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

by Peter Silverman; Catherine Whitney

  Martin had put us in touch with Kasia Wozniak, a Polish researcher, who was just finishing her art history doctorate in Berlin. He spoke highly of her, and she was fully informed of our Leonardo saga. She was invited to join us and help arrange our appointments with the various library and museum directors. We allotted ourselves three days for Warsaw—plenty of time to explore the city and overcome any possible bureaucratic hurdles to viewing the Sforziada. The Poles were understandably very protective of their few treasures, which had miraculously survived Warsaw’s many calamities.

  Before we had even packed for the trip, there was a potential setback. Kasia informed Martin that the National Library was strongly suggesting that a viewing of the microfilm of the book would be more than sufficient for our purposes. They were squeamish about bringing the heavily guarded original to the light of examination. That was understandable, since these old books are extremely fragile, but Martin was adamant. Our research was possible only if we could see the original and study the binding. He shot off a reply on December 4:

  Dear Sirs and Madam,

  I understand from my research assistant Kasia Wosniak that you have refused access to the Sforziada, suggesting that she and Peter Silverman look instead at a microfilm. This simply will not take forward the research at all, since it involves detailed codicological investigations that are simply not possible with any reproduction, even one of facsimile standard. The investigations involve: studying the physical composition of the MS, its binding, how its pages go in sequence, whether there are signs of removed pages; looking to see the means by which this copy has specifically been tailored for Galeazzo Sanseverino and any indications that it was created for his marriage to Bianca Sforza; and other observations of its composition that might be relevant to understanding its production in relation to the preceding versions of the Sforziada.

  After 40 years research into historic manuscripts, including those by Leonardo, I of course am fully aware of the strains put on major historical holdings, but I am also aware of when consultation of the original is the only way to answer vital research questions. Thank you for your kind attention.

  Martin Kemp

  Martin’s letter seemed to have its desired effect. There were no guarantees, but it looked very likely that we would be allowed to view the original book if we made the trip to Warsaw. We had nothing to lose—and so very much to gain.

  Christmas was approaching, and the lights and festivities in eastern Europe are particularly alluring. I had a bit of business to attend to in Vienna, so I booked us a Paris-Vienna-Prague-Warsaw-Paris ticket—a one-week trip to the heart of old Europe. We had our usual room at the Bristol in Vienna and attended the wonderful new opera Il Postino, which first premiered in Los Angeles with Placido Domingo. It was wonderful—a “triumph,” according to one Austrian paper. We also visited two spectacular expos going on concurrently at the Albertina museum. One was on Picasso and his political engagement during World War II, which was a revelation. The second was an extensive, once-in-a-lifetime show of Michelangelo’s drawings. The trip was already a success, in our eyes.

  Two days later we were in Prague, halfway to Warsaw. We hadn’t been to Prague for five years, and we were captivated, as always. Prague, arguably the most beautiful city in old Europe, was resplendent with Christmas lights and spirit—a pure picture postcard of what the season should be—and under a lovely new dusting of snow. An old friend, Oliver von Dohnányi, an acclaimed conductor, had just been nominated director of the magnificent neo-rococo opera house, where we attended a fine production of Georges Bizet’s Carmen and dined with Oliver afterward. The following morning we set off for Warsaw.

  We knew well the history of Warsaw: two hundred years of war, deprivation, communism, and nearly total destruction; the death of 800,000 of its inhabitants during World War II, including the total annihilation of its Jewish population of 350,000 by Hitler’s goons; the valiant fight the Jews waged from their ghetto exile, holding off their Nazi murderers for weeks before being mercilessly slaughtered. My former business partner, now an Israeli, was one of the handful to survive.

  After the war, the people of Warsaw made a supreme effort to reconstruct their once splendid city, often using as their guide the views of paintings of the city by the eighteenth-century Italian court artist Bernardo Bellotto, which were in Poland’s state collections. A modern visitor would have no inkling of the horrors that transpired there just sixty to seventy years ago.

