Leonardo's Lost Princess

by Peter Silverman

  Epilogue

  Life’s Fleeting Grace

  Art is never finished, only abandoned.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  In 1519, Leonardo was an old man in his sixty-seventh year, and he was gravely ill, confined to his bed in the Clos Lucé, the French manor he had lived in for three years under the grace of his dear friend King Fran¸ois I. Perhaps in his imaginings, which were sometimes fevered, the work of his life swirled around him: the face of an angel gazing in reverence at the Christ child, the violent passion of the Battle of Anghiari, the pain in the faces of Jesus’s disciples as they learned of his betrayal by one of their own, the beautiful seductiveness of Lisa’s smile, the lovely countenances of the women of Ludovico’s court, the thousands of sketches made in what he now despaired were a futile attempt to pull the very souls of his subjects into view.

  According to the author Giorgio Vasari, as winter turned to spring, the king often came to sit by Leonardo’s bedside. He was supportive of Leonardo’s late-life turn to religion. After painting some of the most iconic religious themes ever made, Leonardo felt his life ebbing away and had found God. Although he was extremely weak, he would ask Fran¸ois and others to help him leave his chamber so he could take the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

  On his last day of life, his breath labored, Leonardo saw his beloved friend the king in the doorway, looking at him with great sadness. “Help me sit,” he said, and the king gently lifted him into an upright position.

  “I am dying,” Leonardo said with a faint voice, tinged with regret. “I have failed in this life to do full justice to my gift.”

  “No, no,” Fran¸ois protested. “You have honored us all with your work.”

  “I have offended God by not working as well as I ought to have. I pray to be forgiven.”

  Suddenly Leonardo shuddered and let out a gasping breath. The king raised his friend’s head to ease his suffering and held him in his arms as Leonardo passed on to the next life—the last thought in his mind that he had been a poor servant of his art.

  Those who mourned him would disagree. Vasari recorded in the aftermath of Leonardo’s leaving the earth, “The splendor of his great beauty could calm the saddest soul, and his words could move the most obdurate mind. His great strength could restrain the most violent fury, and he could bend an iron knocker or a horseshoe as if it were lead. He was liberal to his friends, rich and poor, if they had talent and worth; and indeed as Florence had the greatest of gifts in his birth, so she suffered an infinite loss in his death.”1

  The discovery and consecration of La Bella Principessa has been a gratifying culmination of my nearly half a century of love and passion for art. It is perhaps every collector’s swan song come to fruition. As Martin so poetically put it, “It is a star portrait of a stellar sitter. La Bella Principessa, as the poets would claim, testifies to Leonardo da Vinci’s victory over the transitory beauties of envious nature and the ravages of corrosive time. It is, I believe, an image that is bound to bring great pleasure to successive generations of viewers.”2

  But the joy and excitement are naturally tempered by a touch of melancholy and a sweet sadness for dear time’s waste—the profound realization that nothing is permanent and that the only certainty in life is uncertainty.

  What could better exemplify this human reality than the fate of the beautiful girl so sensitively depicted by the great Master, Leonardo da Vinci? Bianca Sforza, on the threshhold of a sumptuous courtly life, so full of promise, was suddenly struck down at the age of fourteen. Thanks to the miraculous hand of a genius, Bianca escaped a fate of oblivion, and we are able to appreciate her beauty and cherish her existence.

