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

by Peter Silverman; Catherine Whitney

  Martin Kemp also testified at the trial, suggesting that the choice of Leonardo by Brown was publicity driven. “The ‘Michelangelo Code’ would not have had the same impact,” he said. Later, in an interview with ArtNet magazine, Martin expanded on the idea. “I often ask myself whether the book would have been as popular if it had been The Michelangelo Code or The Shakespeare Code,” he mused. “Would it have had the same sales? And I think the answer probably is no. There is an element of strangeness and something almost magical about Leonardo, both in terms of his work and personality. He served Dan Brown’s needs incredibly well.”

  The interviewer wondered if The Da Vinci Code had harmed Leonardo in some way by diminishing his work and his persona. Martin only laughed. “I am not too worried about that. The book is irresponsible in places because it’s not just saying, ‘I am a novel,’ but it is setting itself out as having a certain factual basis, which is not honest. I am on the other hand happy that people are engaging with the historical character and I am keen to build on that interest. Leonardo is not damaged by that. If you do a crappy production of Shakespeare . . . it will not harm Shakespeare. He is still there and Leonardo is still there despite whatever misleading ideas people might have. I would rather people have some engagement than no engagement at all.”5

  The trial garnered a lot of publicity, and in Vezzosi’s mind it vindicated Leonardo, although he could do nothing to stop Dan Brown’s steady rise to fame and fortune. (Brown became one of the wealthiest authors on the planet in the process.) Now Vezzosi was in the process of completing an important monograph, titled Leonardo Infinito, with an introduction by Carlo Pedretti, the world’s most senior Leonardo specialist and director of the Armand Hammer Foundation.6 Cappuzzo suggested that Vezzosi might be willing to include La Bella Principessa.

  Vezzosi was interested in seeing the portrait, but he warned that his monograph was literally on the verge of going to press. I asked whether there was any window of opportunity. Just the tiniest, he replied, because he was unwilling to lose the chance completely.

  We arranged for Vezzosi to see digital images and the Lumiere lab work, and he was immediately struck with a strong sense that it was the real thing. It just so happened that when I learned that Vezzosi was contemplating including La Bella Principessa in his monograph, Mina Gregori was at our home writing her own opinion.

  “Call him,” I insisted, “and share your thoughts. The strength of your reputation and opinion will carry a great deal of weight.”

  Mina put down her pen and made the call. Afterward, Vezzosi stopped the presses and added a piece on the portrait, giving it full attribution. He wrote: “There now emerges a singular novelty: a splendid portrait of a young woman in profile, carried out in pen and ink and tempera on parchment and measuring 33 × 23.9 cm [12.9 by 9.3 inches]. Dealing with an unpublished work as important as it is unexpected calls for caution. However, the refined intensity and aura of mystery that distinguish its quality and purity are such as to make the recognition of Leonardo’s authorship the logical conclusion of a series of simple and clear investigations.”7

  Vezzosi went on to highlight several key points, in supportive confirmation of the observations of Mina Gregori and Nicholas Turner, as well as the work of Pascal and Martin. These include the left-handed shading, which he called “unequivocal and impressive in its fluidity, certainty, and precision,” and the interplay of light and shadow, which he says can be found in “the Madrid Codex and the anatomical sketches in Windsor from the early Milanese period.”

  Vezzosi noted, as Mina had remarked from the outset, that the “technique is masterly, Tuscan in style, but undoubtedly the work was finished in a Milanese context.” Vezzosi also confirmed the findings and the educated speculation about the subject and the purpose of the portrait. He suggested that perhaps the portrait was not a wedding picture but was made for the purpose of a long-distance proposal. Like others, Vezzosi was drawn to the exquisite detail of the subject’s eye in profile and the perfection of her face.

  The support of experts and specialists was beginning to come in force. Although the technical investigations were far from complete, I felt deeply moved by the rapid enthusiasm being expressed by some of the great names in art. By the fall of 2008, Turner had prepared an official statement documenting his reasons for supporting the Leonardo attribution. He pointed to these specific factors:

  1. The extremely high quality of the mixed-media portrait.

  2. The carbon-14 tests, which did not exclude a fifteenth -century date.

  3. The extent of the left-handed shading, especially in the face, neck, and background along the subject’s profile, which was Leonardo’s signature feature. “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. . . . 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.”

  4. Obedience to Leonardo’s theories of illumination. In his Notebooks, Leonardo writes extensively on the methods of illuminating a subject with proper shadowing to convey night, day, distance, closeness, angle, and so on. “Leonardo talks specifically about the need for the background to make the subject stand out and detach itself sufficiently, contrasting light with dark and dark with light.” This was artfully done with La Bella Principessa.

