Leonardo's Lost Princess

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Silverman, Peter, date.
Leonardo’s lost princess : one man’s quest to authenticate an unknown portrait by Leonardo da Vinci / by Peter Silverman with Catherine Whitney.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-93640-5 (hardback); ISBN 978-1-118-16310-8 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-16311-5 (ebk.); ISBN 978-1-118-16312-2
1. Leonardo, da Vinci, 1452–1519—Criticism and interpretation.
2. Drawing—Expertising.
3. Portraits—Expertising. I. Whitney, Catherine. II. Title.
NC257.L4S55 2012
741.945—dc23
2011042291

To all the wonderful people who have so generously stood up to defend the honor and reputation of
La Bella Principessa
—often at great personal risk. Without you this astounding saga could never have progressed so far so fast. I am humbly in your debt.

To my patient and perceptive wife, Kathleen, for your invaluable collaboration and forbearance over these past three years.

This book is further dedicated to those who were instrumental in helping to make me who I am: Dr. Irene Duerking and my
teachers,
Swami Rudrananda (Rudi) and Professor Namkai Norbu Rimpoche.

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the many people who made this book, and the amazing discovery that prompted it, a reality. First and foremost, my wife, Kathy, who shares my passion for art and has been my partner in both life and work, joined me in a search for the truth about the found portrait. My sister, Tina, a consultant on the project, has been a great help as well, particularly with press relations.

Nicholas Turner, the former curator of drawings at the British Museum and a former curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum, was the first person to suggest to me that I might be holding a Leonardo, and he followed up his initial intuition with a full support of the portrait’s authenticity.

My dear friend Mina Gregori, an acclaimed doyenne of art history, also saw the hand of Leonardo in my find and supplied excellent advice. She insisted on being the first to actually write down the Leonardo attribution. Giammarco Cappuzzo, an independent art consultant in Paris, supplied me with the right contacts at the right time, including recommending Lumiere Technology and the Swiss laboratory for carbon-14 dating. His input saved many months of futile work.

Pascal Cotte of Lumiere Technology, the visionary inventor of the technology that allows one to view great works of art “like Superman,” took on the task of proving that the portrait was the Master’s work. His work and that of his associate, Jean Penicaut, was invaluable. Martin Kemp, a sleuth extraordinaire, one of the world’s foremost Leonardo scholars, and an emeritus professor of art history at Oxford, surmised rightly from the start that the portrait represented Bianca Sforza, which led us to the Warsaw revelations. His analysis was exemplary and masterly in its scope and detail. Peter Paul Biro was brought into the analysis, and using his expertise in art forensics and fingerprint science, he concluded that a fingerprint and palm print on the portrait were of high probability Leonardo’s.

I am grateful to other experts who have supported the Leonardo attribution. Sir Timothy Clifford, the former director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, was an early enthusiast. Considered by many to be one of the most successful and dynamic museum directors, he is a specialist on Renaissance art and concluded early on that it was Leonardo’s hand in the drawing. Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Leonardo’s birthplace of Vinci, believed it was the work of Leonardo and published his findings in his superb monograph on da Vinci. Carlo Pedretti, the director of the Armand Hammer Foundation, added his belief in the Leonardo attribution. Although Pedretti was suffering from a serious health issue and was in pain, he made the trip to Paris to view Lumiere’s findings firsthand. Simon Dickinson, a former director of Christie’s and now one of the world’s leading Old Master dealers, showed his mettle in coming out early in support of the attribution.

I am also very appreciative of the other specialists who took the time to study the portrait and concurred in the da Vinci attribution. These include Cristina Geddo, a scholar of Leonardo’s workshops and the first to actually write a detailed study of the work; Claudio Strinati, the former head of Rome’s museums and now in the Italian Ministry of Culture, who was an enthusiastic supporter from the early stages; and long-term acquaintance Catherine Goguel, a former Louvre drawing specialist, who made a number of interesting observations. For the hairstyle comparison and analysis in its historical context, special thanks to Elisabetta Gnignera. A tribute, too, to D. R. Edward Wright, an emeritus professor of art history at the University of South Florida, Tampa, who discovered clues that could resolve the mystery of provenance (the record of the artwork’s history). His insights led us to the Sforziada manuscript in Warsaw.

