” So La Bella Principessa she was! (When Kathy and I had initially discussed naming the portrait, we had considered using the more accurate La Bella Milanese —denoting the portrait of a beautiful Milanese woman. We were dissuaded, however, by the fact that milanese is also the Italian term for veal cutlet.)

  As he immersed himself in his investigation, Kemp noted a series of incontrovertible facts about the work. These were key in preparing for an ultimate determination of period and hand. They included the following:

  The vellum and the pigments had undergone the kinds of damage, abrasion, and restoration that were to be expected of an object dating from the late fifteenth century.

  The shaded areas were first laid in with extensive parallel hatching in Leonardo’s distinctive left-handed manner—that is, inclining from upper left to lower right, often at or close to a forty-five-degree angle.

  The opaque areas of pigment on the forehead, cheek, and neck resulted from an old campaign of restoration, to cover areas of damage and losses to the original chalk surface.

  The darker ink reinforcements added with the brush, most evident in the headdress, hair, and costume, also resulted from restoration, undertaken piously to “improve” the image in a way that differs from modern procedures. Kemp determined that the retouchings had been made by a right-handed artist.

  A left fingerprint was evident close to the left margin at the level of the woman’s hairline.

  There were clear signs that some part of the artist’s hand, probably the outside of the palm of the right hand, had been pressed into the pigment layer in the subject’s neck.

  The contours of the facial profile, neck, and shoulder revealed some maneuvering to establish the right outline; there were also signs that the rear contour of the subject’s braid was first laid in further to the right of its present location. These are known as pentimenti—underlying images from a draft or an early version that show through—and were common to Leonardo.

  The upper, right, and lower edges of the sheet were consistent in appearance and could be original.

  The relatively regular distribution of tightly spaced follicles suggested that the vellum was from the skin of a calf.

  Now Kemp turned his attention to the investigation of elements. The first question was about the material itself, the vellum. Vellum is parchment made from the skin of a calf or a kid. There was no record of Leonardo’s ever having used vellum. For some, this would have been evidence enough that it was not his work. But Kemp found it intriguing, and he thought that the vellum surface militated against a forger. What forger would have placed such an enormous obstacle in his path? Kemp dug deeper, discovering a telling passage in Leonardo’s “Ligny Memorandum” in which he referred to an interest in using chalk on vellum:

  Get from Jean de Paris the method of dry colouring and the method of white salt, and how to make coated sheets; single and many doubles; and his box of colours; learn the tempera of flesh tones, learn to dissolve gum lake.7

  Jean de Paris was Jean Perréal, the French portrait painter, illuminator, designer, intellectual, and poet, who happened to be in Italy in 1494 with Charles VIII and again in 1499 with Louis XII—and possibly at other times as well. Leonardo seems to have consulted with him on his unique method of using dry colors on vellum, and he was particularly interested in how to achieve flesh tones and how to handle lake pigments—those manufactured by mixing dye with certain insoluble binders, in this case gum arabic. Gum arabic is extracted from the acacia tree and can be used as a binder for pigments or even as a fixative for the whole sheet.

  Leonardo is indicating that he was planning to ask the French Master about ways of preparing the drawing surface. He was interested in obtaining single and double sheets, which refers to the cutting of rectangular pages from the irregular, stretched skin of a kid or a calf. The technical examination of La Bella Principessa was consistent with the use of a gum fixative over the original medium. In short, Leonardo recorded his intention to inquire about the very techniques that were necessary to create the La Bella Principessa! These are different from the standard procedures of manuscript illumination, which were well known in Milan.

  A specialist studying the vellum question (who asked to remain anonymous) would later come upon a meaningful example of the technique: a magnificent, large illuminated portrait on vellum (37 by 27 centimeters, or 14.4 by 10.5 inches) of Lorenzo de’ Medici as a boy, which appeared in a deluxe edition of the complete works of Homer. It was printed on vellum in 1489 and now belongs to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples. The beautiful Portrait of Piero is by the illuminator and painter Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora, who had a workshop in Florence between 1445 and 1497. He knew Leonardo, and it is possible that they discussed the topic of portraits on vellum.

