Leonardo's Lost Princess

by Peter Silverman

  4. Of those whom Dorment cited as rejecting the attribution, not one had actually been to the premises of the research laboratory or had even seen the picture.

  5. Those who reported on the discovery, such as journalists from Der Spiegel and the Times of London, as well as those who ultimately endorsed the attribution, made the effort to visit the premises of Lumiere Technology in Paris—something Dorment did not do.

  6. Leonardo’s palm print and thumbprint are indeed on the parchment. This was discovered by the Lumiere lab and confirmed by the forensic specialist Peter Paul Biro, assisted by a former director of the Canadian equivalent of Scotland Yard.

  7. In denigrating by implication the exhibition hall where La Bella Principessa was on view, Dorment failed to mention that the drawing was in the excellent company of works by Raphael, Michelangelo, Filippino Lippi, and others, in a comprehensive survey of the Renaissance, with loans from many major Italian institutions, including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

  That was just a start. The Daily Telegraph was not interested in publishing my rebuttal. I sensed that some minds were closing. The Germans have an expression, “Papier ist geduldig,” which means in essence that humans have a tendency to believe what they see in print. This affliction has grabbed hold of many reviewers, who have read the original catalog attribution and can see no further.

  In June 2010, Martin gave a lecture on La Bella Principessa before a sold-out crowd of five hundred at the National Gallery in London. Nicholas Penny was on hand to introduce the talk. He noted that even though he did not necessarily agree with Martin’s conclusions, he respected him anyway. It was quite a backhanded compliment, but Martin, as always, was gracious. A friend who was present at the lecture told me that Martin was brilliant and convincing. He received a standing ovation from the crowd.

  The critics weren’t through with us yet. Indeed, they had only just begun. In early July, Martin, Pascal, and Jean Penicaut received an e-mail from Peter Paul Biro. Biro’s tone had a forced casualness that seemed suspicious. “In the next edition of the New Yorker magazine a potentially prejudiced and cherry-picked article is likely to appear about me, my work, and the drawing,” he wrote. “I gave the interview because I always want to be seen as transparent and available. The New Yorker is owned by Condé Nast, which in turn is owned by Sy Newhouse—a major client of Christie’s. Christie’s is on the hook for $100 million. So, just to give you a heads up . . .

  “I have no skeletons in my closet,” he continued, “and I am always ready to answer any questions, as I did with any other interviewer. He [the New Yorker reporter, David Grann] spent most of his time digging into my past going back some 20–30 years ago when my family was running a small art gallery and a restoration workshop. . . . I am not worried, and we have good attorneys to handle this if it gets out of hand. But I wanted you all to know before it hits the newsstands. But again, we have a situation where when they don’t know what to do with the information, they attack the person.”

  Biro’s heads-up gave us all reason for concern, and rightly so. The article, published July 12 and titled “The Making of a Masterpiece,” was a scathing declamation against Biro that used some of his personal credibility problems to—by extension—call into question the Leonardo attribution for La Bella Principessa.2

  I felt an initial sense of disheartenment. I realized that Biro’s background could not, practically speaking, affect his role in analyzing the fingerprints on La Bella Principessa. Biro had never touched the original. He had not discovered the fingerprints. He had merely studied what was already there and drawn a conclusion, which was then backed up by André, Turcotte, a retired fingerprint specialist from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That being said, it was also true that if Biro’s reputation was being dragged through the mud, it was definitely not helpful to us.

  What especially distressed me was that Biro, with full knowledge that he did indeed have skeletons in his closet—especially involving the Jackson Pollock print controversy—should have been more circumspect. What possessed him to give such an extensive interview to a serious journalist like Grann, knowing that he’d be on the hunt for a juicy story? Still, there was no question that Biro’s work on La Bella Principessa could withstand scrutiny.

