Leonardo's Lost Princess (12 page)

Biro checked his work with André Turcotte, a retired Canadian police sergeant who ran the Quebec Police fingerprint lab for more than a decade. Turcotte agreed that the prints matched. But the International Foundation for Art Research, a nonprofit organization that is the primary authenticator of Pollock’s works, balked, saying that Biro’s method was not yet universally accepted.

Complicating the question was the complete absence of any known fingerprints by Pollock. There was no possibility of making a real comparison. Biro’s only option was to build a case through a preponderance of evidence. He could only make cross-comparisons. Nonetheless, he believed he had one important factor in his favor: fingerprinting had been around for more than a century as a true science. There were no gray areas. There was no room for error or review. Done properly, fingerprint analysis shows a match or does not show a match. Nevertheless, the Pollock attribution remains in limbo.

After his experience with the Horton “Pollock,” Biro threw himself into the work with more fervor than ever. He cofounded a company dedicated to the use of scientific methods to help the art community wrestle with these tricky and often controversial issues. He set up laboratories in London and Montreal. His dream was to be at the forefront of an entirely new field: utilizing DNA as evidence in artwork. The old way and the new way were perhaps on a collision course. But it was exciting to watch.

In his workshop, Biro studied Pascal’s digital work on
La Bella Principessa
with great care. Lumiere Technology’s multispectral images revealed two specific impressions on the drawing. One was a stamped impression in ink of a finger near the upper left edge of the vellum. The other print was a plastic impression in the subject’s neck, which appeared to be from the outer edge of the artist’s hand.

There was plenty of evidence to support Leonardo’s use of fingers and hands to blend in shade. As Martin noted, during the period in question, “Leonardo was pushing his chalk techniques in a painterly direction . . . confirmed by the handprint visible in the Lady’s neck, assuming that it is deliberate and not accidental. His paintings before 1500 show extensive use of the fingers or hand to blend the modeling, particularly in the flesh tones. It generally looks as if the soft, fleshy area of the right edge of his right hand was used for this purpose, while he applied the media with his left hand. While he was not unique in exploiting his fingers and hands in paint or priming layers, he did use the technique in a typically widespread and varied manner. It is likely that more handprints were visible in the flesh of
La Bella
before the restoration(s).”
4

Biro also examined a number of images from Lumiere Technology’s database, including the
Mona Lisa
and
Lady with an Ermine
. He found that all of the works contained both fingerprints and palm prints that could be used for comparison.

What, specifically, was he looking for? For two fingerprints to be considered a match, they must be compared in accordance with basic principles, such as being reproduced to the same scale and presented in the same orientation. If these conditions exist, one of three levels of correspondence is possible.

Level one involves a comparable flow of ridges, showing a similar pattern of loop, arch, whorl, and delta (which are the identifying fingerprint marks). Level-one comparison narrows the field of contributors while not being entirely conclusive. For example, twins often have very closely matching prints, and a finer level of detail is needed to see the difference.

Level two involves more detailed characteristic ridge patterns and deviations. If two prints correspond in level-one detail, then the examiner proceeds to look for level-two detail, involving the bifurcations, crossovers, ridge endings, and so forth. “Characteristic” patterns are essentially deviations in a ridge’s path. When a ridge’s path divides into two branches, it is called a bifurcation. When two bifurcations appear on the skin overlaying each other, they are called a trifurcation. If these are found in the comparisons in the same basic position, it’s a match.

Level three involves the minutest aspect of ridge impressions, such as the outline of the ridges and the placement of sweat pores.

The number of corresponding features necessary for a match is not uniform from country to country and is generally left to the examiner’s discretion and expertise.

For Biro, the work that was the most fruitful was Leonardo’s unfinished
St.
Jerome in the Wilderness
at the Vatican, which contained more than two dozen fingertip impressions left in the wet pigment, clearly used to shape the underpainting for the background of sky, water, and rocks.
St. Jerome in the Wilderness
was significant because it was painted early in Leonardo’s career, before he had apprentices. There was no doubt that he was the only artist to touch the painting at that time.