  It is sobering to think how close Bianca came, after five hundred hidden years, to nearly being lost to us again, perhaps this time forever. I have asked myself often where fate has taken her over the centuries, from the moment her portrait was most probably cut from the family album, no longer serving either a political or sentimental purpose. Was it first passed around by former friends or her husband, framed and hung in a family chapel, or hidden in a somber room, a faint remembrance? And with the vagaries of time and through the years of plague, warfare, political dislocations and turmoil, what happened to her? Our fantasies can run wild imagining where she lay hidden all those centuries until Giannino Marchig, an expert restorer and fine painter in his own right, found her, we know not where, prized her without knowing her origins or author, and lovingly restored her, for his own pleasure and the simple joy of bringing her back to life. And then, with some serious misappraisals, misjudgments and a quirk of fate, she fell into my almost unworthy hands—unworthy because I did not immediately understand or recognize her extraordinary qualities or importance. Fortunately, it seems my whole life as a passionate collector focalized and culminated on this one object, and through my experience and many contacts in the field of art, I was able to advance at an astonishing pace for a discovery of this magnitude. I hope this book pays adequate homage to those who made this an amazing success. It has been a truly rewarding adventure, and I am thankful for having played my part.

  Yet, at the back of my mind there will forever be a sigh and a thought for Bianca and Leonardo, as a sonnet by Shakespeare echoes in my mind:

  Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow

  For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night

  And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe

  And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight.

  La Bella Principessa, as the poets would claim, testifies to Leonardo da Vinci’s victory over the transitory beauties of envious nature and the ravages of corrosive time. It is, I believe, an image that is bound to bring great pleasure to successive generations of viewers.

  A century from now, when all who read these pages are but distant memories, Leonardo will, I pray, still be present in the world: a paradigm of perfection, an example to be emulated, a model for the geniuses of the future.

  Appendix

  Nicholas Turner’s Report on Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile

  After studying La Bella Principessa (then known as Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile) at my request, Nicholas Turner agreed to write his analysis, which appeared on Lumiere Technology’s website. He gave me permission to reprint it in full here. Turner’s careful study is a model of art critique, and his conclusion, that the portrait is a signature work by Leonardo da Vinci, carries the weight of his impressive experience, judgment, and intellect.

  Statement by Nicholas Turner Concerning the Portrait on Vellum by Leonardo

  Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile: Pen and brown ink and body color, over red, black, and white chalk, on vellum (laid down on panel); 330 × 239 mm.

  Technique and Style

  This finished, colored drawing on vellum shows a young woman in profile to the left, her hair descending in a single plait from beneath an elaborate headdress or caul, wearing late fifteenth-century Italian costume. Based on its style and left-handed shading, it can only be one of two things—an original work by Leonardo da Vinci or a copy, pastiche, or fake made to look like an autograph portrait by Leonardo.

  The extremely high quality of this mixed-media portrait and the evidence of scientific tests undertaken so far point resoundingly in favor of the first conclusion. According to carbon-14 tests, carried out by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, the parchment support may be dated between 1440 and 1650 (dating with this technology is always given within a two hundred–year period). In the interests of preserving the integrity of the work, physical samples of the materials used in the drawing have not yet been taken, and an exact analysis of the materials and the relative order in which they were applied require further clarification.

  Beyond firsthand examination of the Portrait of a Young Woman, an important starting point for any serious consideration of its quality is the sequence of high-resolution digital scans made early in 2008 by Lumiere Technology, a
Paris-based company specializing in multispectral digital technology, which has had extensive experience of Leonardo’s work, having carried out detailed studies of the Mona Lisa and the Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine). The scans of the new Portrait of a Young Woman, one of the most exciting discoveries in the field of Leonardo studies of recent years, may be consulted on Lumiere’s website (www.lumiere-technology.com). The digital “slideshow” also includes UV, infrared, false color, and raking light reflectographs, as well as an X-ray.

  Introducing this formidable array of technological support is a remarkable color scan of the whole portrait, which may be enlarged several times life-size, giving the viewer an opportunity to understand—better than with the naked eye—the exceptional quality of the drawing’s execution. Among the more noteworthy elements revealed in this way is the extent of the left-handed shading—the “signature feature” and most visible testimony of Leonardo’s authorship—especially in the face and neck and in the left background along the sitter’s profile.

  These areas of parallel hatching in pen in the background, behind the sitter’s face, are blocked in to give a contrast to the highlights of her flesh. Similar dense crosshatching is to be found throughout the artist’s drawings. Especially good examples of the type, also in pen, are found among Leonardo’s studies of anatomical subjects, for example, the series of studies of the human skull in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle (inv. nos. 19058r & v, 19057r & v, and 19059r; Zöllner, 2007, nos. 257–61, all repr.).

