Leonardo's Lost Princess (10 page)

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:

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 Sir 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, style, 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.
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Martin speculated that Leonardo might have been considered something of a specialist in portraying women. As Isabella d’Este, the Marchesa of Mantua, once wrote, he deployed “that air of sweetness and suavity” in which his art peculiarly excels. Who could deny that Leonardo’s sensitive, even sensual, portrayals of women—from
Mona
Lisa
to the new
La Bella Principessa
—have a stirring quality that seems to reach into the ladies’ souls?

Vasari would surely agree, judging by his description of Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa
:

The mouth, with its opening, and with its ends united by the red of the lips to the flesh-tints of the face, seemed, in truth, to be not colours but flesh. In the pit of the throat, if one gazed upon it intently, could be seen the beating of the pulse. And, indeed, it may be said that it was painted in such a manner as to make every valiant craftsman, be he who he may, tremble and lose heart. He made use, also, of this device: Mona Lisa being very beautiful, he always employed, while he was painting her portrait, persons to play or sing, and jesters, who might make her remain merry, in order to take away that melancholy which painters are often wont to give to the portraits that they paint. And in this work of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold; and it was held to be something marvelous, since the reality was not more alive.
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Martin did not believe, as many did, that Leonardo was homosexual. He could find no reflection of sexual orientation or preference in the artist’s portrayals of men and women. Leonardo’s reverence for beauty in all its natural forms was more profound than sexual fantasy.

Perhaps, Martin surmised, other court artists were sufficient to the task of portraying male figures—on horses, on shields, at war, stamped on coins—with their stark formality, whereas only Leonardo had an eye for bringing life to the faces of beloved females. He also rendered them with an intimacy that was suitable for private settings, not formal portraits. In each case, the subject appears to be responding to a person or an activity outside the picture. She is alive and fully human.

Although the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was probably produced several years before
La Bella Principessa
, there are enough stylistic similarities to place the latter comfortably in the period of the Sforza court. Martin advised that there were five women in Sforza’s court who might have sat for such a portrait. However, three of them—Ludovico’s wife, Beatrice; Isabella of Aragon, the wife of Ludovico’s nephew Gian Galeazzo; and Ludovico’s niece Beatrice—could be ruled out, since existing portraits showed what they looked like. There remained two possibilities: Ludovico’s niece Anna and his illegitimate daughter Bianca. Kemp found himself focusing on the young woman Bianca for a number of reasons, including her extreme youth (Anna was six years older).

Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico’s mistress Bernardina de Corradis, was the apple of the duke’s eye. In the secularized Milan of the period, the distinction between wife and mistress was not so morally loaded. Because Bianca was so highly favored, Ludovico took steps to legitimize her in 1489, before betrothing her to Galeazzo Sanseverino, the highly regarded commander of his armies. Since Bianca was a mere eight or nine years old at the time, the wedding date was set for 1496, when she would be at least thirteen.

Bianca’s future husband was a major figure at the court, a dear friend of the duke’s and a patron of Leonardo’s. Leonardo would often visit Galeazzo’s stables to measure his horses and sketch the anatomical drawings that would become so highly prized. One might imagine that the two men also discussed weaponry, which was a topic of great fascination to Leonardo.