  I got a copy of the New Yorker and started to read the article. I had to admit that it was a beautifully written piece, full of color and intrigue. In the beginning, Grann wrote in charming detail about Biro’s forensic art nest in Montreal—including the smells of his wife Joanne’s French cooking coming from the kitchen. But then, many pages into the article, he began scraping away at Biro’s reputation. The centerpiece of Grann’s critique of Biro was his questionable actions in the search for authentication of Pollock’s fingerprints. Grann also highlighted blemishes in Biro’s past business dealings.

  The former investigation focused on the Matter controversy. Alex Matter was a filmmaker whose parents had been friends of Pollock’s. Matter wanted to know if some paintings he found in his father’s Long Island storage compartment were works of Pollock’s. He sent Biro a photograph of a fingerprint on one of them, and Biro found six points that matched the fingerprint on the paint can he’d found in Pollock’s studio. However, experts weighed in against a Pollock attribution, especially after finding pigments that were not available until after Pollock died. The incident was embarrassing for Biro.

  In addition, Grann detailed old family financial problems, dating back several decades. The fact that the Biro family once had issues with creditors seems irrelevant to the question of Biro’s scientific credibility.

  As I read, I could see the journalistic schemata developing: Biro had made questionable calls in the past; ergo, his reading of our portrait was also questionable. But I believed the article had drawn the wrong conclusion when it came to La Bella Principessa, because Biro’s ability to read, compare, and analyze fingerprints on works of art was basically sound, and he did have an extensive Leonardo database, which could not be faulted.

  I had to admire Grann’s skill as a journalist and a writer, but I found many points of dispute. In particular, I was frustrated by the way Grann used “expert” opinions. He quoted Hugo Chapman, an old acquaintance of mine from the days when he worked in the Old Masters department at Christie’s; Chapman was now head of the Prints and Drawings Department at the British Museum. “The market is a fairly efficient place,” Chapman said. “This would be an amazing miss.” I wondered about the characterization. The near meltdowns of the market in recent years would give pause to anyone inclined to call it “efficient.”

  As an interesting aside, during my research period after acquiring La Bella Principessa, I had been to see Chapman at the British Museum to look through his boxes of Leonardo drawings. At the time, I showed him a photograph of the portrait, and he told me he wanted to remain noncommittal until he’d seen the original. “I am not a Leonardo expert,” he said. Yet here he was making a star turn in Grann’s article.

  The other man quoted in Grann’s article was the former Met director Thomas Hoving. Although he had great credentials and was an expert on fakes, Hoving never saw La Bella Principessa before pronouncing on its authenticity. (Now that he is deceased, he won’t have a chance.)

  Grann waxed eloquent about the special nature of art connoisseurs, writing, “Connoisseurship is rife with flaws. It is susceptible to error, arrogance, even corruption. And yet there is something about that ‘strange breed of cat,’ as Hoving referred to the best connoisseurs, who could truly see with greater depth—who, after decades of training and study and immersion in an artist’s work, could experience a picture in a way that most of us can’t. Connoisseurship is not merely the ability to discern whether an art work is authentic or fake; it is also the ability to recognize whether a work is a masterpiece.”

  Yes, yes, yes. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why it is so inexplicable that Grann did not seek out the most highly regarded connoisseurs of the Renaissance and Leonardo for his arti
cle. Where is Mina? Where are Vezzosi and Geddo? Where are Turner and Pedretti?

  Grann’s article left the impression that Biro discovered the fingerprint, with the implication that he had forged it. I believed that this impression must be corrected, so I wrote a letter to the editor to the New Yorker, and it was published in the August 2 issue:

  In his piece questioning Biro’s methods, Grann describes the process of authenticating a work of art, “La Bella Principessa,” that I helped acquire in 2007. Unfortunately, the controversy surrounding Biro distracts from the findings of eminent scholars, none of whom relied upon the fingerprint. The Leonardo was first published by Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, in 2008, long before the discovery of the fingerprint. Biro’s role was minor—he did not discover the fingerprint, nor did he ever have possession of the original. The fingerprint was first identified by Lumiere Technology, which has made all of the technical information freely available on its Web site. Moreover, as Grann states, no claim has been made that the print analysis meets forensic standards. In addition to those named in Grann’s piece, scholars who have endorsed the work include the doyenne of art historians, Professor Mina Gregori; Dr. Claudio Strinati, the former head of Rome’s museum authority and now with the Italian Ministry of Culture; and Dr. Cristina Geddo, a leading scholar of Leonardo’s followers, who published her findings in the scholarly journal ARTES (University of Pavia). “La Bella”’s current exhibition, in Gothenburg, Sweden, is under the patronage of the Italian government.