  The hatching strokes in the new portrait taper from lower right to upper left, just like the strokes defining the left background in the skull studies. Carlo Pedretti’s observation (abstract of introduction to the monograph Leonardo infinito by Alessandro Vezzosi, published in July 2008 [available as a PDF on the Lumiere Technology website]) that Leonardo’s strokes normally went from upper right to lower left applies to the shading on the right side of the skulls, not to the strokes to the left of the skulls. In other words, Leonardo wisely moved the pen from the object’s contour outward into the background, avoiding any possible stray overlapping back into the finished object. It is thus not surprising that he would have directed the pen away from the sitter’s face and neck toward the upper left in the new portrait. Had there been background shading on the right side of the new portrait, one would have expected the lines to move from upper left to lower right. However, there was no need for any shading on the right side to set off the dark hair against the neutral light background.

  In fact, all aspects of the shading of this portrait provide visual testimony of Leonardo’s theories of illumination, as expounded in his Treatise on Painting, a posthumous and somewhat random selection from his writings. The areas of midtone indicated by the crosshatching in the left background of the Portrait, which are seen at the woman’s profile and, to a lesser degree, at her neck and breast, are not cast shadows but local adjustments to the background to increase slightly its darkness. In his treatise (Dover reprint, Precept no. 200), Leonardo talks specifically about the need for the background to make the subject stand out or detach itself sufficiently, contrasting light with dark and dark with light. Without the visual foil of a midtone darker than the rest of the background, the lights of the woman’s forehead, nose, mouth, and chin would not appear in such impressive relief as they do. The flesh of her neck immediately under her chin and her lower chest, being a darker tone than that of her face, has less of this misty shading in the adjacent background to act as contrast. Since her bodice is appreciably darker than the background, the area in front of it (like the whole right side behind her hair) has no such crosshatching.

  Another feature of the portrait that is demonstrated in the Lumiere Technology scan is the presence of several pentiments, especially in the profile of the face and where the line of the hair meets the background at the top of the woman’s head. Much attention was paid to the exact line of the nose, another key point in Leonardo’s theoretical discussion of ideal beauty in his treatise.

  The first of the enlargeable scans also highlights the artist’s intense concentration on detail—from the minutiae of the facial features and the pattern of the woman’s dress to each knot of her caul. Such an obsessive quest to record evenhandedly the appearance of everything within the artist’s view, seemingly down to the last particle, is a characteristic of Leonardo’s creativity.

  Among the more readily observed passages of pen-and-ink drawing, even with the naked eye, are the slender contours defining the young woman’s profile, her shoulders and costume. Such a delicate, subtly modulated outline is encountered in other examples of Leonardo’s head studies, for example, as Prof. Alessandro Vezzosi first observed, the metalpoint Head and Shoulders of a Woman (ca. 1488–1492) in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, where the sitter is similarly viewed in profile, but this time with her head facing right (inv. no. 12505r; Zöllner, 2007, no. 187, repr.). Another close stylistic parallel, though later and probably a pricked cartoon for a painted portrait, is the black and red chalk Portrait of Isabella d’Este (ca. 1499–1500) in the Louvre (inv. no. 753; Zöllner, 2007, no. XXI, repr.). All of these examples, but especially the present work, since it is technically the most akin to a painting, satisfy Precept no. 194 (“Of the Beauty of Faces”) from Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, which states that “you must not mark any muscles with hardness of line, but let the soft light glide upon them, and terminate imperceptibly in delightful shadows; from this will arise grace and beauty to the face.”

  Drawn with an even finer line are the areas of dense parallel hatching that model the sitter’s face and neck. These passages of penwork are readily apparent in the Lumiere Technology scan, but they are mostly covered by the delicate cream, light pink, and white passages of body color of her face, which create a smoky gray sfumato effect that is typical of Leonardo.

