Leonardo's Lost Princess (8 page)

One of the most innovative aspects of Cotte’s camera technique was its ability to track restorations, separating them from the original and from one another. In the course of its existence, the portrait had undergone extensive restoration—not uncommon for works of this age. Cotte observed, “Because Leonardo was so innovative and adventurous in his exploration of new techniques, many of his works have suffered more than those of his contemporaries. (One thinks of the wall painting of
The
Last Supper
or the lost
Battle of Anghiari.
) Even the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani reveals condition issues.”
17

With the aid of the standardized multispectral images and a cross-comparison of the false-color ultraviolet, and infrared, Cotte was able to construct a map of restorations, allowing a clear distinction between the original media and the pigments added later. He found that “in this case, the restorations––the retouching and reinforcement of the original lines and hatching––are, by comparison with Leonardo’s own handling, heavy and overemphatic; in a few areas, they compromise the reading of the work.”
18

Among Cotte’s findings was that a thin layer of pink pigment had been applied by brush to much of the cheek area and forehead, using a system of hatching. “The restorer obviously aspired to be consistent with Leonardo’s handling, but, alas, no restorer could achieve the same degree of subtlety.”
19

Reinforcements in pen and ink carried out during restoration were easy to recognize, and Cotte was able to identify the ink used by the original artist (purportedly Leonardo) and the restorers. In the knot patterns on the shoulder, the restorer’s efforts to reinforce contour lines, details, and hatchings were likewise easily distinguished. Cotte saw that occasionally, the transparency of the ink in the redrawn areas allowed the original black chalk strokes underneath to show through, again highlighting the distinction between the artist and his restorers.

“The restorer’s stroke is hesitant, sometimes wavers, and is irregular in its thickness,” he noted. “It is not always easy to read. The contrast between the labored, less coherent, and less logical hatching of the later intervention and the lively, correct, refined, and harmonious hatching of Leonardo, in which each stroke seems to have a precise role or significance, is abundantly clear from the multispectral images.”
20

Cotte also discovered that the later restorations were the work of a right-handed person. “The movement of the strokes, in contrast to those of Leonardo, starts with a rather timid––even hesitant––placement of the drawing instrument (brush or pen), then continues with a thicker line, with its several nervous wobbles, only to taper off again,” Cotte observed.
21

As part of his investigation, Cotte studied the ink. Although he acknowledged that ink cannot be scientifically dated in the same way as vellum, since the same recipes continued to be in use for centuries, he was able to determine that the ink was compatible with a fifteenth-century date.

In the end, Cotte attempted to establish a firm distinction between the original and the restoration, creating a virtual reconstruction of the original based on a number of educated assumptions:

• The vellum, naturally soiled by the wear and tear of five centuries, would have been brighter.
  
• The colors throughout were probably less dirty, less grayish.
  
• The green was made from a piece of ampelite (a black substance like coal) on a yellow background.
  
• The red of the bodice was achieved with pigment from hematite on a yellow background.
  
• The entire bodice would have been rendered with the same red.
  

Cotte also noted a tantalizing clue as to the portrait’s original usage. The remains of three needle holes along the left edge of the vellum showed that it originally came from a book or a manuscript. The piece of vellum was evidently cut from its codex with a knife. Small cut marks were visible a few millimeters in from the lower left edge. He judged that they could not have been made with a pair of scissors and that they were situated exactly at the fold of the gathering of the codex, below the lowest needle hole. It was one more piece of the mystery we were destined to pursue: What was the purpose of the portrait, and where had it originally been displayed?

We sadly realized that the portrait could no longer hang on our wall for our private enjoyment. “This is scary,” Kathy worried. “It’s an enormous responsibility, and I don’t want it. Isn’t the purpose of a work of art to enjoy it? Art is made to be displayed, not to put away. But the whole thing makes me very nervous.”

As we were deciding what to do, a friend told a story about Bill Gates and his
Codex
(a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo that Gates acquired at an auction in 1994)
.
There was to be a show in France, and someone involved in the show described the security as intense, saying the
Codex
was always accompanied by a team of former Special Forces heavies. Furthermore, Gates’s home, outside Seattle, Washington, was a fortress with advanced electronic security systems. Each guest entering the property carried a microchip, which identified him or her throughout the house.