  Kemp continued his investigation, slowly fitting together each piece of the complex puzzle. His next area of study was the proportions of the face. This area was absolutely critical when reviewing a Leonardo work, because the Master devoted so much space in his notebooks to the series of harmonic proportions that he believed characterized the internal relationships of the human body. For example:

  The space from the mouth to below the chin will be a quarter part of the face, and similar to the width of the mouth. The space between the chin and below the base of the nose will be a third part of the face, and similar to the nose an
d the forehead.

  The space between the midpoint of the nose and below the chin will be half the face.

  The space between the upper origin of the nose, where the eyebrows arise, to below the chin will be two-thirds of the face.8

  This proportional system was also found in Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine, La Belle Ferronière, and Mona Lisa. La Bella Principessa complied exquisitely.

  Kemp worked on with a growing sense of appreciation, verging on awe. Could it be that this was the real thing?

  7

  Leonardo’s Principles

  Men and words are ready-made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  While Pascal and Martin—we were all on a first-name basis by now—labored over their analysis of La Bella Principessa, the project began to attract the attention of scholars who brought their connoisseurs’ eyes to the project. In particular, they were attentive to Leonardo’s ideals of beauty and the human face, which he wrote of in great detail in his notebooks. He urged artists to choose beauty over the grotesque, writing,

  It seems to me to be no small charm in a painter when he gives his figures a pleasing air, and this grace, if he have it not by nature, he may acquire by incidental study in this way: Look about you and take the best parts of many beautiful faces, of which the beauty is confirmed rather by public fame than by your own judgment; for you might be mistaken and choose faces which have some resemblance to your own. For it would seem that such resemblances often please us; and if you should be ugly, you would select faces that were not beautiful and you would then make ugly faces, as many painters do. For often a master’s work resembles himself. So select beauties as I tell you, and fix them in your mind.1

  For Leonardo, anatomical rules and the ideal of beauty might have been one and the same. The animating principle of his work was to paint a living thing—and therefore always know what that living thing is doing and thinking. He wrote:

  A picture or representation of human figures ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognize, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds. Thus, if you have to represent a man of noble character in the act of speaking, let his gestures be such as naturally accompany good words; and, in the same way, if you wish to depict a man of a brutal nature, give him fierce movements; as with his arms flung out towards the listener, and his head and breast thrust forward beyond his feet, as if following the speaker’s hands. Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation—although he is deprived of hearing—can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion. I once saw in Florence a man who had become deaf who, when you spoke very loud did not understand you, but if you spoke gently and without making any sound, understood merely from the movement of the lips.2

  Leonardo believed that the only way to paint an image authentically was to understand and accommodate what was going on underneath. Thus he did not just paint a man with a jacket over bare skin; rather, he made accommodations for an undergarment, even if it remained unseen. His studies of the human organs were quite advanced. Dr. Sherwin Nuland, who in addition to being a medical doctor and a renowned author (of How We Die, among other books) is also a recognized expert on Leonardo’s anatomical studies. Dr. Nuland said:

  He was the first person, for example, to realize that the heartbeat and the pulse were synchronous. This is something clearly everybody thinks is automatically understood, but it wasn’t at that time. And the way he did it was simply to watch farmers who were slaughtering pigs. They would put a large tube right through the chest wall into the pig’s heart to let the blood go out. And, of course, there would be twenty, thirty beats before all of the blood was gone. And he would watch the heartbeat. He would feel the animal’s pulse at the same time, and he would synchronize the two of them, plus the sound of the heart thumping against the chest wall. So he was able to identify the fact that the heart functioned like a muscle, that it leaped forward each time it beat, and that it, in fact, caused the pulse.3

  It is apparent that such studies were made in the interest of authentically portraying a living person in his painting.

  What makes Leonardo’s work so captivating is the intense human feeling coming from his subjects. With their postures and expressions they beckon us to know them and to know, as Leonardo put it, their purpose. As the scholars began to examine La Bella Principessa, they were in agreement that the portrait met not only Leonardo’s rules of anatomy but also his rules of artistic motivation.

  The first outsider to study La Bella Principessa at the lab was Cristina Geddo, a noted scholar of Leonardo’s workshops. An attractive, dynamic powerhouse in her late thirties, Geddo was passionate about Leonardo’s Lombard period. Showing impressive initiative, Geddo presented herself at Pascal’s laboratory, stating her interest in looking at his digital renderings. Pascal agreed. After reviewing the work and Lumiere’s spectral images, Geddo wrote a lengthy article about her findings, which was published in Artes, the scholarly journal of the University of Pavia.