  5. The presence of pentiments, signs of earlier erasures and redrawing, which are a signature process of Leonardo’s.

  6. The intense concentration on detail, “from the minutiae of facial features and the pattern of the woman’s dress to each knot of her caul. Such an obsessive quest to record even-handedly the appearance of everything within the artist’s view, seemingly down to the last particle, is a characteristic of Leonardo’s creativity.”

  7. The stylistic parallels with Leonardo’s profile portraits. “Such a delicate, subtly modulated outline is encountered in other examples of Leonardo’s head studies . . . [which] satisfy [Leonardo’s] precept . . . 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.’ ”

  8. The drawing of the woman’s hair: “among the most beautiful and spontaneous of all the details in the Portrait, as well as the most complex in its colouration. 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 colours 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.”

  9. The vellum surface, which Turner believed was a fine example of Leonardo’s status as a technical innovator. “The artist has successfully exploited the pitted texture of the material in his rendering of the figure’s flesh and clothes.” Like Martin and others, Turner acknowledges that although Leonardo was not known to use vellum, he was always poised to pioneer the latest technique and to experiment with media.

  10. The style—hair, costume, setting—was consistent with Milanese court portraits of the period but also shows the Florentine influences of Leonardo’s training. “From the point of view of 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.”

  Turner concluded, “Not only does this remarkable drawing by Leonardo fit in stylistically to his oeuvre as a painter and draughtsman, it also conforms to his theories of figurative representation, as set out in his Treatise.”8

  In the fall, I got in touch with Si
r Timothy Clifford, the former director general of the National Galleries in Scotland, and asked him to come to Lumiere for a viewing. Clifford, whom I had met on several occasions, was well known and highly regarded. A few years earlier he had discovered a drawing by Michelangelo in the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York. When asked how he initially knew what he was looking at, Clifford responded, “Cannot I recognize my own wife over the breakfast table?”9 Of course, he then went on to do a diligent study, but it was his contention that when one is in the presence of a Master, there was almost a knee-jerk reaction of instant recognition. I was curious to see if Clifford would have such a reaction to our portrait.

  Clifford told me he was planning to be in Paris in November, and we arranged to go to Lumiere Technology together. He would write, “To my mind, the masterly appearance of the drawing not only proves that Leonardo did work on parchment but it is the finest sheet discovered for very many years by this remarkable genius of the Renaissance. It is an iconic image of haunting beauty.”10

  The forensic and historical analysis was very elaborate, and far too complex for my feeble brain. I did not deal in the world of pixels, but in the world of stories, and I was deeply engaged in the question of what story this portrait was telling the world. I believed that without knowledge of, or at least a strong theory about, the lady’s identity, the most compelling evidence in the world would fail to convince. Martin agreed that determining the lady’s identity represented an exciting challenge. As a historian, he was particularly drawn to the question of identity. It was not essential that the portrait’s subject be identified beyond doubt, but it was critical to the integrity of the work that it be set in a plausible time and place, that it have a function in Leonardo’s world. And so the question that had once captivated the masses with the Mona Lisa was being asked again: Who is she?

  8

  Beloved Daughter

  Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

  —Leonardo da Vinci

  We can imagine Leonardo seated, holding a wooden board to which parchment was affixed, his pen caressing the lines of the young woman’s lovely face as it took form on the surface.1 She was most likely posed across from him, utterly still, her lips slightly parted. She did not smile or frown. She did not fidget with boredom. Her brow was smooth, her posture erect, her gaze steady, her air calm. She would have known that for her father to commission a formal portrait was a supreme act of devotion, and she would have wanted to do it justice. Leonardo was a busy man who had paused in his many court obligations to produce this portrait.

  In spite of those obligations, which must have weighed on the artist, his concentration was complete, as though he were attempting to channel the spirit of his subject. He strove, as always, for an eternal portrait, an ode to the young woman and to her father, the duke.

  That he could bring such intensity to a simple portrait was a marvel, especially considering the major commissions that were not yet completed. One of these was a grand piece for the friars of St. Dominic at Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie: a large-scale painting that would become his portrayal of the Last Supper, which he had been working on for quite some time. According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, the effort required long stretches of meditation because he was intent on portraying not only the group of men around the divine Christ but also their emotions at the point when Christ announced, “One of you will betray me.” What were the thoughts of the innocents—love, fear, indignation, and sorrow—and could one read guilt in the expression of Judas?

  Like others who had commissioned Leonardo, the prior of the monastery was anxious to see the work completed, and he could not understand what was taking so long. Vasari recounts that the prior would see Leonardo standing around lost in thought, “wasting time” when he could have been working, and it annoyed him greatly. Finally, he complained to the duke, and Ludovico il Moro sent for Leonardo. “The Prior doesn’t understand,” Leonardo told Ludovico. “Great artists may be working their hardest when they appear to be doing the least—forming those perfect ideas which afterwards they express with their hands.”2

  He added that he had only two heads left to do—that of Christ, whose beauty and divinity his imagination was in-adequate to fully portray, and that of Judas. “I feel incapable of imagining a form to express the face of him who after receiving so many benefits had a soul so evil that he would resolve to betray his Lord,” he said, adding that he had been looking for a model of such a face. “If I can find no better, there is always the head of the Prior,” he joked, causing Ludovico to roar with laughter.3

  “You are dead right,” the duke told Leonardo, and he promised that the prior would give him no more trouble.4

  Leonardo’s second major project, which had already been years in the making, was an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza. It was clearly a standout and generated much excitement among those who saw the massive clay horse developing before their very eyes. People said they had never seen anything so beautiful or more superb, but it was a long way from completion.