  As a pleasant bonus, we were surprised to discover that Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine was currently on exhibit at the Royal Castle Museum. We had last seen it in its permanent home in Kraków ten years earlier and were delighted with the opportunity to view it again. It was a good omen, and another reason to consider our trip a success.

  On December 15, Kasia announced that she had arranged a viewing of the manuscript for the morning of December 17. That afternoon we received a phone call from Washington, D.C. It was David Murdock, producer of the forthcoming National Geographic–Nova documentary on the discovery. He told us that he would be willing to fly out that very evening if he was assured authorization to film at the moment we viewed the manuscript. By some brilliant tour de force, Kasia not only got approval from the National Library officials but also secured David’s entry to film the Leonardo exhibition in the museum as well. Within four hours of his call, David, dynamic, dedicated, and all of thirty-seven years old, was on a flight to Warsaw, where the temperature had dropped to -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit).

  On December 16, we were all very kindly received at the Royal Castle Museum after closing hours. Armed guards stood by as David filmed Lady with an Ermine, the Leonardo on loan from Kraków. That evening Kathy and I attended a fine production of The Marriage of Figaro (in Italian with Polish subtitles) in the magnificent reconstructed opera house.

  The following day, with Mozart’s sublime music still ringing in our ears, we set off, accompanied by Kasia and David, for the big make-or-break moment. Would we find a vital clue about our treasure?

  When we arrived at the National Library, we were cheerfully greeted by a lovely young woman whose appearance made us gape in disbelief. To our amazement, she had her hair braided in the same fashion as the woman in La Bella Principessa: a coazzone more than two feet long. It was very hard not to stare. Kathy and I shared a smile, both thinking this might be a lucky portent.

  We were greeted next by Anna Zawisza, the head of manuscripts, who accompanied us into a room with an armed guard standing regally to one side. On a table at the center was a metal armored case in which the Sforziada was kept. Donning white gloves, Zawisza slowly and carefully removed the book and set it down. I showed her the life-size reproduction of La Bella Principessa I had brought with me and explained our reason for wanting to consult the manuscript. “We want to know if this Leonardo portrait was once bound into this book,” I said.

  Zawisza’s eyes widened, and she became flustered. A Leonardo in her manuscript?

  We began by measuring the page size to see if it corresponded to La Bella Principessa and were gratified to see that it did, within a millimeter or two (a minute fraction of an inch). Zawisza pointed out that the slight variation might be explained by the fact that the manuscript had been rebound, probably two to three hundred years ago; its edges were cut slightly and trimmed with gold at that time.

  Martin had surmised that the Leonardo portrait would have been placed either at the very beginning or the very end of the book, but after careful examination we could find no trace of a cut page in either place.

  “May we turn each page?” I asked. It was not a simple request. The book was nearly two hundred pages, and it would be a bit laborious for her, since utmost care had to be used so as not to damage the precious work in any way. Arriving at page 7, we finally saw the resplendent full-page illumination painted by Birago, and we were thrilled by its quality. This was the stunning allegorical rendering. Looking at it, Martin’s comment made total sen
se: if such a piece were produced for the wedding, perhaps Leonardo would have been commissioned to do a page as well.

  It was apparent that the three pinholes where the binding had been sewed, noted earlier by Martin, which we had hoped would be a key to matching, would not be relevant, since the book had been rebound using five sutures.

  My mind was awhirl in flashbacks of the past five centuries, when this very book was lovingly composed for Bianca and Galeazzo Sanseverino’s marriage. How could I not have suspected sooner that there was a Polish connection to this conundrum—after all, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine had been in Polish hands for two hundred years! Historical records chronicle the connections between the Sforzas and the royal house of Poland. Bona Sforza, the daughter of Bianca’s cousin, married Sigismund I of Poland in 1518, taking her private possessions (and possibly this very manuscript) with her on her epic journey from Bari to Kraków.

