This and other new findings allow the reader to make discoveries for himself, without the help of systematic indices or listings, and I actually think that it is better not to mention too many of these new findings—in order not to deprive the reader of the excitement that these will arouse.
Other notable critics and art historians before me have seen and examined it—none of whom wish to be mentioned by name. The exception is Nicholas Turner, who has issued a declaration in which he limits himself to describing and commenting on what he has seen of the original, with particular attention paid to the left-handed execution. According to him, the strokes in the background beyond the sitter’s profile move from lower right to upper left: since he did have access to a technical examination, this process needs to be checked, since it can be demonstrated that the direction of the strokes in Leonardo’s celebrated drawings of skulls of 1489 in the Royal Library at Windsor is the opposite. I must confess that an exception, however, must be made for one new previously unpublished item—too important to be skimmed over lightly. I refer to the large drawing on parchment of a Young Woman Seen in Profile to the Left, dressed in a lavish Renaissance outfit without jewellery, and presented as a presumed portrait of a “betrothed bride,” the sort of portrait that one could imagine being sent to a distant prospective groom—as was the case of Emperor Maximilian, who lived a long distance from Bianca Maria Sforza, the niece of Ludovico il Moro.
This fascinating story, which concluded with the lavish marriage festivities in 1494, and other similar stories in the political manoeuvres on the part of her astute uncle, not to mention the various aspects of the portrait’s complex attributional problems, are told by Vezzosi with the same restrained eloquence with which he has tackled every other theme or problem. I owe to him my knowledge of this extraordinary work of art, in the first instance from a digital image and then firsthand in the original. My first impression, perhaps influenced by the wooden panel to which the parchment has been attached, on the back of which one sees two old customs stamps, was that this is the sort of wooden support applied to boxes of chocolates in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is also curious that on the only occasion that the work has been described in print, when it was sold at Christie’s, New York, in January 1998, it was attributed to a nineteenth-century German artist and estimated at between $12,000 and $16,000. It was, in fact, sold for $21,850—a surprising result for a work attributed to an anonymous nineteenth-century German hand.
Another reason to be perplexed is the costume, where one would expect to see a detachable sleeve held in place by laces. Here instead one has a triangular opening (but not large enough to squeeze an arm through) with elegant, embroidered Leonardo-style knots along the sides. Impeccable, however, is the typical Lombard hairstyle, with the hair gathered in a “coazzone” which falls along the back of the sitter and is held in place at various points with ribbons—all drawn without a single perspectival error.
There were also curious aspects to the story of the reattribution of that painting, which are brought to light in my essay on it as a political allegory, published in 1990 in the volumes of miscellaneous studies in honor of Luigi Firpo. In his sober and essential account of the new study on vellum, Vezzosi dwells on the naturalistic elements of the image, including the head-and-shoulders portrait format, as an attribute of movement or timely decorum, which gives it its extraordinary and unexpected power: “Looking at the compositional schema, the curvilinear system is of such extreme purity that it has always made me think of an innovation on the scale of that of Mademoiselle Pogany by the twentieth-century sculptor Brancusi.”
8. Nicholas Turner, “Statement by Nicholas Turner Concerning the Portrait on Vellum by Leonardo,” Lumiere Technology website, www.lumiere-technology.com, September 2008. For the full report, see the appendix.
9. Timothy Clifford, “How I Know the New Portrait Is by Leonardo,” Times (London), October 14, 2009.
10. Ibid.
8. Beloved Daughter
1. An account derived from Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists and Kemp’s Leonardo. Also according to Vasari, in The Last Supper Leonardo finished Judas’s head, “which is a true portrait of treachery and cruelty,” but the head of Christ he left imperfect. The art scholar D. R. David Wright also weighed in on the surface Leonardo used, writing, “Given the vellum ground I would guess (only a guess) that he would have worked on a wooden tabletop, or a wooden board held in the hand.” Wright references a copy of a painting by Baccio Bandinelli in the Gardner Museum in Boston in which the artist holds a 3-by-3-foot board with a drawing attached (edges curling to reveal the board) as typical of the era.
2. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 289–290.
3. Ibid., 290.
4. Ibid.
5. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 24.
6. Martin Kemp, “Leonardo and the Ladies,” Art Quarterly and Review, Spring 2010.
7. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 290.
8. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 80.
9. Martin Kemp, “Leonardo da Vinci: Science and Poetic Impulse,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 133 (1985), 196–214; see also A. Giulini, “Bianca Sanseverino Sforzafigliadi Lodovico il Moro,”Archivio storico lombardo, 39 (1912), 233–252.
10. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 81.
11. Ibid., 82.
12. Elisabetta Gnignera to Martin Kemp, e-mail, April 11, 2010. Details of hair and clothing may be found in Gnignera, I Soperchi Ornamenti. Ad nexus caps are mentioned in the wedding trousseau of Bianca Maria Sforza (1472–1510), who married Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1494, and Gnignera notes “almost total similarities” between the ad nexus caps in La Bella Principessa and in La Dama con la Reticella (attributed to Ambrogio de Predis), thought to portray Anna Sforza, Ludovico’s niece, who married Alfonso d’ Este in 1491 and died during childbirth in 1497 at the age of twenty-one.
But whereas the cap in La Dama con la Reticella is a sumptuous affair made of silk ribbons and lined with pearls, the one in La Bella Principessa appears to be made of linen. This, says Gnignera, suggests everyday use, but it could also tie in with Martin Kemp’s suggestion that La Bella Principessa’s plain costume and absence of jewelery suggests it to have been a memorial portrait. Gnignera concludes that the hairstyle in La Bella Principessa was in use at the Sforza Court in Milan for less than a decade (between 1491 and 1499), when the braided Spanish style gave way to the freer, braidless French style. Gnignera believes that the subject must have been “a lady very close to [Duchess] Beatrice d’Este.”
See also E. Welch, “Art of the Edge: Hair, Hats, and Hands in Renaissance Italy,” Renaissance Studies 195, no. 22 (2008), 1–29.
13. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 71.
14. Vezzosi, “Nuptial Portrait of a Young Woman.”
15. Geddo, “A ‘Pastel’ by Leonardo da Vinci.”
16. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 84.
9. The Art of Fingerprints
1. Biro’s biographical details are from his own story at www.peterpaulbiro.com and conversations with the author.
2. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 161.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 44.
10. The World Reacts
1. “Art: Every Line Will Be Alive,” Time, September 12, 1960.
2. Elisabetta Povoledo, “Dealer Who Sold Portrait Joins Leonardo Debate,” New York Times, August 29, 2008.
3. Richard Day, Artful Tales: The Unlikely and Implausible Journal of an Art Dealer (London, privately published, 2009).
4. Gene Weingarten, “Pearls before Breakfast,” Washington Post, April 8, 2007.
5. According to various sources, the ten most expensive paintings ever sold are: (1) Jackson Pollock, No. 5, 1948, for $140 million (2006; alleged, for the records are in some dispute); (2) Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, for $135 million (2006); (3) Pablo Picasso, Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, for $106.5 million (2010); (4) Pablo Pic
asso, Gar¸on à la Pipe, for $104 million (2004); (5) Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar with Cat, for $95.2 million (2006); (6) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, for $82.5 million (1990; one of two versions); (7) Claude Monet, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas, for $80,451,178 (2008); (8) Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Bal au Moulin de la Galette, for $78 million (1990); (9) Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, for $76.7 million (2002); and (10) Vincent van Gogh, Portrait de l’Artiste sans Barbe, for $71.5 million (1998).
6. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, pp. 295–296, provides some details of Leonardo’s work on The Battle of Anghiari:
By the excellence of the works of this most divine of artists his fame was grown so great that all who delighted in art, and in fact the whole city, desired to have some memorial of it. And the Gonfalonier and the chief citizens agreed that, the Great Hall of the Council having been rebuilt, Leonardo should be charged to paint some great work there. Therefore, accepting the work, Leonardo began a cartoon [a preliminary sketch in the size of the work] representing the story of Nicolo Piccinino, captain of the Duke Filippo of Milan, in which he drew a group of cavalry fighting for a standard, representing vividly the rage and fury both of the men and the horses, two of which, with their forefeet entangled, are making war no less fiercely with their teeth than those who ride them. We cannot describe the variety of the soldiers’ garments, with their crests and other ornaments, and the masterly power he showed in the forms of the horses, whose muscular strength and beauty of grace he knew better than any other man. It is said that for drawing this cartoon he erected an ingenious scaffolding that could be raised and lowered. And desiring to paint the wall in oil, he made a composition to cover the wall; but when he began to paint upon it, it proved so unsuccessful that he shortly abandoned it altogether.