  The drawing of the woman’s hair is among the most beautiful and spontaneous of all the details in the Portrait, as well as the most complex in its coloration. Here Leonardo was not ashamed to mix his media in what for him seems to have been the most unusual combination of brown ink and brown-red wash over black, red, and white chalk. Nevertheless, the range of textures and colors suggested by the different media enabled him to convey the velvety sheen of hair and to distinguish subtly between those parts that are relatively loose and in the light, at the top of the head, and others in shadow, at the back, with some of the hair held in place by the mesh of the caul and the rest bound tightly together in the plait.

  The pen lines flow in rivulets down her head. Together with the darker, even more broadly indicated strokes of the brush and wash, they represent the descending strands of hair that are brought together into the single thick braid that hangs down the middle of her back and is cut off by the bottom of the composition. Both the underdrawing in chalk and the lines in both pen and wash are spaced farther apart at the top of the woman’s head, allowing the parchment ground to show through. This creates a highlight in the hair that establishes the crown of her head, the form of which continues beautifully the curve of her brow. At the side of her head the tresses of hair are parted even more subtly to indicate the shape of the ear beneath.

  There are few surviving drawn portraits with which to make technical comparisons, and it is not easy to find parallels for the more intuitive drawing in mixed media of the hair in other works by Leonardo. In Study of a Winged Figure; Allegory with Fortune (ca. 1480–1481), in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1895–9–15–482; Zöllner, 2007, no. 387, repr.), the freedom of both the penwork and its accompanying brown wash do, however, approximate to its rhythmical movement and show the same indifference to neatness. Moreover, the use of pen and brown wash in combination with body color does occur in one category of Leonardo’s drawn oeuvre, those of maps and plans, of which several have survived, although these are without exception done on paper.

  Support

  Also apparently unprecedented is the use of vellum or parchment as a support
for the new portrait. Being so far in advance of his time as a painter, draughtsman and thinker, it is not surprising that Leonardo was also a technical innovator. For the making of drapery studies, he pioneered drawing with the brush and body color on linen, showing that he was prepared to experiment when it came to finding the right support for different types of representation. Although no other work by him exists on vellum, this alone does not exclude his authorship. Professor Alessandro Vezzosi has pointed out that Leonardo, in his Treatise on Painting, recommended the use of vellum as a support for drawing: “take some skin of a goat, soft and well prepared, and then dry it; and when it is ready, use it for drawing, and then you can use a sponge to cancel what you first drew and make a second attempt” (quoted from Vezzosi, not apparently in Dover edition of the Treatise). The artist has successfully exploited the pitted texture of the material in his rendering of the figure’s flesh and clothes. It would be interesting to establish whether the vellum used as the support for the Portrait is indeed from goat.

  Dating

  The Portrait has been dated around 1481–1482, that is, in the time shortly after Leonardo’s transfer to Milan from Florence. (This probably took place during the course of 1482, sometime after the last recorded payment in Florence in September 1481.) There are two strong points in favor of such a dating—the drawing’s style and the sitter’s dress. From the point of view of the style, the legacy of Florence is clearly to be seen in her facial type, with its echoes of heads by Andrea del Verrocchio, Lorenzo di Credi (who trained together with Leonardo in Verrocchio’s workshop), and others. The purity of the woman’s silhouette set against the light background, suggestive of a paper cutout, recalls the equally uncompromising but more complex outline of the Warrior with Helmet and Breastplate (ca. 1472), in the British Museum (inv. no. 1895–9–15–474; Zöllner, 2007, p. 11, repr., and p. 365, no. 191, repr.). Although the Portrait is dissimilar in actual detail from the Warrior in almost every respect, it is interesting to note that the structure of the warrior’s eye and eyelids are close to those of the woman in the Portrait. The British Museum drawing has been interpreted by some critics as a copy, or adaptation, of a work by Verrocchio, Darius.