  We slowly continued to view each page, but there was no sign of a missing page. Had we come all this way for an opera and a tour of Warsaw? I had begun to abandon hope and to mentally prepare myself to return empty-handed. But then Zawisza turned page 161.

  There was a momentary beat of silence, and then she and I let out muffled cries. There, before our incredulous eyes, was what seemed to be the missing link, the element we longed to find: a remnant of a cut and extracted page of vellum that was the same darkish yellow as La Bella Principessa. We could barely contain our emotions. We measured the undulation of the remnant, and it corresponded exactly. Kathy and Kasia came around to see for themselves, while David filmed the historic moment. Even the armed guard was caught up in the excitement.

  Zawisza, who had carefully studied the book on past occasions, murmured how unhappy she was that she’d never noticed the missing page, now so glaringly obvious from the protruding remnant. She pointed out that the page had been cut out after the manuscript had been rebound. Why and by whom we could not even begin to speculate.

  I was eager to tell Martin the amazing news, and back at the hotel I placed a call. Elated, I said, “You really are a sleuth extraordinaire! Your supposition by exclusion that La Bella Principessa represented Bianca Sforza has been fully and rather spectacularly confirmed. I and the world of art are in your debt.”

  Martin, too, was elated, although he cautioned that it would be premature, indeed reckless, to reach a definitive conclusion until more research had been performed. Even so, on the flight back to Paris the next day, I could afford to smile at the thought of all the lectures I had endured from rejectionists about the importance of provenance. Why and for whom had La Bella Principessa been created? Where had she been all these centuries? Why was there no trace of her in Italy? How could she have escaped the notice of art historians for so long? Now, perhaps, we knew.

  Sitting on the Warsaw discovery while yearning to shout it from the rooftops was a test of my legendary impatience. But the secrecy was worth it. Martin needed to see the Sforziada, and the scientific analysis he planned with Pascal would be painstaking and time-consuming. Martin had slated a visit to Warsaw in January, so I was hoping to read his conclusions by the spring.

  But spring and summer came and went, and there was still no sign of the fruits of Martin and Pascal’s research. Martin talked about reserving his findings, out of courtesy, for the Polish National Library’s biannual journal; I was never quite sure if he had the library’s 2011 fall issue in mind or the spring issue in 2012. There was some discussion of releasing the information to coincide with the broadcast of David Murdock’s documentary. But that wasn’t planned until early 2012, either. Meanwhile, there was a big Leonardo show scheduled to open on November 9 at the National Gallery in London, and I did not want La Bella Principessa brushed under the media carpet in the run-up to that event.

  Martin remained sanguine in the face of the gentle pressure I applied in his direction. As usual, he was busy on a host of simultaneous projects, including Christ to Coke, a study of popular icons, and a revised, updated edition of his authoritative book, Leonardo. Ultimately, it was his Leonardo that set things back in motion. In early September, Martin informed me that the book’s publication date had been set for October 6, and that it would cite La Bella Principessa as an authentic Leonardo, evoking the research he and Pascal had recently undertaken in Warsaw.

  I eagerly awaited the arrival of their report and was thrilled when I received it. It was a twenty-one-page document titled “La Bella Principessa and the Warsaw Sforziada.”1 Ever the perfectionists, Martin and Pascal included nearly thirty illustrations—charts, graphs, and photographs. Their conclusion was unequivocal: La Bella Principessa was once contained within the Warsaw Sforziada.

  The report makes fascinating, if highly technical, reading. As it was obviously impossible to dismantle the Warsaw volume, they used macrophotography—a process that allows extreme close-ups of an object—to examine the volume in supersonic detail, especially to determine the sequence of the sheets in the first quire (assembly) of four sheets (that is, eight folios, or sixteen pages). Helped by comparisons with the Sforziadas in London and Paris, it was demonstrated that one folio, and a complete sheet, had been removed from the Warsaw Sforziada: not, alas, from page 161, as I had enthusiastically surmised during our Warsaw visit in December 2010, but from the first quire. This implied that, originally, the folio adorned with La Bella Principessa directly preceded the Birago frontispiece.