When Kathy heard of these extreme security measures, she looked at me meaningfully and said, “Peter, the
Codex
is highly significant, but so is our portrait, in its own way.”

At the urging of Kathy and others, I placed the drawing in a secure vault in Zurich, protected by armed guards and alarm systems. Until I knew for sure whose work it was, I wasn’t going to take any chances.

In any case, Cotte no longer needed the original. He had all of the digital information required. Multispectral imaging had digitally stripped away the “noise” built up through centuries of aging and restorations. So many of the critical pieces fit together to form a high probability that it was the work of Leonardo. But high probability was not enough.

Sitting at his computer, lovingly reviewing the photo enhancements of the portrait, Cotte’s curiosity grew. He needed to look into questions of style and period that were beyond the range of his camera. He could make the details visible, but he could not know all of the meaning. For that he needed another eye. It was time to bring in a big gun, a Leonardo expert of unquestionable authority. We discussed names and were inevitably led to Martin Kemp.

6

A Scholar's View

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, was a leading Leonardo scholar. Slender, soft-spoken, and youthful in his sixties, he lived in something of a Renaissance cocoon: a historic eighteenth-century house near Oxford. It was there that he burrowed in to do the laborious work of examining the numerous pieces of art and photographs of art that were sent his way.

Kemp was a star in the art history arena, and he had written extensively on imagery from art and science in the Renaissance. He had recently published, in 2004,
Leonardo
, in which he probed the real meaning behind Leonardo's greatest masterpieces.

Kemp's passion was the relationship between art and science, and he had an unusual background for an art historian. He was trained in natural sciences and art history at Cambridge University and at the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London. In his career he has curated many exhibitions and has been the favored consultant for those exploring the intricacies of Renaissance style.

Kemp's explorations have also taken him in intriguing directions. Always fascinated by Leonardo's scientific sketches, in early 2000 he was visited by daredevil skydiver Adrian Nicholas, who wanted to consult him on the construction of a parachute according to the specifications of Leonardo's drawings, using authentic period materials. In 1485, Leonardo had scribbled a simple sketch of a four-sided pyramid covered in linen. Alongside it he had written, “If a man is provided with a length of gummed linen cloth with a length of 12 yards on each side and 12 yards high, he can jump from any great height whatsoever without injury.”
1
Nicholas wanted to test the concept, and he figured the best person to help him was a bona fide Leonardo scholar.

Kemp agreed to serve as a consultant, and in June 2000 the contraption was ready. The chosen destination was South Africa, where Nicholas launched himself from a hot-air balloon 10,000 feet high. He parachuted for five minutes as a black box recorder measured his descent, then he cut himself free of the contraption and released his Leonardo-inspired parachute. He made a slow, graceful, uneventful descent.

Leonardo's parachute design had worked flawlessly.
2
Nicholas and Kemp were elated. “It took one of the greatest minds who ever lived to design it, but it took 500 years to find a man with a brain small enough to actually go and fly it,” Nicholas told the media, adding that “all the experts agreed it wouldn't work—it would tip over or fall apart or spin around and make you sick—but Leonardo was right all along. It's just that no one else has ever bothered trying to build it before.”
3

It was an exhilarating adventure for Kemp, who would grieve deeply for Nicholas when he died in a skydiving accident only five years later.

Kemp's fascination with the intuitive integration of art and science made him the perfect choice to weigh in on the authorship of our portrait. But getting his ear was no easy task.

“Since the publication of
The
Da Vinci Code
, I was getting e-mails from people saying they owned the next Leonardo,” Kemp told me. “I call them the ‘Leonardo Loonies.' Leonardo attracted lunatics more than any other figure—Shakespeare, Dante, Newton.”
4

Kemp liked to recount some of the wilder stories, including the theory that Leonardo had faked the Shroud of Turin and that the image was not Jesus Christ but Leonardo himself. But Dan Brown's huge bestseller
The
Da Vinci Code
, and the fantasizing it encouraged, drove him around the bend. In Kemp's experience, especially in the modern media-saturated environment, if there was a conspiracy theory or a secret society, Leonardo was bound to make an appearance.