  The Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile to the Left, which recently surfaced in a private collection, impresses itself from the very first encounter as a work beyond the ordinary, not only for the remarkable high quality of its conception but also because of the distinctiveness of the technical means by which it has been realized. It is with a mixture of surprise, caution and embarrassment that the name Leonardo comes readily to mind and, indeed, takes root with time, removing any possible alternative, beginning with the names of his pupils––not one of whom was capable of attaining this level of accomplishment nor mimicking so accurately and to so high a degree the art of his master.4

  Geddo based her strong conviction on four fundamental arguments: the unequivocal character of the style and of the physiognomy, the unrivaled quality of the execution, the irrefutable evidence of the recurring left-handed shading, and the experimental technique with which the portrait itself was realized. Of the subject, she wrote,

  The portrait represents a young woman, blonde and angel-like, the most seductive that ever came out of Leonardo’s hands, but at the same possessed with a true and vibrant intimacy, reserved in how she offers herself, and inert in her proud firmness of posture. The crystalline eye, offset from the axis of the profile, is slightly tilted and rotates towards us, yet cannot cross our gaze. From this barely perceptible infringement of the rule—that of the absolute profile—comes the “motion of the mind” of our protagonist, an internalized, ineffable look that captures the attention of the beholder with magnetic force.

  Reading Geddo’s analysis, Kathy remarked, “I can almost feel the sitter come to life in her eyes.” I can, too. And we were itching to find out the identity of this beautiful and mysterious young woman.

  Meanwhile, Giammarco Cappuzzo, our friend and independent art consultant, was urging me to arrange for Alessandro Vezzosi to see digital images. Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Leonardo’s birthplace of Vinci, was arguably one of Leonardo’s most passionate fans. A charming man and a serious scholar, Vezzosi had nearly single-handedly built the museum into a stunning tribute to Leonardo. The museum is a marvel, with large-scale models of Leonardo’s great inventions, such as flying machines, war machines, and a helicopter built to the specs of his writings and drawings.

  In 2005, Vezzosi had spearheaded a “trial” in Vinci of Dan Brown’s bestseller The Da Vinci Code, summoning art experts and historians to weigh in on the accuracy or, as Vezzosi saw it, the scandalous belittlement of the great Master by Brown’s popular prose. Vezzosi found it an affront that so many readers of the pulp novel actually believed some of its claims—in particular, that Leonardo had belonged to a secret society, the Priory of Sion, which knew the secret of the Holy Grail, and that he’d buried the code in his art. The book had sold eightee
n million copies worldwide and was being made into a film. It was a grand moneymaking machine for countless business ventures that wanted to cash in on its popularity—everything from tours to a weight-loss diet. In the process it infuriated, among others, art scholars, citizens of Vinci, the Vatican, and traditional Catholics.

  Although Brown and his representatives were not present, Vezzosi’s mock trial was attended by hundreds of Vinci residents and other interested parties. Vezzosi made the case for the prosecution, using more than a hundred slides in defense of Leonardo. For instance, Brown’s assertion that Leonardo was homosexual was “pure invention,” he said, along with his claim that the artist designed instruments of torture. Leonardo did include a drawing of a scythed chariot that sliced people into pieces in one of his works, but he did not invent it. In any case, Leonardo’s interest was in protecting oneself from the onrush of the deadly chariot, not in using it to harm others.

  A high point of the trial was testimony by two members of Opus Dei, who were there to defend the organization from Brown’s characterization. The central villain in the book was an evil albino Opus Dei member named Silas, whose mission it was to eradicate the four people in the world who knew the secret of the Holy Grail, because if the truth were known it would spell the destruction of the Catholic Church. Silas was all the more intriguing, or perhaps grotesque, because he wore a sharp instrument of self-flagellation, which was supposedly part of the Opus Dei rubric.

  “I’ve come to tell you what Opus Dei really is,” announced Massimo Marianeschi to the breathless audience. “It is not a sect; it’s not black, criminal, or catastrophic. I do not flog myself or mortify my flesh. It’s a lay organization with no monks. It’s not Machiavellian, we don’t assassinate people, we don’t sanction any negative acts.” He received applause from the audience, but there was also a hint of skepticism.