Leonardo's Lost Princess (23 page)

In the inventory of Leonardo’s effects, datable to the early 1480s, one finds “
Una testa in profile con bella cappellatura
” (“A head in profile with beautiful hair”) and “
Una testa di putta con trezie rannodate
” (“A head of a girl with plaited locks”). The line of the face is of absolute purity and, though describing the physiognomy of the young woman, also succeeds on an idealized level. With a completely different effect and a profile in the opposite direction, it recollects a drawing in Windsor (inv. no. 12505). Notwithstanding the differences that stem from the noble effigy on the one hand and the popular type on the other, and between a finished work and a study in progress, the proportions coincide exactly.

The present
Profile
is the culmination of an extraordinary sequence that, in the story of Renaissance art, began with Piero della Francesca (with the
Portrait of Battista Sforza
, wife of Federico da Montefeltro, c. 1465, preserved in the Uffizi) and the presumed portrait of the wife of Giovanni de’ Bardi, attributed to Piero del Pollaiolo (c. 1470, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milano), as well as Piero di Cosimo’s
Cleopatra
(or
Simonetta Vespucci
, c. 1483, Musée Condé, Chantilly), and Domenico Ghirlandaio’s
Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni
(1488, Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Madrid).

The composition is enlivened by a balance of elements vigorously interpreted, in a composed harmony of refined intensity and nobility. In the hair, the strokes run vibrantly in waves, interpreted in their natural visual flow with a dialogue with the natural lightness of the parchment.

The “Leonardesque knot” on the shoulder is obviously a paradigm of the artist and not only a decorative feature. It constitutes here an original assemblage, in a unique arabesque, in the form of geometrical matrices with two knots, alluding to symbols of infinity, like those drawn at the end of 1473 and which can be seen elaborated in the clothing of the both
Lady with an Ermine
and the
Mona Lisa
.

The border reinforces it, also with simplified knots, which run around the edge of the sleeve in a reticulated pattern, which is, in its turn, created by the most refined interlacing. The hairdo, called in Milan a “coazone” is also characteristic of the period and was fashionable at the Sforza court.

Limpid is the detail of the eye that interprets Leonardo’s concept of the Window of the Soul and expresses in its unconventional gaze the interior grace and strength of character of the sitter. The rhythms of the contours and borders, and the lines and profiles that intersect and vary in their course animate the subject. Equally as harmonious are the different proportions of the facial elements that correspond to an anthropometric ideal.

One is tempted to think that this actual portrait may have inspired other Lombard portraits, including the
Dama con la reticella di perle
in the Ambrosiana and perhaps the lost and this still mysterious painting attributed to Leonardo by Adolfo Venturi in 1941: “Leonardo executed the portrait of Beatrice d’Este, beloved of Ludovico il Moro, who he called his
puttina
. One sees this, unfortunately totally ruined, almost destroyed, at Kraków, in the Museo Czartoryski, the young little bride.”

Even Cristina Geddo excludes the possibility that one is dealing here with the work of a follower, and, in effect, the comparison with paintings attributed to Ambrogio de Predis or to Bernardino de’ Conti ultimately confirms the assignment to Leonardo. A hypothesis for the identification of the sitter might also be suggested in passing: she could be a member of the Sforza or a similar noble family, for example Bianca Maria Sforza as a young woman. In 1494 Bianca Maria, the second-born daughter of Galeazzo Maria, Duke of Milan, and Bona di Savoy, kinswoman of the king of France, married the Emperor Maximilian I, who would praise her beauty rather than her character. The wedding ceremony and the marriage procession, at which it is sometimes said that Leonardo himself may have participated, were memorable. The comparison with the presumed portraits of Bianca Maria, attributed to Ambrogio (National Gallery of Art, Washington) or to Bernardino (Louvre), is eloquent: they reveal not insurmountable distances.

This
Profile Portrait
, so diaphanous and sculptural, elegant in its unadorned simplicity (without jewellery), is masterful in every detail, as has also been demonstrated by the scientific examinations and the in-depth analyses of the Lumière Technology.

