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

by Peter Silverman; Catherine Whitney

  Martin speculated that Leonardo might have been considered something of a specialist in portraying women. As Isabella d’Este, the Marchesa of Mantua, once wrote, he deployed “that air of sweetness and suavity” in which his art peculiarly excels. Who could deny that Leonardo’s sensitive, even sensual, portrayals of women—from Mona Lisa to the new La Bella Principessa—have a stirring quality that seems to reach into the ladies’ souls?

  Vasari would surely agree, judging by his description of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa:

  The mouth, with its opening, and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse. And, indeed, it may be said that it was painted in such a manner as to make every valiant craftsman, be he who he may, tremble and lose heart. He made use, also, of this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits that they paint. And in this work of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive.7

  Martin did not believe, as many did, that Leonardo was homosexual. He could find no reflection of sexual orientation or preference in the artist’s portrayals of men and women. Leonardo’s reverence for beauty in all its natural forms was more profound than sexual fantasy.

  Perhaps, Martin surmised, other court artists were sufficient to the task of portraying male figures—on horses, on shields, at war, stamped on coins—with their stark formality, whereas only Leonardo had an eye for bringing life to the faces of beloved females. He also rendered them with an intimacy that was suitable for private settings, not formal portraits. In each case, the subject appears to be responding to a person or an activity outside the picture. She is alive and fully human.

  Although the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was probably produced several years before La Bella Principessa, there are enough stylistic similarities to place the latter comfortably in the period of the Sforza court. Martin advised that there were five women in Sforza’s court who might have sat for such a portrait. However, three of them—Ludovico’s wife, Beatrice; Isabella of Aragon, the wife of Ludovico’s nephew Gian Galeazzo; and Ludovico’s niece Beatrice—could be ruled out, since existing portraits showed what they looked like. There remained two possibilities: Ludovico’s niece Anna and his illegitimate daughter Bianca. Kemp found himself focusing on the young woman Bianca for a number of reasons, including her extreme youth (Anna was six years older).

  Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico’s mistress Bernardina de Corradis, was the apple of the duke’s eye. In the secularized Milan of the period, the distinction between wife and mistress was not so morally loaded. Because Bianca was so highly favored, Ludovico took steps to legitimize her in 1489, before betrothing her to Galeazzo Sanseverino, the highly regarded commander of his armies. Since Bianca was a mere eight or nine years old at the time, the wedding date was set for 1496, when she would be at least thirteen.

  Bianca’s future husband was a major figure at the court, a dear friend of the duke’s and a patron of Leonardo’s. Leonardo would often visit Galeazzo’s stables to measure his horses and sketch the anatomical drawings that would become so highly prized. One might imagine that the two men also discussed weaponry, which was a topic of great fascination to Leonardo.

  Evidence of Bianca’s favor with her father is the fact that he commissioned the creation of a sonnet by the court poet, Bernardo Bellincioni, on the occasion of her betrothal.

  One can recognize and see the person,

  With a great mind in their early years;

  Today Bianca will be for the world a phoenix,

  Because good fruit stems from its roots,

  And she is the heir of her father’s mind.

  Heaven accords her a groom

  Who will make them both happy.

  What an unerring choice, both proper and wonderful,

  Was made by my patron Ludovico,

  Because nothing is missing in this couple.

  This star [Bianca] was lacking for Galeazzo,

  And Galeazzo, friend of virtue, was lacking only Bianca.8

  It was common during the Renaissance for portraits to be commissioned around major events in a subject’s life, and the Sforza court, with its love of pageantry, followed this tradition. The portraits were often bound into tribute books, often garish and elaborate, that sang the praises of the subject. Indeed, Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was accompanied by such a poem, which began:

  Nature, what provokes you, who arouses your envy?

  It is Vinci, who has painted one of your stars!9

  Knowing of Bianca’s place in Sforza’s heart and of her betrothal to Galeazzo, we can quite plausibly say that she was the subject of a portrait. There is also evidence that this portrait was bound into a book, possibly of poems, which was the tradition. Impressions on the grooves of the vellum of our portrait suggest that it was removed from a book. This may help explain why the portrait disappeared from view for such a lengthy period.

  All of the beauty and promise evident in the portrait was short-lived. In November 1496, only four months after her marriage, Bianca died as the result of a fatal passione de stomach. The cause is not known, although one speculation is that she may have had an ectopic pregnancy. At the time, there were also whispers of the possibility of poisoning, but they led nowhere.

  Niccolò da Correggio, the court poet who replaced Bellincioni after his death, wrote the bittersweet tribute:

  Bianca, the daughter of the Duke,

  having achieved two lustri

  Plus a little more than one half of the third,

  Was delighting with Galeazzo in the pleasures of marriage.

  When conjoined in passion within their encampment,

  In the midst of a such a sweet game,

  She departed her body

  And went amongst the elected souls,

  Her beauty and grace buried first in human breasts,

  Not content with being only in one place.

  Why do you reside in such different graves?

  The stones have the bones,

  While the world preserves her name,

  Since her virtues can be preserved in prose and poetry.