There is a story that having gone to the bank for the sum which he was accustomed to receive from the Gonfalonier Piero Soderini every month, the cashier wanted to give him some packets of farthings, but he refused to take them, saying, ‘“I am no farthing painter.” As some accused him of having cheated Soderini in not finishing the picture, there arose murmurs against him, upon which Leonardo, by the help of his friends, collected the money and restored it to him, but Piero would not accept it. [This last bit is typical Leonardo; his career was fraught with money issues!]
7. Mark Irving, “On the Trail of a Lost Leonardo,” Times (London), May 16, 2006.
11. The $100 Million Blunder?
1. The details of this story were provided to me by Jeanne Marchig in a personal interview in February 2010 and an interview with her lawyer, Richard Altman, in January 2011.
2. Ernest Samuels (Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend ) wrote that a number of portraits owned by Berenson were deposited with Giannino Marchig in 1944. Berenson, who was sequestered in Tuscany during the war, also wrote a diary of the period, Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, which was published by Simon and Schuster in 1952.
3. Meryle Secrest, Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography (Littlehampton, UK: Littlehampton Book Services, 1980).
4. Marchig et al. v. Christie’s Inc., 10 Civ. 3624 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 13, 2010).
5. Judith Bresler, “Bella Principessa and the Hazard of Expert Opinion,” Art Law, September 2010. Bresler is also the coauthor, with Ralph Lerner, of Art Law: The Guide for Collectors, Investors, Dealers and Artists (New York: Practising Law Institute, 2009).
6. Marchig et al. v. Christie’s Inc., 10 Civ. 3624 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 31, 2011).
7. Simon Hewitt, “Marchig Vows to Fight On in ‘Leonardo Case.’” Antiques Trade Gazette, March 7, 2011.
12. The Art World Strikes Back
1. Richard Dorment, “La Bella Principessa: A £ 100m Leonardo or a Copy?” Daily Telegraph (London), April 12, 2010.
2. David Grann, “The Making of a Masterpiece,” New Yorker, July 12, 2010.
3. Press release, www.peterpaulbiro.com.
4. Peter Paul Biro v. Conde Nast, a division of Advance Magazine Publishers Inc., David Grann, et al. Filed June 29, 2011, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
13. What Constitutes Proof?
1. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 187.
2. Theresa Franks, “Getting to the Truth of Authentication,” Fine Arts Registry, December 17, 2006. The Fine Arts Registry (www.fineartsregistry.com) is a registration system for art, purporting to ensure authenticity.
3. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 9.
4. Turner, “Statement by Nicholas Turner Concerning the Portrait on Vellum by Leonardo.”
5. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 8.
6. Theresa Franks, “Getting to the Truth of Authentication.”
7. “Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasures,” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 5, 2010–January 17, 2011, and at the National Gallery, London, February 23–May 30, 2011.
8. Giovanni Morelli, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Works (London: John Murray, 1900).
9. Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (Charleston: Bibliolife, 2011; orig. 1873), viii.
10. Bernard Berenson, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1953), ix.
11. Thomas Hoving, “Becoming an Art Connoisseur,” Art Appreciation, Dummies.com, www.dummies.com/how-to/content/becoming-an-art-connoisseur.html.
12. John Gapper, “The Forger’s Story,” Financial Times, January 21, 2011.
14. Miracle in Warsaw
1. Pascal Cotte and Martin Kemp, “La Bella Principessa and the Warsaw Sforziad,” September 28, 2011. The full report is available at www.lumiere-technology.com.
2. Simon Hewitt, “New Evidence Strengthens Leonardo Claim for Portrait,” ATG, October 3, 2010.
3. Dalya Alberge, “Is This Portrait a Lost Leonardo?” Guardian, September 27, 2011.
4. “The Mystery of Leonardo da Vinci’s 13th Portrait Elucidated,” Le Figaro, September 30, 2011.
5. “Martin Kemp on Lost Leonardos,” Artinfo.com, October 14, 2011.
Epilogue: Life’s Fleeting Grace
1. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, 297–298.
2. Kemp and Cotte, La Bella Principessa, 190.
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