She didn’t name these detractors but boldly declared, “At the end of the day, when you talk about connoisseurship, it comes down to whether something is beautiful enough to be a Leonardo, whether it resonates with all of the qualities that define his handwriting—sublime modeling, exquisite delicacy, an unparalleled understanding of anatomy—and to me this drawing has none of those things.”
Oh, really? I found Kate’s entire explanation suspect. For one thing, if she had really harbored any suspicions that she was holding a Leonardo, she would have launched a more serious investigation. She never so much as carbon-tested the work to see if the nineteenth-century attribution held. It seemed to me that if there was a possibility that she was holding a fifteenth-century work, much less a Leonardo, she would have hung onto it and conducted a vigorous investigation.
And who were these experts she had summoned to her side? I wanted names. They certainly could not match the growing list of experts on the side of a Leonardo attribution for La Bella Principessa—a large cast of the best and brightest, a group so impressive that it nearly constituted a consensus:
Nicholas Turner
Mina Gregori
Martin Kemp
Timothy Clifford
Alessandro Vezzosi
Carlo Pedretti
Cristina Geddo
Claudio Strinati
I would put this august assembly up against Kate’s anonymous experts any day!
Personally, I thought Kate was exaggerating—that she had never considered the portrait a Leonardo. One could not say one day, “This might be a Leonardo,” and the next day state, “This is a nineteenth-century German artist.” It does not compute. The two are like apples and oranges.
In any case, Kate is perhaps not always the best judge of the Masters. In his book, Artful Tales: The Unlikely and Implausible Journal of an Art Dealer, 1957–1997, Richard Day recounts the story of Ganz’s miss on a Michelangelo attribution.3 Much to her embarrassment, Ganz had sought advice from her former art history teacher at Hunter College, and when he dismissed the Michelangelo attribution, she went along with his advice. Perhaps her collection of expert advisers is not all it’s cracked up to be.
There wasn’t much media attention over the La Bella Principessa skirmish, and Kate and her explanations soon faded from view. Biro’s report on the fingerprint came, and with that we decided to launch an official investigation.
I had some fantastic news to accompany the announcement. Vezzosi had arranged for La Bella to be displayed at an upcoming show for which he was the artistic director. Called “And There Was Light: The Masters of the Renaissance Seen in a New Light,” the show, to be held in Gothenburg, Sweden, would be La Bella Principessa’s official debut. It was courageous on Vezzosi’s part. He wasn’t going to wait for the masses to come to the portrait. His conviction was so strong that he was willing to bring it to them.
What do you do when you know for certain that you are holding an authentic portrait by Leonardo da Vinci? How do you tell the world? Suddenly, all I wanted to do was retreat. I fantasized about keeping it secret, avoiding the crush of publicity. I loved the life I had with Kathy, and I knew that once I announced a new Leonardo discovery, the tranquillity we cherished would be lost.
I had an idea of the debate that would ensue over the authenticity of La Bella Principessa. In my own heart I had no doubt it was a Leonardo, and Pascal and Martin would back me up, as would others like Mina Gregori and Nicholas Turner. But I also knew that for some media and art critics, the game would instantly be on to show that this was not a Leonardo. I had to be ready for the sheer cynical weight of their skepticism.
I had chosen the man I wanted to write the story. As a point of professional respect, I had decided not to go with the “media circus” crowd like CNN or the New York Times. They would surely pick it up, but I wanted the first publication to be a respectable vehicle within the art world. A serendipitous meeting sealed the choice: a somewhat obscure, high-quality trade publication called the Antiques Trade Gazette. ATG was the bible of the art and antiques trade, a London-based weekly newspaper for serious buyers and sellers that had been in business since 1971.
In the summer of 2007, six months after I had acquired La Bella Principessa, I was in Brussels, coming from an art fair and waiting for a taxi. Noticing another man also waiting, I offered to give him a lift to his hotel. He turned out to be Simon Hewitt, a well-regarded and influential journalist with ATG. I knew and admired his work, and during our twenty-minute ride together, my opinion of Hewitt strengthened. As he shook my hand and prepared to depart, I said, “Give me your card. A year from now I may have an extraordinary story for you.”
More than a year had passed, but I was ready. I located Hewitt’s card and made the call.
Naturally, he was quite pleased to have an exclusive on what might be the biggest art unveiling of the century. His story, published on October 12, 2009, was titled “Fingerprint Points to $19,000 Portrait Being Revalued as $100m Work by Leonardo da Vinci.” Liberally quoting Pascal and Martin, Hewitt described in flawless detail the scientific methods that had been used to determine the authenticity of La Bella Principessa. To this day, his article remains the best presented, most thorough account.
With the publication of Hewitt’s piece, the great sleeping giant of the international media awoke. Timothy Clifford called me and warned, “Put your seat belt on, Peter. You’re about to be swamped.”