The digital enlargement of
La Bella Principessa
helped Biro to recover ridge-path detail at a resolution approaching what was necessary for fingerprint examination. It revealed a number of recognizable characteristics that could be compared with those of a digitally enhanced fingerprint on
St. Jerome in the Wilderness.
Biro singled out eight characteristics discernible on both prints. He concluded that the correspondence between the fingerprints on Leonardo’s
St. Jerome in the Wilderness
and
La Bella Principessa
provided a highly valuable piece of evidence. Although it might not be sufficient to establish innocence or culpability in a legal case, the coincidence of the eight marked characteristics was strongly supportive of Leonardo’s authorship of
La Bella Principessa.

To further strengthen his findings, Biro gained access to a high-quality photograph of an X-ray of Leonardo’s
Ginevra de’ Benci
, which was on display at the Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. He discovered a fingerprint that was similar to the others.

Biro found the examination of Leonardo’s fingerprints thrilling, because their presence revealed so much about the genius of the artist. Leonardo used his fingers and palms as extensions of the brushes—he got literally down into the painting, working it over as if he were sculpting. Leonardo’s brilliant and effective use of the ridges on his fingers and hands clearly contributed to the subtle and sublime effects he created here and in so many of his works. It revealed the imaginative and ever exploring creative mind for which he is so revered.

Martin believed that the fingerprints, though not conclusive on their own, added an important piece to the puzzle. He wrote to me, “This is yet one more component in what is as consistent a body of evidence as I have ever seen. I will be happy to emphasize that we have something as close to an open and shut case as is ever likely with an attribution of a previously unknown work to a major master. As you know, I was hugely skeptical at first, as one needs to be in the Leonardo jungle, but now I do not have the slightest flicker of doubt that we are dealing with a work of great beauty and originality that contributes something special to Leonardo’s oeuvre. It deserves to be in the public domain.”

The jury is still out on the fingerprint evidence as full proof of a Leonardo attribution. Jean Penicaut is in the process of attempting to obtain permission from Vatican authorities to digitize Leonardo’s
St. Jerome
in order to properly compare the fingerprints. This is a scientific study in progress, quite promising, but ongoing nevertheless. Even so, when I read Biro’s report, I saw one more piece of a complex puzzle leading to Leonardo.

It was time, at last, to introduce the world to Leonardo’s beautiful princess—once lost but now most assuredly found. Little did I know the upheaval that awaited me.

10

The World Reacts

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Katsushika Hokusai, one of the world’s great artists, who lived between 1760 and 1849, famously exclaimed on his deathbed at eighty-nine years of age, “If only heaven will grant me a few more years, I will become a real painter.”
1
To that I can say without false modesty that if heaven grants
me
a few more years, I might just understand a little about art. Certainly, the moment the news of
La Bella Principessa
hit the world, I began my education anew.

It’s not as though there had been complete silence about the project. In the summer of 2008, while Biro was still making his fingerprint study, details of Lumiere’s findings began to leak out to the press. Pascal was openly saying he believed the work was by Leonardo, and the buzz began.

The press was interested in tracking down the dealer who had bought the portrait at the Christie’s auction in 1998. In the beginning, it wasn’t publicly known, and that was mostly my doing. I had decided to be a gentleman and withhold Kate Ganz’s name. It was a small deception, made to save Kate the embarrassment. I didn’t want to cause her problems by highlighting how she’d kept Leonardo in a drawer for nine years. I thought my motivations were quite honorable. But Kate didn’t see it that way.

When the first media coverage appeared about the portrait, Kate herself contacted the
New York Times
and said straight out—and somewhat indignantly—that she was the previous owner.
2
She was clearly incensed by the suggestion that she’d missed a Leonardo, and she wanted to defend herself. However, I found her explanation somewhat disingenuous. She told the
Times
that she had considered a Leonardo attribution when she bought the work but had rejected it after consulting a number of art historians and a conservator at a major American museum.

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:

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 world 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.