  Above all others, Galeazzo, for whom the harvest

  Was reaped while still green,

  His fruits becoming lost,

  Can say that Death was unripe for him.10

  Incidentally, a lustro is a span of five years, so the poem would indicate that Bianca was thirteen or fourteen at the time of her death. Studying La Bella Principessa, Martin had a new thought. Noting her lack of celebratory jewelry and the restraint of her costume, he had initially been puzzled. He especially found the absence of pearls interesting. The Sforza court delighted in pearls, and the duke had something of a fetish for them. Martin now wondered if the portrait might have been commissioned as a memorial at the time of Bianca’s death and not as a celebratory matrimonial portrait. “If so,” he wrote, “Leonardo has evoked the sitter’s living presence with an uncanny sense of vitality.”11

  Martin and others who viewed the portrait from a historical perspective could not fail to conclude that everything about the style and fashion of the subject was consistent with the Milanese court of the late fifteenth century.

  The long braid she wears in her portrait is called a coazzone—it was typical for the fashion-conscious ladies of the court to wear extremely long and elaborately bound pigtails in the 1490s in Milan; the mistresses could be portrayed in less conventional poses, but their daughters, the princesses, warranted the formal profile.

  While he was studying the portrait, Martin was contacted by a young Italian costume
historian named Elisabetta Gnignera. She was in the process of writing a study of hairdressing in the fifteenth century, and she wanted to include La Bella Principessa, since in her opinion “the portrayed Lady wears a beautiful example of a late fifteenth century/early sixteenth century coazzone hair dressing—the so-called acconciatura alla spagnuola [Spanish hairdressing], which was in fashion in Italy no later than the first years of the sixteenth century.”12

  As Gnignera studied the portrait, she elaborated on the following points to Martin:

  The hairstyle in La Bella Principessa was in fashion in Italy from 1491 to 1499—and “absolutely not beyond 1500.” This would fit the period of Bianca’s marriage, as well as Leonardo’s presence at the court.

  In 1491, when Beatrice d’Este entered the Sforza court as the wife of the duke, she established herself as a trendsetter by putting into fashion a particular style of coazzone, which she made unique with subtle differences from the Spanish style. This is the coazzone worn by the subject of La Bella Principessa.

  By the final years of the fifteenth century, a new hairstyle—the fòggia alla Francese (French style)—replaced the coazzone. An example of the new style can be found in the drawing of Isabelle d’Este attributed to Leonardo, with long hair wrapped in a subtle hairnet.

  Gnignera’s input confirmed what Martin’s studies had showed him regarding the high fashionability of the coazzone in the Sforza court during the 1490s. To achieve the required length on these elaborately bound pigtails, a hairpiece was generally added and colored to match the lady’s hair.

  Martin was also drawn to the intricate knot pattern in the fabric. Leonardo had been fascinated by knots since at least 1480 and had earlier used them as a motif in his portrait of Cecilia Gallerani. Martin would later write down his view that the two examples “show not only an identical way of fashioning the loops, but the same skill and intelligence in rendering the perspective as the ornament follows curves and recedes into the distance. This element is very important, for it confirms that we are in the presence of two works realized with the same creative spirit, the same sense of perfection, and an identical manner of treating details, however tiny they might be.”13

  Vezzosi was also very taken with evidence found in the patterns, commenting, “The ‘Leonardesque knot’ on the shoulder is obviously a paradigm of the artist and not only a decorative feature. It constitutes here an original assemblage, in a unique arabesque, in the form of geometrical matrices with two knots, alluding to symbols of infinity, like those drawn at the end of 1473 and which can be seen elaborated in the clothing of both Lady with an Ermine and the Mona Lisa. The border reinforces it, also with simplified knots, which run around the edge of the sleeve in a reticulated pattern, which is, in its turn, created by the most refined interlacing. The hairdo, called in Milan a ‘coazzone,’ is also characteristic of the period and was fashionable at the Sforza court.”14

  Cristina Geddo concurred, writing,

  This was a fashion of Spanish origin, imported by Milan upon the marriage of the daughter of the King of Naples, Isabella of Aragon, to Gian Galeazzo Sforza (1489), but refined and imposed by Beatrice d’Este, daughter of Eleonora of Aragon and younger sister of Isabella, who married Ludovico il Moro in 1491 and was already dead in 1497. The hairstyle, a “coazzone,” is also worn by the Belle Ferronière (Lucrezia Crivelli) in the Louvre, datable to about 1496–99 and thus chronologically close to our portrait. This look quickly dwindled at the turn of the century with the arrival of the French and the abrupt end of the era of Ludovico il Moro, and was replaced by the loose, layered cut inspired by Transalpine fashion, already adopted by Isabella d’Este in the Leonardo cartoon, datable to early 1500. . . . This is therefore an important element for securing the Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile to Milanese territory, and to a time period before 1499, when the artist left the Lombard capital.15

  In other words, the Master’s hand is distinctive.

