One of these, Adoration of the Magi, was a commission in 1481 by the Augustinian monks of San Donato a Scopeto in Florence, which he received thanks to his father’s influence.4 The job was to create a large altarpiece, measuring 9 by 8 feet, depicting the adoration of baby Jesus by the three magi. Leonardo was given thirty months to complete the complex task, and he spent nearly a year sketching out the plans. Even in the sketches it was plain to see that Leonardo’s vision was very different from that of others who had portrayed the scene. His view was more humanistic, emotional, and egalitarian, with many figures whose expressions were vivid and dramatic. Instead of narrowing his focus to the magi or the Holy Family, he explored all of the action going on around them.
While Leonardo was working on Adoration of the Magi, he was sidetracked by a request from Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence, that he go on a diplomatic mission to the court of the Duke of Milan, Ludovico il Moro Sforza. It seems that Leonardo had learned to play the lyre as a child, and in early adulthood he had created a marvelous silver lyre, shaped like a horse’s head, that had a beautiful resonance when played. When de’ Medici saw the lyre, probably through Leonardo’s father, whom he knew, he decided that it would make the perfect gift for the duke—especially if Leonardo would play it for him.
So Leonardo left for Milan, and his performance so far surpassed the performances of the Milanese court musicians that the duke was charmed and intrigued. His eye turned with great interest on the fascinating young man with so many talents in plain evidence. Leonardo obviously felt similarly intrigued, for shortly after this event he sent Ludovico il Moro Sforza the following letter—arguably the most famous job application in history:
Most Illustrious Lord: Having now sufficiently seen and considered the proofs of all those who count themselves masters and inventors in the instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use does not differ in any respect from those in common practice, I am emboldened . . . to put myself in communication with your Excellency, in order to acquaint you with my secrets. I can construct bridges which are very light and strong and very portable with which to pursue and defeat an enemy. . . . I can also make a kind of cannon, which is light and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones like hail. . . . I can noiselessly construct to any prescribed point subterranean passages—either straight or winding—passing if necessary under trenches or a river. . . . I can make armored wagons carrying artillery, which can break through the most serried ranks of the enemy. In time of peace, I believe I can give you as complete satisfaction as anyone else in the construction of buildings, both public and private, and in conducting water from one place to another. I can execute sculpture in bronze, marble, or clay. Also, in painting, I can do as much as anyone, whoever he may be. If any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or impractical to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make a trial of them in your park or in whatever place shall please your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility.5
How to explain Leonardo’s interest in being on hire to the court? A man of his extreme talent could have had as many independent commissions as he chose. Perhaps he was aware of his own failings, his tendency to lose heart in the midst of a job, his need for structure and discipline. Perhaps, too, he required the regular reinforcement and support of his superiors, for he struggled with self-esteem and often questioned his own abilities. On a practical level, he was constantly worrying about money, and the Court of Milan probably seemed like a guarantee of job security.
His letter was obviously an effective résumé, for the duke brought Leonardo to his court, where he remained for seventeen years. He was a young man of thirty when he accepted the position of painter and engineer of the duke.
It was a wonderful era in Milan, a golden age of art and science. The duke, a benevolent dictator with a love of the arts and a fascination with urban modernization, was happy to attract the great master painters, poets, and engineers to his city.
Sforza’s court, at the massive Castello Sforzesco, was renowned for its spectacular pageants and festivities celebrating marriages and births; court poets recorded flowery verses, and Leonardo himself was involved in executing elaborate stage designs for theatrical productions at the court. Pomp, circumstance, and glitter reigned at the court, evidenced by the elaborate gold embroidery on the gowns of the highest court ladies. One cannot emphasize enough the beauty and splendor of the court during Ludovico’s reign. The company that gathered in the Castello of Milan seemed, according to the chronicles of the writer Baldassare Castiglione, “the flower of the human race.”6
The enormous prosperity was reflected in the lifestyle of Milan’s citizens, who lived chiefly by trade and manufacturing, and all benefited from the fertility of the soil. Two main industries formed the basis of Milan’s success as a manufacturing center: Milanese armor and the woolen industry (which included silk weaving, embroidery, and gold and silver cloth). This created a merchant class, which bought up all the wares and then sold them to the consumer. Trade generated great wealth for the top echelons of society, and they lived in noble houses—if they were not quite royalty, they were the closest thing to it. The aristocracy of Milan was based on wealth, not birth.
It was a rich intellectual culture for Leonardo. The Court of Milan became a sort of academy, which united writers, poets, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. Illustrious scholars from throughout Italy gathered there.
Visitors to Milan were impressed by the splendor of the ladies’ dresses, often made entirely of cloth of gold, adorned with rich embroidery and laden with jewels. Technically, there were laws governing rank, which determined manner of dress, but it seems that these prohibitions were rarely enforced, because to have done so would have destroyed an important Milanese trade. Luxury was encouraged in the interest of a strong trading community.