  Yet in spite of these large obligations, Leonardo’s concentration on the girl and the portrait was absolute. With every stroke, he sought to illuminate her soul.

  The woman in La Bella Principessa is young, and the portrait itself is quite formal. It does not have the intimate, “come hither” aura of Mona Lisa. Stylistically, the profile implies distance. But who is she, and when was she drawn?

  Martin and Pascal, with their historical sensibility veering into the poetic, imagined her thus:

  A young lady, or a girl on the cusp of maturity, is costumed for a formal portrait. Her fashionable accoutrements are those of a Milanese court lady in the 1490s. She wears a green dress, under which is a red bodice. The shoulder of the dress is “slashed” to reveal a triangle of red. Green, red, and white were favored by the Sforza family, rulers of Milan. Around the aperture runs a continuous knot design in raised thread. The central flourish at the top of the knotwork is punctuated by embroidered points. Her light brown hair, glowing and tightly bound, is elaborately dressed with a caul of knotted ribbons, edged by a smaller interlace design. It is held in place by a thin band located at precisely the right angle on her forehead. Extruding from the net, her pigtail––the Milanese coazzone––is bound into a neat cylinder by a tightly circled thread. Below this binding, a flat ribbon disposed in two spirals constrains the long tresses of her hair, only a little less strictly.

  The details are beautifully observed. Her ear plays a subtle game of hide-and-seek below the gentle waves of her hair. The band pulls the rear profile of the caul into a slight concavity. Below each band of the spiraling ribbon, her hair swells slightly before it is constricted again by the next loop.5

  Can we sense a tension between the fresh innocence of the young lady and the formal courtly duties that her costume signals as her destiny––before she has become a mature woman ready for the fixed responsibilities of aristocratic marriage and the hazards of childbearing? She is, we may be reasonably certain, fated to become a young bride, betrothed early to cement a social alliance. It is not difficult to be romantic about such an image. It is almost too perfect in its refined poise.

  It was irresistible to contemplate what Leonardo himself might say about the drawing and the setting. Martin and others were certain that details of the dress and style pointed to the 1490s, when Leonardo was at the Milanese court.

  During that time, he did several portraits for Ludovico il Moro, including the famous Lady with an Ermine—which was, coincidentally, the second Leonardo work digitalized by Pascal on a visit to Kraków. The beautiful, serene portrait depicts the duke’s mistress Cecilia Gallerani holding a white ermine (a symbol of purity and also a Sforza symbol) to her breast. She was no more than sixteen or seventeen at the time, and, unusual for a young woman of the period, she was extremely well educated and an amateur poet and philosopher.

  Cecilia was not a concubine in the conventional sense but a courtesan whose intellect, s
tyle, and sensuality put her on a pedestal in the court during the ten years of her involvement with the duke. She bore him one child, and then went on to marry and have four other children. The portrait itself was a new style for the artists of the period. Typically, portraits were cool and emotionless, with little hint of the subject’s personality or thoughts—especially when the subject was a woman. Leonardo infused Cecilia’s portrait with life. One can gaze at her countenance and see her deportment, her intelligence, and her selfhood shining through. This, the observer can see, was a woman of substance.

  Many years later, Leonardo would take his humanizing approach quite a bit further with the portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo: the Mona Lisa. That smile! It just wasn’t done. Yet Leonardo apparently evoked it deliberately, perhaps by arranging entertainment for Lisa while she was sitting, and captured her amusement with his brush.

  Martin had often contemplated Leonardo’s special “eye for the ladies.” Indeed, there is only one known male portrait in existence: the unfinished Musician in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan. Martin observed:

  Leonardo da Vinci was employed by some very powerful men, including members of the Medici family, Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and two French kings, Louis XII and Francis I. He was an innovative and masterly portraitist. It is remarkable, therefore, that we have no record of his undertaking portraits of any of his major male patrons. Instead, we have an early portrait of a woman in the Medici circle, two surviving portraits of the Duke’s mistresses, a splendid chalk drawing of Isabella d’Este, the redoubtable Marchioness of Mantua, and the famous portrait of Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a Florentine silk merchant who was acquainted with Leonardo’s father. . . . To add to the list of ‘Leonardo’s Ladies,’ we now have the remarkable portrait of the young woman in profile, which I have christened La Bella Principessa.6