Leonardo's Lost Princess (19 page)

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 Elucidated.”
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.

Thanks to the reams of scientific and historic evidence uncovered between 2008 and 2011, all doubts and questions about
La Bella Principessa
’s authenticity have been laid to rest. Only the most prejudiced skeptics can dispute the shattering conclusion brought forth by the skilled marriage of technology and connoisseurship: that
La Bella Principessa
,
this subtle, moving, and hauntingly beautiful image, is the work of a supreme genius—Leonardo da Vinci.

Epilogue

Life's Fleeting Grace

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

—Leonardo da Vinci

In 1519, Leonardo was an old man in his sixty-seventh year, and he was gravely ill, confined to his bed in the Clos Lucé, the French manor he had lived in for three years under the grace of his dear friend King Fran¸ois I. Perhaps in his imaginings, which were sometimes fevered, the work of his life swirled around him: the face of an angel gazing in reverence at the Christ child, the violent passion of the Battle of Anghiari, the pain in the faces of Jesus's disciples as they learned of his betrayal by one of their own, the beautiful seductiveness of Lisa's smile, the lovely countenances of the women of Ludovico's court, the thousands of sketches made in what he now despaired were a futile attempt to pull the very souls of his subjects into view.

According to the author Giorgio Vasari, as winter turned to spring, the king often came to sit by Leonardo's bedside. He was supportive of Leonardo's late-life turn to religion. After painting some of the most iconic religious themes ever made, Leonardo felt his life ebbing away and had found God. Although he was extremely weak, he would ask Fran¸ois and others to help him leave his chamber so he could take the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist.

On his last day of life, his breath labored, Leonardo saw his beloved friend the king in the doorway, looking at him with great sadness. “Help me sit,” he said, and the king gently lifted him into an upright position.

“I am dying,” Leonardo said with a faint voice, tinged with regret. “I have failed in this life to do full justice to my gift.”

“No, no,” Fran¸ois protested. “You have honored us all with your work.”

“I have offended God by not working as well as I ought to have. I pray to be forgiven.”

Suddenly Leonardo shuddered and let out a gasping breath. The king raised his friend's head to ease his suffering and held him in his arms as Leonardo passed on to the next life—the last thought in his mind that he had been a poor servant of his art.

Those who mourned him would disagree. Vasari recorded in the aftermath of Leonardo's leaving the earth, “The splendor of his great beauty could calm the saddest soul, and his words could move the most obdurate mind. His great strength could restrain the most violent fury, and he could bend an iron knocker or a horseshoe as if it were lead. He was liberal to his friends, rich and poor, if they had talent and worth; and indeed as Florence had the greatest of gifts in his birth, so she suffered an infinite loss in his death.”
1

The discovery and consecration of
La Bella Principessa
has been a gratifying culmination of my nearly half a century of love and passion for art. It is perhaps every collector's swan song come to fruition. As Martin so poetically put it, “It is a star portrait of a stellar sitter.
La Bella Principessa
, as the poets would claim, testifies to Leonardo da Vinci's victory over the transitory beauties of envious nature and the ravages of corrosive time. It is, I believe, an image that is bound to bring great pleasure to successive generations of viewers.”
2

But the joy and excitement are naturally tempered by a touch of melancholy and a sweet sadness for dear time's waste—the profound realization that nothing is permanent and that the only certainty in life is uncertainty.

What could better exemplify this human reality than the fate of the beautiful girl so sensitively depicted by the great Master, Leonardo da Vinci? Bianca Sforza, on the threshhold of a sumptuous courtly life, so full of promise, was suddenly struck down at the age of fourteen. Thanks to the miraculous hand of a genius, Bianca escaped a fate of oblivion, and we are able to appreciate her beauty and cherish her existence.

It is sobering to think how close Bianca came, after five hundred hidden years, to nearly being lost to us again, perhaps this time forever. I have asked myself often where fate has taken her over the centuries, from the moment her portrait was most probably cut from the family album, no longer serving either a political or sentimental purpose. Was it first passed around by former friends or her husband, framed and hung in a family chapel, or hidden in a somber room, a faint remembrance? And with the vagaries of time and through the years of plague, warfare, political dislocations and turmoil, what happened to her? Our fantasies can run wild imagining where she lay hidden all those centuries until Giannino Marchig, an expert restorer and fine painter in his own right, found her, we know not where, prized her without knowing her origins or author, and lovingly restored her, for his own pleasure and the simple joy of bringing her back to life. And then, with some serious misappraisals, misjudgments and a quirk of fate, she fell into my almost unworthy hands—unworthy because I did not immediately understand or recognize her extraordinary qualities or importance. Fortunately, it seems my whole life as a passionate collector focalized and culminated on this one object, and through my experience and many contacts in the field of art, I was able to advance at an astonishing pace for a discovery of this magnitude. I hope this book pays adequate homage to those who made this an amazing success. It has been a truly rewarding adventure, and I am thankful for having played my part.

Yet, at the back of my mind there will forever be a sigh and a thought for Bianca and Leonardo, as a sonnet by Shakespeare echoes in my mind:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe
And moan th'expense of many a vanished sight.

La Bella Principessa
, as the poets would claim, testifies to Leonardo da Vinci's victory over the transitory beauties of envious nature and the ravages of corrosive time. It is, I believe, an image that is bound to bring great pleasure to successive generations of viewers.

A century from now, when all who read these pages are but distant memories, Leonardo will, I pray, still be present in the world: a paradigm of perfection, an example to be emulated, a model for the geniuses of the future.