  “The lady in profile is an important addition to Leonardo’s canon,” Martin said with certainty. “Within the apparently inflexible format of a profile, it exhibits a graphic refinement and poetic beauty that lies far beyond what anyone in his circle could accomplish. He has characterized the youthful sitter, perhaps the tragic Bianca, with infinite tenderness, decisively surpassing (as he would fervently have wished) the effusions of the court poets.”16

  Based on an accumulation of interlocking evidence, Martin had no doubt of Leonardo’s authorship. “After forty years in the Leonardo business, I thought I’d seen it all,” he told me emotionally. “But I had not. The delight I had when I first saw it has been reinforced enormously. I’m absolutely convinced.” He added, with a slight shaking in his voice, “Above all, it’s thrilling to look at. There is an incredible freshness, a delicacy. I have seen Mona Lisa out of its frame. I have seen Lady with an Ermine out of its frame. All of Leonardo’s works have an inner life. The sitters seem to live. This is a rare gift that no other artist, with the possible exception of Rembrandt, could achieve.”

  He concluded, “After repeated viewings, scientific analysis, and intensive research, I have not the slightest doubt that the portrait that I am calling La Bella Principessa is a masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.” One of the greatest Leonardo scholars in the world was a believer.

  I realized that no matter how many experts praised the work as a Leonardo or signed documents stating their beliefs, there would still be an opposing side that would forever question its authenticity. I found the notion somewhat depressing. If only there was a way to prove Leonardo’s authorship beyond doubt!

  In that respect we had a potential trump card. Pascal and Martin spoke to me about the fingerprint and palm print that were clearly visible in the pigment—and almost certainly belonged to Leonardo. Martin had a fingerprint expert in mind who might confirm it.

  9

  The Art of Fingerprints

  Anyone who conducts an argument by appealing to authority is not using his intelligence; he is just using his memory.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  Peter Paul Biro grew up surrounded by art. His father, Geza Biro, was a moderately well-known artist and conservator, and Biro began working in his father’s Montreal gallery and studio as a boy. Now in his fifties, comfortably settled in Montreal with his wife, Joanne, a mezzo-soprano, Biro retains a fixation on art, the legacy of a remarkable history, and occasionally pauses to enjoy his favorite hobby of stargazing or his marine fish tank filled with live corals and exotic creatures.1

  Geza Biro, who died in 2008 at the age of eighty-nine, grew up in Budapest, where he had the ambition to be a great painter. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and developed a signature style. Like Leonardo da Vinci, Geza was left-handed. But during World War II, he was drafted into the Hungarian army and was taken captive by the Russians. While he was being transported to a prison camp, the truck he was in crashed, and Geza’s left arm was crushed. He never gained full use of it again.

  After the war Geza learned to paint with his right hand, and even though he was accomplished, he would never know whether he could have been great. In the late 1960s, he left Budapest, immigrating to Montreal with his wife and his two sons, Laszlo and Peter Paul. There he set up a gallery and conservation studio.

  The story of how Peter Paul Biro came to marry the gritty world of crime analysis with the elite world of art authentication is fascinating. He and his brother began working with paintings at a very young age, learning the ropes at their father’s knee. It was an exciting and challenging environment to grow up in, and it provided an early introduction to the difficulties of art authentication.

  Biro trained and practiced as a conservator, and he might have spent his life in this work were it not for an incident of fate. As Biro tells it, about twenty years ago, a client walked into his Montreal conservation laboratory with a large canvas that he wanted cleaned and restored. Biro noticed immediately that the painting seemed heavily overpainted, and recently s
o. He provided an estimate for cleaning that was quite high, and the client balked.

  “It’s not worth it,” he said grumpily. Then he gave Biro a calculating look. “Will you buy it from me?” he asked.

  Biro was taken aback. “No,” he said dismissively, but then he inquired curiously, “For what?”

  The man was clever. “Why don’t you clean half of it and then you can hang it as a demonstration of your work—a before and after?” he suggested.

  After some haggling, the two men struck a deal, and Biro found himself the reluctant owner of what could only be described as a wreck. The painting sat unattended for several months. Finally, Biro got around to testing a small area, removing the overpainting on a portion of sky to see what happened.

  “We were awestruck at the beauty of the original surface coming to light,” he later said. Now excited, Biro threw himself into the task, removing ever larger areas of the overpainting that was hiding the original surface. As he worked, the conviction grew inside him that this was the work of a Master. But who?

  Biro was a practiced student of art, and he determined that the best candidate was the celebrated British painter J. M. W. Turner. For the next few years, Biro tried and failed to gain recognition and acceptance for his find from the imperious and closed art world. No one would give him a hearing. At best, he was able to get the painting judged as a “good Turneresque work.” His frustration bordered on outrage. “Turneresque? Why not Turner?” It was impossible to break through the stone wall of art experts.

  Biro gave up his quest. It was pointless. But then, quite unexpectedly, he stumbled upon a new road to authenticity. In 1985, during a visit to London’s Tate Gallery, he found himself contemplating one of Turner’s great works, the Chichester Canal. Suddenly he noticed that Turner had used his fingertips to model the scene. It was Biro’s eureka moment. He realized that these were Turner’s fingerprints, right there in full view. Why not compare them with those in the painting in his possession?