7
. Carlo Pedretti, introduction to Vezzosi, “Nuptial Portrait of a Young Woman.” Here is most of Pedretti’s introduction to the monograph:

After overcoming an initial moment of stunned surprise upon opening this imposing and spectacular book, the reader who is not totally ignorant of the present state of Leonardo studies cannot fail to feel a sense of
déjà vu
—not simply because of the splendid reproductions of the works of art (not only by Leonardo) that it features, but also for the very original and attractive, yet scientifically impeccable way in which they are presented. This approach is, moreover, the same as that applied to the exhibition programmes of the Museo Ideale in the center of Vinci, founded in 1993 by its current director, Alessandro Vezzosi. . . .

This and other new findings allow the reader to make discoveries for himself, without the help of systematic indices or listings, and I actually think that it is better not to mention too many of these new findings—in order not to deprive the reader of the excitement that these will arouse.

Other notable critics and art historians before me have seen and examined it—none of whom wish to be mentioned by name. The exception is Nicholas Turner, who has issued a declaration in which he limits himself to describing and commenting on what he has seen of the original, with particular attention paid to the left-handed execution. According to him, the strokes in the background beyond the sitter’s profile move from lower right to upper left: since he did have access to a technical examination, this process needs to be checked, since it can be demonstrated that the direction of the strokes in Leonardo’s celebrated drawings of skulls of 1489 in the Royal Library at Windsor is the opposite. I must confess that an exception, however, must be made for one new previously unpublished item—too important to be skimmed over lightly. I refer to the large drawing on parchment of a
Young Woman Seen in Profile to the Left
, dressed in a lavish Renaissance outfit without jewellery, and presented as a presumed portrait of a “betrothed bride,” the sort of portrait that one could imagine being sent to a distant prospective groom—as was the case of Emperor Maximilian, who lived a long distance from Bianca Maria Sforza, the niece of Ludovico il Moro.

This fascinating story, which concluded with the lavish marriage festivities in 1494, and other similar stories in the political manoeuvres on the part of her astute uncle, not to mention the various aspects of the portrait’s complex attributional problems, are told by Vezzosi with the same restrained eloquence with which he has tackled every other theme or problem. I owe to him my knowledge of this extraordinary work of art, in the first instance from a digital image and then firsthand in the original. My first impression, perhaps influenced by the wooden panel to which the parchment has been attached, on the back of which one sees two old customs stamps, was that this is the sort of wooden support applied to boxes of chocolates in the middle of the nineteenth century. It is also curious that on the only occasion that the work has been described in print, when it was sold at Christie’s, New York, in January 1998, it was attributed to a nineteenth-century German artist and estimated at between $12,000 and $16,000. It was, in fact, sold for $21,850—a surprising result for a work attributed to an anonymous nineteenth-century German hand.

Another reason to be perplexed is the costume, where one would expect to see a detachable sleeve held in place by laces. Here instead one has a triangular opening (but not large enough to squeeze an arm through) with elegant, embroidered Leonardo-style knots along the sides. Impeccable, however, is the typical Lombard hairstyle, with the hair gathered in a “coazzone” which falls along the back of the sitter and is held in place at various points with ribbons—all drawn without a single perspectival error.

There were also curious aspects to the story of the reattribution of that painting, which are brought to light in my essay on it as a political allegory, published in 1990 in the volumes of miscellaneous studies in honor of Luigi Firpo. In his sober and essential account of the new study on vellum, Vezzosi dwells on the naturalistic elements of the image, including the head-and-shoulders portrait format, as an attribute of movement or timely decorum, which gives it its extraordinary and unexpected power: “Looking at the compositional schema, the curvilinear system is of such extreme purity that it has always made me think of an innovation on the scale of that of
Mademoiselle Pogany
by the twentieth-century sculptor Brancusi.”

8
. Nicholas Turner, “Statement by Nicholas Turner Concerning the Portrait on Vellum by Leonardo,” Lumiere Technology website,
www.lumiere-technology.com
, September 2008. For the full report, see the appendix.