  Biro seemed stunned and demoralized by Grann’s article, which he had expected to turn out quite differently. He issued a statement full of personal pain:

  I was dismayed by David Grann’s article in the New Yorker and indignant about the unjust accusations that have been levelled against me. The claims are quite preposterous and the light in which I am cast is a travesty of my character. I hold to the highest ethical behaviour and categorically deny ever having forged paintings or fingerprints. Moreover, I have always striven for the best possible standards while working actively for the broader acceptance of fingerprint evidence on paintings, now understood and appreciated by many. I believe this highly personal attack is solely designed as a crude attempt to undermine my credibility. Nowhere does the author refer to the numerous clients who regularly attest to my professional integrity.3

  Later, in June 2011, Biro filed a $2 million lawsuit against Grann in Manhattan federal court, which stated, “Through selective omission, innuendo and malicious sarcasm, the article paints a portrait of the plaintiff which has no basis in reality, and which has been highly damaging to his reputation.”4

  Although I believed that Biro had brought much of this problem on himself, I felt sorry for him. I still believed in his incredible skill and his impressive database. I didn’t care about his past problems with creditors.

  I accept the fact that there are differences of opinion among experts. I was prepared for the flood of dissent. But even I was surprised by the fury of it. What particularly frustrated me about Grann’s article was that the journalistic credibility of the New Yorker gave it extra momentum. Grann’s suspicions were republished in dozens of venues and were perfect ammunition for those who were seeking to cast aspersions. I had expected a great deal of opposition to the attribution, because new discoveries by their very nature are rarely received unanimously. But I hadn’t expected such hysteria or blatantly biased responses. Ordinary people were writing to me, saying, “Mr. Silverman, thank you for bringing us an unknown Leonardo,” but I heard none of that appreciation or awe in the media. I know that sounds peevish, but my feelings were hurt.

  To be fair, there were honest critics, and with these I was eager to open a debate. As long as a critic was motivated by a search for the truth, I found it very positive. One such person was Dr. Francis Ames-Lewis, a distinguished art historian, a professor of the history of Renaissance art at Birkbeck College at the University of London, and the vice president of the Leonardo da Vinci Society. I was curious about his opinion on the Leonardo attribution, and I wrote to him detailing some of the criticism that had been directed at Martin since the publication of his book. Dr. Ames-Lewis won my enduring respect for the thoughtfulness of his response to me on August 21, 2010:

  I confess that I have not followed the ebb and flow of discussion about your drawing on a day-by-day basis: I find this sort of backbiting and vituperative polemics distasteful and regrettable. But I am also saddened that you and Martin have both had to withstand any unnecessarily “hysterical” criticism. I quite agree that no honest critic should dismiss the attribution without having seen the drawing; conversely, I do not feel able to accept the attribution without seeing the drawing. But I am well inclined towards putting my name behind it: I find that in his book Martin argues the art-historical case very plausibly, and Pascal’s scientific evidence contributes significantly towards strengthening Martin’s case. The lecture that Martin and Pascal gave, under the auspices of the Leonardo da Vinci Society, at the Courtauld on 9 May was fascinating and excellent.

  He went on to say that he was “intrigued” by the possibility of a Leonardo attribution because of its implications for the history of drawing techniques in late fifteenth-century Italy. “I look forward to someday seeing the original,” he wrote, and I hoped that day would not be long in coming.