So Kemp was naturally skeptical of all claims. When I first e-mailed him about a possible Leonardo find, he later told me, he thought, “Oh, dear, another bout of painful correspondence.” But after the digital file came through, he saw that it warranted a closer look.

Kemp's first task was to view the original, which was locked away in Zurich. He told us that the viewing would have to wait several months, when he planned to be in Zurich to make a television program. He would not go beforehand; it was his policy to accept no money, even travel expenses, for giving an attribution. He believed unequivocally that once one accepted money of any kind, one's opinion could be bought.

True to his word, some months later Kemp sat in a large viewing room at the bank where the portrait was being kept and waited for the two security guards (whom he humorously described as having big shoulders and no necks) to retrieve the portrait from storage. They laid it on the table in front of him and retreated to a corner of the room to wait in respectful silence.

There is a mythology about art experts like Kemp that they have an unerring instinct, like an energy vibration, that tells them they are in the presence of a Master. Would Kemp have that moment of recognition? He himself had once described a similar sensation when viewing the real thing. “It was what struck you—that first jump of recognition,” he said reverently. “If you didn't get that interior feeling that grabbed you, perhaps you would not pursue the matter. But the process was also more organic—involving other criteria and contextual support to ask, ‘Does this belong, does it tell us about Leonardo?' ”
5

When he viewed the portrait, he admitted to having a sense that there was something to it. “I immediately saw it was in a different league than others,” he said. “But I was still very, very cautious. I didn't want to jump at it, because once you start believing, you can summon all the evidence you need.”
6

Kemp's method was from the “doubting Thomas” school. He kept pulling back and saying to himself, “Let's see what's wrong with it. What tells me it's not a Leonardo?” Because he was trained in scientific methodology, Kemp's road to attribution was heavily paved with skepticism. Over the next few hours he became lost in the portrait, studying it from every angle.

He left the vault feeling very positive. His initial interest had been fully corroborated in the presence of the real thing. The next steps involved further technical and historical analysis to see whether, on the whole, the portrait was consistent with Leonardo and to determine whether the subject could be identified. His process was organic, pulling in every imaginable piece to a giant jigsaw. And like a jigsaw, if a single piece didn't fit, the entire puzzle would be ruined.

He compared the process of review to a well-designed piece of furniture, like a cabinet, which through the construction process gradually becomes a functional whole. In the end, everything fits together. The drawers don't stick, the legs don't wobble. It is sturdy.

Kemp decided to pursue the matter, and he is the one who dubbed the portrait
La Bella
Principessa
(“The Beautiful Princess”), a title that stuck. The name, he explained to us, referred to a princess not in the royal sense but in the generic sense. “She is wearing a court costume with the colors of the court, and her long pigtail is the badge of court ladies of the time.” So
La Bella
Principessa
she was! (When Kathy and I had initially discussed naming the portrait, we had considered using the more accurate
La Bella
Milanese
—denoting the portrait of a beautiful Milanese woman. We were dissuaded, however, by the fact that
milanese
is also the Italian term for veal cutlet.)

As he immersed himself in his investigation, Kemp noted a series of incontrovertible facts about the work. These were key in preparing for an ultimate determination of period and hand. They included the following:

• The vellum and the pigments had undergone the kinds of damage, abrasion, and restoration that were to be expected of an object dating from the late fifteenth century.
  
• The shaded areas were first laid in with extensive parallel hatching in Leonardo's distinctive left-handed manner—that is, inclining from upper left to lower right, often at or close to a forty-five-degree angle.
  
• The opaque areas of pigment on the forehead, cheek, and neck resulted from an old campaign of restoration, to cover areas of damage and losses to the original chalk surface.
  
• The darker ink reinforcements added with the brush, most evident in the headdress, hair, and costume, also resulted from restoration, undertaken piously to “improve” the image in a way that differs from modern procedures. Kemp determined that the retouchings had been made by a right-handed artist.
  