Outside the court, the citizenry lived a frugal existence, but for the privileged class, luxury was on the increase throughout the Sforza period. Note, for example, the splendor that marked the birth of Duchess Beatrice d’Este’s firstborn child in 1493: a gilded cradle, a rich brocaded quilt, and a grand show of gifts.
Society modeled itself on the court, because the two were tightly connected. Unlike the city of Florence, which at this time had experienced a religious revival, Milan tended to emphasize the material side of life through outward magnificence and commercial interest. Piety manifested itself less in devotional fervor than in such practical works as building hospitals and founding schools. And always there were the lavish pageants, which drew visitors from across the country.
This was the universe Leonardo stepped into when he arrived in Milan to offer his skills as a painter, an inventor, an engineer, and a sculptor to the duke. Leonardo adapted well to the Milanese court. It was there that he was able to let his imagination and skills fully develop. It was there too that he developed his full appreciation of art—things observed—and of the artist as the greatest communicator. “If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, you could not report of them in writing,” he wrote sensibly, continuing:
If you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? To be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions, they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions, and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them.7
Leonardo’s contribution to the court was eclectic and exciting. His schemes for civic engineering were far ahead of his time, and so were his plans for war machines. He designed sets and costumes for many festivals and plays. Among his most ambitious projects was the creation of a massive equestrian monument in honor of Francesco Sforza,
the founding father of the Sforza dynasty.8 Over a period of ten years he constructed the model in clay, but, sad to say, before it could be cast in bronze, the French invaded Milan and destroyed it.
Occasionally, at the request of his benefactor the duke, Leonardo set aside his drawings and his building and spent his afternoons with a favored court lady, bringing life to her features with his pens, paints, and chalks. Although other artists could have handled the task quite competently, Sforza had confided that he trusted only Leonardo to capture the countenances of his beloved ones. Sometimes Sforza would stand in the doorway, smiling his encouragement to the young lady, for whom the sitting required great poise. Indeed, in the finished works, sitters seemed to be turning their gazes upon another person, and the result was a softening of their features so unlike the expressions in the stiff formal portraits that were common at the time. This, then, was Leonardo’s signature—the animating quality that would allow these special ladies to stand apart even centuries later.
4
Real or Fake?
The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Before my fateful encounter with Nicholas Turner at the Louvre, I had been reluctant to pursue the possibility that I held the work of a Master—indeed, the Master. I knew how tongues would wag. Every so often someone popped up with a claim of holding a lost Leonardo, a lost Michelangelo, or a lost Pollock, but these claims were invariably disproved. It was almost unheard of for a new work to appear out of nowhere, especially a work by one of the Renaissance Masters. Despite the common myth that these treasures were out there in abundance, buried in people’s attics waiting to be discovered, it was more a romantic notion than a reality.
In his 1996 book, False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes, Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and recently deceased at the age of seventy-eight), wrote that we live in a time when there are so many art fakes that he almost believed that there are “as many bogus works as genuine ones.” I’m not sure I’d go that far. Hoving also pointed out, “Art forgery is as old as mankind.”1 And the art forger, by nature, must be as passionate about art and often as gifted as the genuine artist.
According to Hoving, every art historian abides by some basic tenets when determining if a work is a forgery:
The forger will always betray himself by some silly personal mannerism of style.
A fake will always lack freedom of execution and originality.
The phony is always lower in quality than the original.
Where gut reaction and intense scrutiny by the naked eye fails to detect a fake, “science”—the computer, the laser—will always unmask the bogus.
Fakes eventually reveal the taste of the time in which they are created and never stand up more than a generation or so before they crash.2
This seems to be a rather narrowly constructed list—optimistic even about the historian’s ability to scout out the inferiority of a forgery. History shows that fakes do not always reveal themselves so plainly. But I also find Hoving’s tenets interesting in light of his assertions (described later) that our portrait is not the real thing.
Hans van Meegeren is the most notorious forger of the last century, and his case is a cautionary tale for all who place their trust in the arbiters of artistic greatness. Van Meegeren’s brilliant forgeries were at the center of a notorious 1940s scandal that rocked the art establishment. Van Meegeren was an artist and a picture restorer who considered himself an unheralded genius and who took advantage of the fact that Jan Vermeer, a real genius of intimist interiors in seventeenth-century Holland, was reemerging three centuries after his death as one of the greatest Masters of the Golden Age of Dutch Painting.