I also appreciate the work of Simon Hewitt, Oxford trained and a journalist with
Antiques Trade Gazette
, who helped launch the story to the world. Simon is a fine sleuth and scholar in his own right. Other journalists who took the time and made the effort to get the story right include Milton Esterow of
ARTnews
; Julien Pfyffer of
Paris Match
; Jean Folain of the
Times
of London; Stefan Simon of
Der Spiegel
; and Randy Boswell of Canadian broadcasting. I am grateful for the time Simon took to review this manuscript. His insights were always helpful.

Thanks, too, to Mats Ronngard and his team at Excellent Exhibitions, as well as to the officials and city of Gothenburg for their kindness in helping with the first showing of
La Bella Principessa
.

Special thanks to Peter Haas and his team at Moebel Transport for their invaluable help and expertise in storing and shipping
La Bella
Principessa
.

I am grateful to my art-savvy legal team—Eric Kaufman in New York and Peter Mosimann in Basel—for advising on this project, as well as Brinsley Dresden in London.

Madame Jeanne Marchig,
La Bella Principessa
’s former owner, gave of her time to explain her and her late husband’s involvement and fill in the gaps of the provenance during the past half century. When she consigned the painting to Christie’s for sale, she hoped to be better served by a company with which she had had a fruitful and trusted relationship for decades. It is her fervent hope that she will be made whole in the end.

Producing a book is a collaborative effort, and many people have made this one possible. I am grateful for the fine work of my collaborator, Catherine Whitney, who faithfully recorded my story and views. My literary agent, Jane Dystel, brought her considerable experience and expertise to the project, finding a good home for the book with John Wiley & Sons. My editor, Stephen Power, has been passionate and insightful in his pursuit of a great story.

I beg forgiveness if anyone has been omitted, and I thank all who have helped to make this come to fruition.

Naturally, a thought goes out to the beautiful and tragic subject of this portrait,
La Bella Principessa
, Bianca Sforza, and finally, my profound admiration and respect to the great Master himself, Leonardo da Vinci, who allowed me to enter his world in this small way.

A final note: This book is one man’s story about one man’s discovery. It is not and does not pretend to be art history, although great pains were taken to ensure that it reflects art history accurately. To this end, it was submitted for review to several prominent scholars. For those wishing to study Leonardo da Vinci, the bibliography contains many fine titles. I had a lot of pleasure telling this rather improbable story of what many consider to be the most important art discovery in generations. If any lesson is to be drawn, it is that in art, as in life, things are not always as they seem.

Found!

O! Wretched mortals, open your eyes!

—Leonardo da Vinci

My wife, Kathy, and I strode arm in arm along the winter-slicked sidewalks of Fifth Avenue, past the elegant buildings with their shivering doormen blowing whistles to hail taxis. There was nothing beautiful about January in New York, with its ice-encrusted pavements and towers of dirty snow. But the major art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were held in January, so that is where we had to be, like it or not. We never missed an auction season; we eagerly traveled from our home in Paris to immerse ourselves in the hunt for the next great find.

Kathy and I are full partners in life and in art, and over the years we had amassed a large collection, mostly works on paper, ranging from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. By the turn of the twenty-first century, we were already known for a handful of remarkable discoveries, including three miscatalogued paintings by van Dyck and a Raphael that was sold as the work of an anonymous sixteenth-century artist.

The most prominent find was a profoundly subtle and moving wooden crucifix we bought in the early 1990s that has recently been attributed to Michelangelo in a new major monograph on the artist. When we purchased the crucifix through an agent, it was presented as the work of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century unknown German artist, which I suspected was totally wrong. In 2005, through my contacts in Italy, I heard of a newly found wooden crucifix, attributed to Michelangelo, that was to be exhibited at the Horne Museum in Florence. I immediately saw a resemblance to the crucifix we had, so I sent photos to a specialist in Florence, who confirmed that it seemed to be by the same hand. Subsequently, a number of experts who studied the piece stated that not only was it likely a Michelangelo, it was even more sublime than the crucifix on display at the Horne Museum. In 2009, a London auction house estimated its value at £25 million (more than $39 million).

Kathy and I delighted in these adventures, and in time we learned to turn our differences into assets. And different we were! I was well aware and appreciative of Kathy’s balancing influence. As is often true in partnerships, we slipped easily into distinct, complementary roles. Kathy is the practical one with the critical eye, more earthbound and analytical. I am the dreamer and the hunter, with a passion for beauty. Kathy once told me she thought I had the curiosity of a Renaissance man but also that I spread myself too thin. I will say that I’ve always believed there is only one school, which is quality.