Five minutes later, I was on the phone with the New York Times, and media calls were backing up like jets on a busy runway. In just one week there were fifteen hundred articles and hundreds of television and radio reports. The press, particularly in the United States, was most captivated by the fingerprint evidence, as though the collective fan base of the crime drama CSI had been brought to attention.
In reality, the fingerprint evidence was only a small consideration. The likes of Mina, Martin, and Alessandro Vezzosi had named the portrait a Leonardo before they ever heard of the fingerprint. But people outside the art world, not understanding the issues of connoisseurship and perhaps bored by the technical complexity of multispectral imaging, grabbed onto the fingerprint evidence as the most convincing proof. Despite Biro’s cautions to the contrary, most people believed that if there was a fingerprint, that settled the matter. Nearly every media outlet, both print and broadcast, led with the fingerprint. The headlines and quotes screamed. Here are some examples:
A fingerprint has intensified the debate about the origin of a mysterious drawing sold at auction for $21,850. Experts don’t agree whether it’s a 19th-century German work or a genuine Leonardo worth $150 million.
—ARTNews
Fingerprint May Lead to New da Vinci Discovery
—USA Today
How a New da Vinci Was Discovered
—Time
First Leonardo Da Vinci Found in 100 Years? Da Vinci Fingerprint Is Clue to Identity of the Painter
—Times (London)
Is It a Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci? Millions at Stake
—New York Times
Lumiere Technology was swamped with requests and received thousands of hits on its website. Jean Penicaut joked, “I was visiting London, and even my cabbie wanted to talk about the Leonardo.”
To no one’s surprise, Christie’s refused comment, issuing only a tepid statement that set the tone for its future defense: “We are aware of the recent discussions surrounding the possible re-attribution of this work, which rely heavily on cutting-edge scientific techniques which were not available to us at the time of the sale.”
I was not accustomed to being in the spotlight, and the phenomenal force of the world’s media left me stunned with the magnitude of my find and the enormity of my responsibility. I always thought the purpose of art was enjoyment, but I could not enjoy this work. I could not hang it on my own wall. My guardianship required only that I protect it. It was a burden—a glorious burden, but a burden nonetheless.
And what did the wor
ld want to know about La Bella Principessa?
How much was it worth? Where was it being kept? Would it be sold? I can’t count how many people asked me, “Will you become rich?” I understood the popular fascination with the monetary potential of the discovery, yet I knew I was the keeper of a priceless work, and in that sense I might have answered, “It’s worth everything . . . and nothing.”
Naturally, everyone was eager to put a price tag on La Bella Principessa, but I couldn’t help but contemplate—and not for the first time—how whimsical the process of assigning value can be. One might well ask how a painting can be worth $19,000 one day and $100 million the next—the only difference being its attribution. In fact, art has no intrinsic value. It cannot be consumed in a famine or easily traded in an economic depression. Its worth is always tentative, subject to a fickle marketplace.
I have never pursued art for its monetary value. I believe that people who buy art for speculation are missing the entire point of collecting, which is love. We do not need art, but we must love it in order for it to serve its original purpose: to be aesthetic, uplifting, inspirational, and even decorative.
I find myself constantly engaged in a battle with the ideology of the market, where people associate a big price tag with great meaning or beauty. In the case of La Bella Principessa, I have watched the cynical process unfold. When the drawing was thought to be a nineteenth-century work, it was deemed “lovely.” When it was later surmised that the drawing was fifteenth-century Italian, it was admired as “quite beautiful.” Now that the Leonardo attribution has been affixed, the drawing has been heralded as “exquisite . . . extraordinary . . . remarkable” and every other superlative in the book.
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the prospect of a financial windfall surely improves one’s vision. Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime, and many great artists worth millions today hardly survived on their earnings.
The topic of the perception of art and its worth fascinates me. There is absolutely no question that value is a matter of perception. Here’s a case in point: This incident took place in a Washington, D.C., metro station on a cold January morning in 2007. A man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about forty-five minutes. During that time, approximately two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About twenty gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a grand total of $32.
No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most famous musicians in the world. He serenaded the metro crowd with a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days earlier he had sold out a theater in Boston where tickets averaged $100 each.
Bell’s incognito appearance was part of an experiment dreamed up by the Washington Post to determine if passersby would recognize genius when it was disguised in an unfamiliar setting.4 I am almost certain that if Bell’s identity had been known, the metro would have been packed with appreciative listeners.
It would be untrue and hypocritical to say that Kathy and I never thought about the financial aspect of the discovery. We no longer live in a world where it would be considered crass to even suggest a valuation on something as precious as a work by the world’s most celebrated artist. However, it was not my primary thought or motivation. We had never been in serious financial straits, and I felt fortunate for that, so I was never in a situation where I had to “turn over”—as the trade would put it—a work of art that gave us both great pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction.