9
. Timothy Clifford, “How I Know the New Portrait Is by Leonardo,”
Times
(London), October 14, 2009.

10
. Ibid.

8. Beloved Daughter

1
. An account derived from Vasari’s
The
Lives
of the Artists
and Kemp’s
Leonardo
. Also according to Vasari, in
The Last Supper
Leonardo finished Judas’s head, “which is a true portrait of treachery and cruelty,” but the head of Christ he left imperfect. The art scholar D. R. David Wright also weighed in on the surface Leonardo used, writing, “Given the vellum ground I would guess (only a guess) that he would have worked on a wooden tabletop, or a wooden board held in the hand.” Wright references a copy of a painting by Baccio Bandinelli in the Gardner Museum in Boston in which the artist holds a 3-by-3-foot board with a drawing attached (edges curling to reveal the board) as typical of the era.

2
. Vasari,
The Lives of the Artists
, 289–290.

3
. Ibid., 290.

4
. Ibid.

5
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 24.

6
. Martin Kemp, “Leonardo and the Ladies,”
Art Quarterly and Review
, Spring 2010.

7
. Vasari,
The
Lives of the Artists
, 290.

8
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 80.

9
. Martin Kemp, “Leonardo da Vinci: Science and Poetic Impulse,”
Journal of the Royal Society of Arts
, 133 (1985), 196–214; see also A. Giulini, “Bianca Sanseverino Sforzafigliadi Lodovico il Moro,”
Archivio storico lombardo
, 39 (1912), 233–252.

10
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 81.

11
. Ibid., 82.

12
. Elisabetta Gnignera to Martin Kemp, e-mail, April 11, 2010. Details of hair and clothing may be found in Gnignera,
I Soperchi Ornamenti
. Ad nexus caps are mentioned in the wedding trousseau of Bianca Maria Sforza (1472–1510), who married Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I in 1494, and Gnignera notes “almost total similarities” between the ad nexus caps in
La Bella Principessa
and in
La Dama con la Reticella
(attributed to Ambrogio de Predis), thought to portray Anna Sforza, Ludovico’s niece, who married Alfonso d’ Este in 1491 and died during childbirth in 1497 at the age of twenty-one.

But whereas the cap in
La Dama con la Reticella
is a sumptuous affair made of silk ribbons and lined with pearls, the one in
La Bella Principessa
appears to be made of linen. This, says Gnignera, suggests everyday use, but it could also tie in with Martin Kemp’s suggestion that
La Bella Principessa
’s plain costume and absence of jewelery suggests it to have been a memorial portrait. Gnignera concludes that the hairstyle in
La Bella Principessa
was in use at the Sforza Court in Milan for less than a decade (between 1491 and 1499), when the braided Spanish style gave way to the freer, braidless French style. Gnignera believes that the subject must have been “a lady very close to [Duchess] Beatrice d’Este.”

See also E. Welch, “Art of the Edge: Hair, Hats, and Hands in Renaissance Italy,”
Renaissance Studies
195, no. 22 (2008), 1–29.

13
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 71.

14
. Vezzosi, “Nuptial Portrait of a Young Woman.”

15
. Geddo, “A ‘Pastel’ by Leonardo da Vinci.”

16
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 84.

9. The Art of Fingerprints

1
. Biro’s biographical details are from his own story at
www.peterpaulbiro.com
and conversations with the author.

2
. Kemp and Cotte,
La Bella Principessa
, 161.

3
. Ibid.

4
. Ibid., 44.

10. The World Reacts

1
. “Art: Every Line Will Be Alive,”
Time
, September 12, 1960.

2
. Elisabetta Povoledo, “Dealer Who Sold Portrait Joins Leonardo Debate,”
New York Times
, August 29, 2008.

3
. Richard Day,
Artful Tales: The Unlikely and Implausible Journal of an Art Dealer
(London, privately published, 2009).

4
. Gene Weingarten, “Pearls before Breakfast,”
Washington Post
, April 8, 2007.