• A left fingerprint was evident close to the left margin at the level of the woman's hairline.
  
• There were clear signs that some part of the artist's hand, probably the outside of the palm of the right hand, had been pressed into the pigment layer in the subject's neck.
  
• The contours of the facial profile, neck, and shoulder revealed some maneuvering to establish the right outline; there were also signs that the rear contour of the subject's braid was first laid in further to the right of its present location. These are known as
  pentimenti
  —underlying images from a draft or an early version that show through—and were common to Leonardo.
  
• The upper, right, and lower edges of the sheet were consistent in appearance and could be original.
  
• The relatively regular distribution of tightly spaced follicles suggested that the vellum was from the skin of a calf.
  

Now Kemp turned his attention to the investigation of elements. The first question was about the material itself, the vellum. Vellum is parchment made from the skin of a calf or a kid. There was no record of Leonardo's ever having used vellum. For some, this would have been evidence enough that it was not his work. But Kemp found it intriguing, and he thought that the vellum surface militated against a forger. What forger would have placed such an enormous obstacle in his path? Kemp dug deeper, discovering a telling passage in Leonardo's “Ligny Memorandum” in which he referred to an interest in using chalk on vellum:

Get from Jean de Paris the method of dry colouring and the method of white salt, and how to make coated sheets; single and many doubles; and his box of colours; learn the tempera of flesh tones, learn to dissolve gum lake.
7

Jean de Paris was Jean Perréal, the French portrait painter, illuminator, designer, intellectual, and poet, who happened to be in Italy in 1494 with Charles VIII and again in 1499 with Louis XII—and possibly at other times as well. Leonardo seems to have consulted with him on his unique method of using dry colors on vellum, and he was particularly interested in how to achieve flesh tones and how to handle lake pigments—those manufactured by mixing dye with certain insoluble binders, in this case gum arabic. Gum arabic is extracted from the acacia tree and can be used as a binder for pigments or even as a fixative for the whole sheet.

Leonardo is indicating that he was planning to ask the French Master about ways of preparing the drawing surface. He was interested in obtaining single and double sheets, which refers to the cutting of rectangular pages from the irregular, stretched skin of a kid or a calf. The technical examination of
La Bella Principessa
was consistent with the use of a gum fixative over the original medium. In short, Leonardo recorded his intention to inquire about the very techniques that were necessary to create the
La Bella Principessa
! These are different from the standard procedures of manuscript illumination, which were well known in Milan.

A specialist studying the vellum question (who asked to remain anonymous) would later come upon a meaningful example of the technique: a magnificent, large illuminated portrait on vellum (37 by 27 centimeters, or 14.4 by 10.5 inches) of Lorenzo de' Medici as a boy, which appeared in a deluxe edition of the complete works of Homer. It was printed on vellum in 1489 and now belongs to the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples. The beautiful
Portrait of Piero
is by the illuminator and painter Gherardo di Giovanni del Fora, who had a workshop in Florence between 1445 and 1497. He knew Leonardo, and it is possible that they discussed the topic of portraits on vellum.

Kemp continued his investigation, slowly fitting together each piece of the complex puzzle. His next area of study was the proportions of the face. This area was absolutely critical when reviewing a Leonardo work, because the Master devoted so much space in his notebooks to the series of harmonic proportions that he believed characterized the internal relationships of the human body. For example:

The space from the mouth to below the chin will be a quarter part of the face, and similar to the width of the mouth. The space between the chin and below the base of the nose will be a third part of the face, and similar to the nose and the forehead.

The space between the midpoint of the nose and below the chin will be half the face.

The space between the upper origin of the nose, where the eyebrows arise, to below the chin will be two-thirds of the face.
8

This proportional system was also found in Leonardo's
Lady with an
Ermine, La Belle Ferronière
, and
Mona Lisa. La Bella Principessa
complied exquisitely.

Kemp worked on with a growing sense of appreciation, verging on awe. Could it be that this was the real thing?