That is why we were able to build up a fine collection of works on paper, within our modest means, in the past quarter of a century. We basically bought with love and connoisseurship, in auction houses and from dealers throughout Europe and the United States. Sometimes we found things that others had missed. Occasionally we paid too much or missed wonderful things that we should have been prepared to pay more for. But we always had fun with the hunt and the idea that a new discovery, albeit more modest than a Leonardo da Vinci, might be around the corner at the next shop or salesroom.
The discovery of La Bella Principessa was no more than the same fun and satisfaction—just magnified a thousandfold. I doubted that our lives would radically change if the portrait were one day put on the market and actually sold, although we did enjoy daydreaming about having the money to establish a foundation for Renaissance and classical studies that would rival the workshops and salons of that era.
As for the question “What is she worth?” I had a standard reply for journalists. I asked them to Google the ten most expensive artworks and decide for themselves.5 If a bronze by Giacometti (one in an edition of twelve) could bring more than $100 million at an auction, a Jackson Pollock a bit more than that, a Picasso $106 million, or a drawing of a head by Raphael more than $50 million, what would be the value of the rarest of rare things: a drawing, more akin to a painting, by Leonardo da Vinci? Less then twenty full autograph paintings survive by the Master, five of which are portraits, and what are the chances of another work of his ever being discovered?
I also noted that there were many major art-loving and wealthy nations—China, Japan, Canada, and Australia, to name a few—that did not have a single Leonardo work within their borders. How would a billionaire in one of these nations value such a piece—and what would be the draw for museums? Leonardo’s light reflects on everyone it touches; his presence is capable of transforming the tourism industry of a nation.
Early in the process, when I was first investigating what it would take to display La Bella Principessa in museums, the subject of value came up in a most pragmatic context: insurance. How much insurance would we need to protect the work?
Simon Dickenson, the former head of Old Masters at Christie’s and considered one of the world’s foremost dealers, visited La Bella Principessa at its secure vault in Zurich and set the value at £100 million (over $150 million). This is the current insured value.
Sir Clifford had a point to make about the entire matter. He found the publicity quite distasteful. “The press coverage associated with this discovery has been both vulgar and unseemly,” he told me. “We should not be focusing so much on a trophy of discovery, which may or may not be worth a great deal of money, but on a glorious and previously unconsidered masterpiece by one of the greatest artists that has ever lived.”
I couldn’t disagree.
Shortly after I spoke with Clifford, I traveled to Florence, where I had the privilege of meeting Maurizio Seracini, the director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture, and Anthropology. Seracini is a famous pioneer in the use of scientific diagnosis to study art. His background is in bioengineering and electronic engineering, and he has devoted his career to this pursuit.
In the mid-1970s, he participated in the Leonardo Project, sponsored by the Armand Hammer Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute, to locate the lost fresco The Battle of Anghiari, and this has been his passion ever since. This painting is yet one more Leonardo mystery, albeit one with many clues.6 In 1504, Leonardo was commissioned by Piero Soderini, head of the government of Florence, to commemorate the republic’s military victory in 1440 over the Milanese on the plains of Anghiari with a large wall mural.
His rival (and some say enemy) Michelangelo was assigned an opposite wall but left his portion undone when he returned to Rome to decorate the tomb of Pope Julius II. Leonardo continued Michelangelo’s work, and there are many drawings and writings as evidence of his intention to create a glorious, violent battle scene. Unfortunately, due to the materials he used and his technique, the wall began to disintegrate. (A similar deterioration occurred with The Last Supper.) It was one of Leonardo’s only known failures. In time the project was abandoned, and the wall was whitewashed. Some fifty years later, long after Leonardo’s death, none other than Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to paint a new work. It is Seracini’s belief that Leonardo’s original lies beneath, and he has
launched an investigation, using all of the technology at his disposal.
In 2006, Seracini’s investigation into The Battle of Anghiari was exhibited as part of “The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He believes that Leonardo himself would be enthusiastic about the use of scientific analysis for art understanding because the artist was immersed in the pursuit of engineering innovation. “We do justice to Leonardo,” he said. “We are using technology to understand the masterpieces. I think he would have been happy about that.”7
We talked about the ongoing mysterious aura that follows Leonardo and how many questions remain to be investigated. He promised to make time to view La Bella Principessa.
After the initial media craze had died down, I found myself on a crowded flight to New York, squeezed unhappily between two passengers. I had placed a mock-up of the cover of a brochure for the Gothenburg exhibition on my tray table. There was no text on the page, just the portrait of La Bella Principessa.
“That’s very beautiful,” one of my seatmates said conversationally.
I glanced in his direction. “Thank you,” I said, intent on my own musings.
“It’s a Leonardo, isn’t it?” he asked.
Now I stopped and looked at him with more interest. “Why do you say that?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m an art lover, and it looks like Leonardo da Vinci to me.”
I gave him a big smile and said that his guess was correct. I didn’t elaborate. “I wish the museum world had your eye,” I said.
11
The $100 Million Blunder?
Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.
—Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo's Lost Princess: One Man's Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci Page 12