On this January day in 2007, we were headed to an address on 73rd Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues: the gallery of Kate Ganz, a dealer in Old Master drawings. It was the custom for major art galleries, mostly clustered around the Upper East Side of Manhattan, to host exhibitions and sales of their own during auction week, and we usually tried to visit those that featured Old Master drawings and works on paper. The weather was so icy we had actually considered skipping the Ganz exhibition, but I was representing a couple of wealthy European collectors on this trip, and I felt obligated to see as much as I could.

As we walked into the enveloping warmth of the gallery, my eyes were instantly drawn to a display to the right of the door. I moved closer. Standing on a small easel in the center of a table was the portrait of a lady I had never forgotten during the last nine years—a portrait I had missed out on at a Christie’s auction, which I had always regretted. I froze, staring. Behind me, Kathy gave a small gasp. It was the last thing either of us had expected to encounter that afternoon.

I first laid eyes on the image in 1998, in a Christie’s Old Masters catalog.
1
I vividly remember perusing the catalog at our Paris apartment in advance of the New York auction and stopping at the full-page display of the portrait. I still recall being struck by the image and feeling a sense of excitement and recognition that I couldn’t quite identify. The quality of the work stood out. Because I have spent many years studying art, my eye was trained to respond instinctively to quality before my rational mind could kick in.

The portrait was a 9-by-13-inch drawing in chalk and pen and ink on vellum, mounted on an oak board. It portrayed a young woman, her face in profile, her carriage erect and still, her features delicate and lovely. Her gaze was steady and expectant, her lips parted ever so slightly. The barest hint of a blush teased her porcelain cheek. Her light brown hair was dramatically braided with ribbons and tightly bound in a ceremonial style, falling in a thick coil down her back. She wore a richly detailed costume: a green dress over a red bodice, with a beautifully embroidered pattern at the top of the knot work. The setting and formality of the drawing suggested that it was a betrothal portrait.

The portrait was catalogued as “German, early 19th Century.” I immediately questioned the annotation. I was not an art historian, but I was a collector of long experience, with a trained eye for period details. I didn’t believe it was nineteenth century. I stared at the image for a long time, convinced that I was looking at either an original Renaissance period work or a forgery, but certainly not a nineteenth-century German work. That was plain wrong.

What possible reason could there be for such a blatant misattribution? I thought I understood the logic, flawed as it was. In the early nineteenth century there was a neo-Renaissance movement by a small cadre of German painters, known as Nazarenes, who longed to recapture the nobility, beauty, and spirituality of Renaissance art, which they lamented had been lost by the modern neoclassicists.
2
Modeling themselves after the pious romantics, they lived a pseudomonastic life, dressed in monks’ garb, and called themselves the Brotherhood of St. Luke after a medieval painters’ guild.

In 1810, four of the cadre moved to Rome, where they set up shop in an abandoned monastery. As their numbers grew, their influence spread. Artists such as Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel, and Peter von Cornelius created elaborate pieces, often duplicating the work of great Masters such as Raphael and Rubens. For example, Franz Pforr painted a variation of Raphael’s
St. George and the Dragon
, and others painted
The Wedding Feast at Cana
and
Madonna and Child
, in the style of the Masters.

Eventually the group disbanded and most of the artists returned to Germany, but they made a mark on the art world that was felt for decades. Still, the Nazarene artists are practically unknown by most people today, and accounts of their era are sketchy at best—at least in English; there are some written in German. Short of traveling to Germany, there’s no way to see the Nazarene paintings. Many critics dismiss the art as plastic and fault the Nazarenes for using art to serve religious purposes, thus diluting its importance and purity. In some respects, their aims were similar to those of the current fundamentalist Christian revival, whose followers read biblical implications into every endeavor, no matter how painfully forced they seem.

Stylistically, most experts have little trouble distinguishing true Renaissance art from the nineteenth-century derivatives.

Having once lived in Munich for several years, visiting museums replete with works of the Nazarene school, I was sufficiently familiar with it to know that this portrait did not belong among its works. It was simply not in the spirit of the Nazarenes. In particular, there was no religious symbolism or pious significance to the work. To me, it was not at all reminiscent of the nineteenth-century German painters. That determination had been made by just one man, Fran¸ois Borne, Christie’s resident expert for Old Master drawings, and to this day there has been no explanation from Borne or from Christie’s of how this attribution came to be. I would love to sit across a table from Borne and hear his reasoning, but I seriously doubt that this will ever happen.