Vermeer’s style was still a subject of speculation, with attributions not yet totally cemented, since almost none of his paintings were signed. Van Meegeren created a few pictures in what he considered Vermeer’s style and technique, mixing his colors and using some pigments that existed in the seventeenth century. One of his forgeries, Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus, was bought in 1937 by the Dutch Rembrandt Society for about $4.7 million in today’s dollars and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The painting was loudly acclaimed by the scholarly powers of the time as a long-lost painting by Vermeer, whose known production did not exceed thirty-five works. The excitement generated by this new “discovery” among members of the art establishment was so great that the director of the State Museum himself contributed personal money to purchase it for his institution.
There the story took a shocking turn. After World War II it was learned that the Rotterdam painting was not by Vermeer but by the forger van Meegeren. In a dramatic twist, the revelation was made by the forger himself under some obvious duress, because he was about to be indicted by the Dutch government for collaborating with the Nazis during the war. The charge: he had sold Dutch patrimony—Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus, the alleged Vermeer—to the notorious Nazi art lover Hermann Goering. Revealing the secret of the forgery was the only way to exonerate himself! So, before the tribunal and to the incredulity of scholars and the world press, van Meegeren showed how he painted his “Vermeers,” including Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus. Van Meegeren was sentenced to a year in prison but died six weeks after he was sentenced. He is still cited as an enduring reminder of how art connoisseurship can sometimes go dreadfully wrong.
How did van Meegeren succeed in fooling so many learned and competent individuals? The painting had even passed the test of the museum restorer’s examination. Van Meegeren had developed an ingenious technique for aging the canvas, including damaging parts of it and then restoring those areas in order to give the picture an aged appearance. He was even adept in creating a network of fine cracks in the painting surface (craquelure) so that to the naked eye the picture would appear to meet one of the criteria one looks for in a seventeenth-century work. The eye of the beholder, alas, was completely fooled by the overall effect created by an artist who chose to use his uncanny talent for hoodwinking the powers that be.
I must say, however, that standing in front of that picture, and benefiting from today’s vastly greater understanding of Vermeer’s style as well as having viewed nearly every painting he ever painted, I thought the van Meegeren creation wasn’t that convincing from an aesthetic viewpoint. The facial types and the lighting effect do not correspond to what we know about Vermeer today. Today’s connoisseur would no doubt dismiss it outright, and a scientific examination would further confirm that it was a forgery. In fairness to the experts of that time, it is necessary to acknowledge that today we have so much more scholarly knowledge about artists and their techniques at our disposal, and a lot of this information is the result of scientific technology that has exploded in the last few decades.
Another fascinating story about the potential for forgery involves none other than the Mona Lisa itself.3 On August 21, 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre early in the morning. Rather bizarre is that when the guards noticed that the painting was missing, they assumed it had been taken to be photographed, and an entire day passed before the theft came to light. The Mona Lisa would remain at large for more than two years. In the process of a worldwide investigation, hundreds of people were questioned, including Pablo Picasso. Picasso was wrongly implicated because he had once purchased two stone sculptures that were later found to be stolen from the Louvre, and he had returned them.
For twenty-seven months, the investigators scoured the world looking for the lost treasure, only to learn that the Mona Lisa had been in Paris and Florence all along. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian carpenter who had once worked at the Louvre and had helped to build the glass case for the Mona Lisa, was found to be the culprit. Peruggia was discovered trying to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for 500,000 lira (about $100,000). When the museum reported him to the police, he was caught in the act.
In spi
te of seeking a large sum of money, Peruggia claimed his motivation was purely patriotic. “I am an Italian patriot [who] was seized by the desire to return to my Italy one of the treasures that Napoleon stole from her,” he said.4 The recovered painting went on display in Italy for a month before being returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Peruggia was sentenced to a little more than a year in prison, but his sentence was later reduced to seven months and nine days. Once released, he went on to lead an uneventful life. However, the Mona Lisa’s adventure did not end there.
In 1931, a reporter named Karl Decker came forth with some startling information. Decker said that at the time the Mona Lisa was found and returned to the Louvre, he had interviewed a man named Eduardo de Valfierno, who told a different story about the theft. Sworn to secrecy until Valfierno’s death, Decker was only now coming forward. Valfierno had been in the business of selling forged Spanish Master paintings with his partner, a conservator and skilled forger named Yves Chaudron.
In 1910, the pair moved to Paris, and according to Valfierno’s account, they hatched a plan to produce forged copies of the Mona Lisa. Valfierno convinced Peruggia to steal the painting so that its whereabouts would be in question. Chaudron would make several copies, which he would sell as the original to private foreign collectors, who might each be persuaded that his or her copy was the missing painting. He reasoned that if the Mona Lisa were ever recovered, he would simply tell his investors that the one in the Louvre was a fake and only they had the real thing.
When the alleged plot was revealed, people immediately became concerned about the authenticity of the lady at the Louvre. However, none of the supposed fakes ever emerged, and the Louvre has authenticated its treasure to the satisfaction of the art community. Even so, every once in a while there is a whisper: Is she for real?
Leonardo's Lost Princess Page 4