  Martin and Pascal also found that the dimensions of the folios were the same as in the Paris and London versions, and that the vellum on which La Bella Principessa was drawn closely matched the physical characteristics of the remaining sheets in the first quire. The thickness of the vellum used for the portrait was “entirely consistent” with that of the other folios in the Warsaw Sforziada. Perhaps most exciting of all, the stitch holes in the vellum of the portrait matched those in the book, even though both were unevenly spaced.

  This welter of evidence left no doubt that the portrait was indeed made for the Sforziada destined to mark the marriage of Bianca Sforza and Galeazzo Sanseverino in 1496. Leonardo’s authorship, wrote Martin and Pascal, was “powerfully supported.” Claims that the work was a modern forgery, a nineteenth-century pastiche, or a copy of a lost Leonardo were “all effectively eliminated.” They ended with a thundering conclusion: the portrait was now “one of the works by Leonardo about which we know most in terms of its patronage, subject, date, original location, function and innovatory technique.”

  There is no difficulty imagining a scenario whereby Leonardo, who had known the bride and groom intimately for many years, was commanded to produce a bridal portrait for a special wedding book. His response was, characteristically, to produce a vivid image using a method that differed from traditional illumination, by extending and transforming the trois crayons technique he had learned about from French court artist Jean Perréal when the latter was in Milan with King Charles VIII in 1494.

  On Martin’s insistence, we issued a press embargo on the report until September 28. Simon Hewitt, who had so faithfully followed the story since the outset, was doing some of his own digging, including a fact-finding mission to Poland, which took him not just to Warsaw but also to Zamosc, the town in southeast Poland where the Sforziada had been kept for at least two hundred years. Once the embargo was lifted, Simon wrote a major piece for ATG titled, “New Evidence Strengthens Leonardo Claim for Portrait.”2 The article thoroughly described Martin and Pascal’s findings and also referred to the “conspiracy theories flying around the art world,” with respect to La Bella Principessa’s absence from the National Gallery exhibition.

  The international media were wowed by the Warsaw findings, and we received some wonderful press, beginning with the Guardian, which published an interview with Martin about the Warsaw findings.3 Le Figaro, France’s leading daily, renowned for its art market coverage, devoted all of its page 2 to La Bella Principessa, under the sizzling headline, “The Mystery of Leonardo da Vinci’s 13th Portrait Elucida
ted.”4 A few days later, Artinfo.com, the online version of the respected American magazine Art and Auction, ran a lengthy interview with Martin, dubbing him the “Da Vinci Detective” and asserting that he had “rediscovered Leonardo’s tragic portrait of a Renaissance Princess.”5

  In the interview, Martin described his visit to Warsaw as “a bit of a circus” due to “all the technical equipment, photographic equipment and spectral equipment” Pascal brought with him (not to mention David Murdock’s film crew), and went on to outline their minute analysis of the first few pages in the Sforziada—those that “have all the special material in them.”

  Soon after Martin and Pascal’s research was published, National Geographic magazine announced that it would run an eight-page feature on La Bella Principessa in its February 2012 issue, to coincide with the publication of this book and the screening of the Murdock documentary. Meanwhile, D. R. Edward Wright was busy putting the finishing touches to his own scholarly study of the history of the four Sforziadas, adding yet more bricks into what was rapidly becoming a wall of provenance of Jericho proportions.

  In the wake of Simon’s ATG article, there was outcry in the media about La Bella Principessa’s omission from the National Gallery show on Leonardo’s years in Milan. Tepid, and at times confused, explanations were circulated by National Gallery spokespeople, some insisting the show was mainly about paintings, and La Bella Principessa was technically a drawing; others insinuating that the gallery could not be seen to do anything that might enhance the commercial value of a work in private hands. That sort of guff went down like a lead balloon with the hundreds of thousands of art lovers who felt cheated of the chance to admire what we can now assert, without exaggeration or false modesty, to be one of the greatest art discoveries in modern history.