If the lady in profile was not the work of a nineteenth-century German artist, then by whose hand was it? That was less clear. Although I recognized some characteristic Leonardo touches, the “L-word” didn’t even spring to my mind. First, that would have been too far-fetched. The portrait was, after all, catalogued by Christie’s, one of the world’s leading auction houses, and it was logical to assume that the house had done due diligence. I was ignorant of the provenance (the record of the artwork’s history) and the technical examination that had surely occurred. I had a healthy respect for Christie’s experts.

By the time I arrived New York for the Old Masters auction in January 1998, I had looked at the catalog image of the portrait many times. The first thing I wanted to do was see the real thing for myself. I headed over to Christie’s to take a look. In the showroom, I gave it close scrutiny, and I have to say, somewhat to my surprise, it was everything I might have hoped for. On the spot I decided to place a bid for double the minimum estimate.

I didn’t plan to attend the auction itself. I make it a principle not to be seen bidding in an auction room. You never know who might be inclined to bid against you, just for spite—or because they think you may know something they don’t. I am more comfortable with anonymity.

Christie’s auctions are the ultimate insider’s game, but often Christie’s makes news in the mainstream press, especially when there is something unique on the block. There is a vicarious thrill to be had by the masses—and anyone can visit the auction house and see remarkable works of art, as well as artifacts, jewelry, clothing, musical instruments, and many other items of value. The auction can spark tremendous media attention, especially when there is something awe-inspiring to be had. In 1994, Bill Gates purchased Leonardo’s
Codex Leicester
—a collection of scientific notes and drawings—for more than $30 million, and to this day, when it is not being shown at exhibitions, he keeps it in his personal library at his estate near Seattle. The purchase created a huge stir.

A different 1998 Christie’s auction would make big news for the $71.5 million sale of a self-portrait by Vincent van Gogh. But my focus was on the portrait of a young woman that I believed to be misattributed. It wasn’t unheard of. Art authenticating is not an exact science but relies on the ability to fit together many connecting pieces. I often found that when my colleagues and I made mistakes, it was usually the result of listening too uncritically to others’ opinions, reflected in auction-catalog entries, expert treatises, and just plain hearsay in the salesrooms. I always tried to abide by the philosophy of a colleague who once advised, “Trust your eyes and not your ears.”

I wish I had taken that advice in 1998. At the auction I lost my nerve, or at least my resolve. I was not feeling flush enough to punt—as they call it in the trade—for more than $17,000. The winning bidder, whose identity was unknown to me, paid the hammer price of $19,000; with Christie’s commission, the total was $22,850. I lost out, but over the years I would sometimes think about the portrait and wonder if it would ever resurface. I had that gnawing, uncomfortable gut feeling that I’d mucked up big-time. My lovely lady was gone forever. Or so I thought.

Kathy had often remarked on my obsession with the portrait, pressing me to explain what it was about the one that got away that so enraptured me. I could not fully explain my feeling of being captivated, or what it was about the portrait that made it so unforgettable, except to say that it was incredibly lovely, and had immediately presented me with a mystery: when was it really drawn, and by whom? I never abandoned my initial sense that it was perhaps a true Renaissance work.

I had often imagined the exquisite piece permanently exiled to an ordinary living room wall somewhere in North America or Europe or Asia, lost forever to the world at large. Now here it was, close enough that I could reach out and touch it. It was for sale, and most amazing of all, after so many years, the label did not vary much from the original Christie’s attribution, reading:

A carefully rendered study, this portrait is based on a number of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and may have been made by a German artist studying in Italy.

I circled the table nervously, mumbling with agitation. “My God, I don’t believe it. There you are, my lost lady,” I whispered. “Where have you been all this time? Has Kate been keeping you in a drawer?” I felt my heart thumping in my chest, and certainly the melodrama was warranted, but I tried to slow my breathing and look calm and casual.

If anything, the portrait drew me in more fiercely than it had before. Once again, I noted that it was beyond credibility that a nineteenth-century plagiarist would be capable of such a sensitive, fully realized rendering. The young woman seemed alive and breathing, every feature perfect. Her mouth was serene, her lips gently parted with the subtlest hint of expression, but her eye in profile was radiant with emotion. The formality of the portrait could not mask her blushing youth. She was exquisite. I could easily have stood gazing at the drawing for hours, but I knew the moment required decisive action.

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