  Once Martin and Pascal published their findings in book form, the reviewers began to respond. My correspondence file was growing fat with the back-and-forth communications with certain reviewers, some of them friends and colleagues, who I believed failed to give La Bella Principessa her due. One of these was Professor David Ekserdjian, whose review in Burlington Magazine was highly critical. I had known David and his wife, Susan, who worked as a journalist for the Financial Times, for many years, and I wrote to him on November 5, 2010:

  If you recall, I offered you, very early on, over two years ago, the opportunity to actually study the drawing in the original, and to view the findings of Lumiere Technology. You never acted on my offer, which is fair enough. But why would you then make statements about the work without even having seen it? Surely this is something you as a scholar would not accept as normal procedure. Martin Kemp absolutely refused to pronounce before seeing the Bella Principessa in flesh and blood, so to speak, followed by Pedretti, Catherine Goguel, Mina Gregori, Claudio Strinati, Nicholas Turner, Simon Dickinson, Alessandro Vezzosi, Francesco Buranelli, Cristina Geddo and others. If you have any respect for these people, many of whom have devoted their lives to Leonardo studies, and [whom] I would imagine you consider esteemed colleagues, why would you give them the scholarly equivalent of a slap in the face by making such pronouncements?

  I reminded him that the portrait was available to anyone who cared to make the effort to view it, and I urged him once again to take me up on my offer to show it to him.

  David replied promptly on the same day:

  I have just reread my review attentively and cannot understand why you think I have given anyone “the scholarly equivalent of a slap in the face.” . . . All I have done is to express a strong suspicion about what it is, absolutely not a certainty. It is true that you encouraged me to see the drawing, but I am an academic and do not have the means to come to Paris. Equally, I have never accepted even expenses to see a work of art, and—perfectly reasonably—you did not bring the mountain to Mohammed, so to speak.

  David disputed my strong belief that one could not pass judgment without viewing a work in person:

  I do not believe it makes sense to refuse to make an explicitly provisional judgment about a work one has not seen—you may never express an opinion under such circumstances, but I do so all the time, not least when people send me images via e-mail. After all, there are countless works in museums I have never visited or in accessible private collections that I have not seen but need to judge. The same goes for works that have been destroyed, such as the casualties of the Flakturm fire in Berlin. Are we n
ot able to hazard a guess about the authorship of the “Signorelli” Pan and the “Caravaggio” Saint Matthew, or indeed the frescoes in the Eremitani Chapel?

  I realise we are unlikely to agree about the Principessa, which I regret on a personal level, but not on an academic one. The truth is one’s ideas are constantly disputed and rejected, and I am perfectly relaxed about that. I do not need people to agree with my views: I just hope they will attend to my reasoning and make their own minds up. Moreover, as I tried to say, if you are right (which alas I do not believe), then in the end you are likely to win the argument—the jury does not stay out forever.

  I appreciated David’s points, and I had a lot of respect for him, but I thought he was being a bit disingenuous—especially regarding his failure to see the portrait. We were, after all, talking about what many scholars were calling the most important art historical discovery in generations. And failing his ability to travel to Paris or Sweden, he might have attended one of two talks given in London at the Courtauld and the National Gallery.

  I had little patience for those who would pass judgment on La Bella Principessa without viewing her, especially when their judgments could prove so damaging to the cause. Some might even say that David’s review was tainted by his former association with Christie’s, although I didn’t believe that. After all the vicious, and to my mind unfair, shots fired at Martin Kemp, I and others I respect have still failed to see scientific evidence to dispute the science discussed in the book—which actually seems somewhat above the heads of many scholars for its technical arguments. It is hard to believe, but even today there are people who refuse Darwin and accept the biblical creation myth in spite of science. People believe what they want, but the fact is that Lumiere Technology has the absolute scientific evidence proving the attribution.

  Charles de Gaulle once asked, “How does one govern a country that makes five hundred cheeses?” In the same spirit, how does one obtain a consensus on an artist like Leonardo when there are scores of self-proclaimed Leonardo experts? One has only to Google “La Bella Principessa” and “Leonardo” to see some of the most far-fetched opinions by these self-styled experts, who are often anonymous, including: “It can’t be by Leonardo because the neck is too long.” Or, “It has never been documented in his body of works.”