Leonardo's Lost Princess (4 page)

The enormous prosperity was reflected in the lifestyle of Milan's citizens, who lived chiefly by trade and manufacturing, and all benefited from the fertility of the soil. Two main industries formed the basis of Milan's success as a manufacturing center: Milanese armor and the woolen industry (which included silk weaving, embroidery, and gold and silver cloth). This created a merchant class, which bought up all the wares and then sold them to the consumer. Trade generated great wealth for the top echelons of society, and they lived in noble houses—if they were not quite royalty, they were the closest thing to it. The aristocracy of Milan was based on wealth, not birth.

It was a rich intellectual culture for Leonardo. The Court of Milan became a sort of academy, which united writers, poets, mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers. Illustrious scholars from throughout Italy gathered there.

Visitors to Milan were impressed by the splendor of the ladies' dresses, often made entirely of cloth of gold, adorned with rich embroidery and laden with jewels. Technically, there were laws governing rank, which determined manner of dress, but it seems that these prohibitions were rarely enforced, because to have done so would have destroyed an important Milanese trade. Luxury was encouraged in the interest of a strong trading community.

Outside the court, the citizenry lived a frugal existence, but for the privileged class, luxury was on the increase throughout the Sforza period. Note, for example, the splendor that marked the birth of Duchess Beatrice d'Este's firstborn child in 1493: a gilded cradle, a rich brocaded quilt, and a grand show of gifts.

Society modeled itself on the court, because the two were tightly connected. Unlike the city of Florence, which at this time had experienced a religious revival, Milan tended to emphasize the material side of life through outward magnificence and commercial interest. Piety manifested itself less in devotional fervor than in such practical works as building hospitals and founding schools. And always there were the lavish pageants, which drew visitors from across the country.

This was the universe Leonardo stepped into when he arrived in Milan to offer his skills as a painter, an inventor, an engineer, and a sculptor to the duke. Leonardo adapted well to the Milanese court. It was there that he was able to let his imagination and skills fully develop. It was there too that he developed his full appreciation of art—things observed—and of the artist as the greatest communicator. “If you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians, had not seen things with your eyes, you could not report of them in writing,” he wrote sensibly, continuing:

If you, O poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to be understood. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? To be blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions, they are not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions, and places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them.
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Leonardo's contribution to the court was eclectic and exciting. His schemes for civic engineering were far ahead of his time, and so were his plans for war machines. He designed sets and costumes for many festivals and plays. Among his most ambitious projects was the creation of a massive equestrian monument in honor of Francesco Sforza, the founding father of the Sforza dynasty.
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Over a period of ten years he constructed the model in clay, but, sad to say, before it could be cast in bronze, the French invaded Milan and destroyed it.

Occasionally, at the request of his benefactor the duke, Leonardo set aside his drawings and his building and spent his afternoons with a favored court lady, bringing life to her features with his pens, paints, and chalks. Although other artists could have handled the task quite competently, Sforza had confided that he trusted only Leonardo to capture the countenances of his beloved ones. Sometimes Sforza would stand in the doorway, smiling his encouragement to the young lady, for whom the sitting required great poise. Indeed, in the finished works, sitters seemed to be turning their gazes upon another person, and the result was a softening of their features so unlike the expressions in the stiff formal portraits that were common at the time. This, then, was Leonardo's signature—the animating quality that would allow these special ladies to stand apart even centuries later.

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Real or Fake?

The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Before my fateful encounter with Nicholas Turner at the Louvre, I had been reluctant to pursue the possibility that I held the work of a Master—indeed,
the
Master. I knew how tongues would wag. Every so often someone popped up with a claim of holding a lost Leonardo, a lost Michelangelo, or a lost Pollock, but these claims were invariably disproved. It was almost unheard of for a new work to appear out of nowhere, especially a work by one of the Renaissance Masters. Despite the common myth that these treasures were out there in abundance, buried in people’s attics waiting to be discovered, it was more a romantic notion than a reality.

In his 1996 book,
False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes
, Thomas Hoving, a former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and recently deceased at the age of seventy-eight), wrote that we live in a time when there are so many art fakes that he almost believed that there are “as many bogus works as genuine ones.” I’m not sure I’d go that far. Hoving also pointed out, “Art forgery is as old as mankind.”
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And the art forger, by nature, must be as passionate about art and often as gifted as the genuine artist.

According to Hoving, every art historian abides by some basic tenets when determining if a work is a forgery:

• The forger will always betray himself by some silly personal mannerism of style.
  
• A fake will always lack freedom of execution and originality.
  
• The phony is always lower in quality than the original.
  
• Where gut reaction and intense scrutiny by the naked eye fails to detect a fake, “science”—the computer, the laser—will always unmask the bogus.
  
• Fakes eventually reveal the taste of the time in which they are created and never stand up more than a generation or so before they crash.
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This seems to be a rather narrowly constructed list—optimistic even about the historian’s ability to scout out the inferiority of a forgery. History shows that fakes do not always reveal themselves so plainly. But I also find Hoving’s tenets interesting in light of his assertions (described later) that our portrait is not the real thing.

Hans van Meegeren is the most notorious forger of the last century, and his case is a cautionary tale for all who place their trust in the arbiters of artistic greatness. Van Meegeren’s brilliant forgeries were at the center of a notorious 1940s scandal that rocked the art establishment. Van Meegeren was an artist and a picture restorer who considered himself an unheralded genius and who took advantage of the fact that Jan Vermeer, a real genius of intimist interiors in seventeenth-century Holland, was reemerging three centuries after his death as one of the greatest Masters of the Golden Age of Dutch Painting.

Vermeer’s style was still a subject of speculation, with attributions not yet totally cemented, since almost none of his paintings were signed. Van Meegeren created a few pictures in what he considered Vermeer’s style and technique, mixing his colors and using some pigments that existed in the seventeenth century. One of his forgeries,
Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus
, was bought in 1937 by the Dutch Rembrandt Society for about $4.7 million in today’s dollars and donated to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The painting was loudly acclaimed by the scholarly powers of the time as a long-lost painting by Vermeer, whose known production did not exceed thirty-five works. The excitement generated by this new “discovery” among members of the art establishment was so great that the director of the State Museum himself contributed personal money to purchase it for his institution.

There the story took a shocking turn. After World War II it was learned that the Rotterdam painting was not by Vermeer but by the forger van Meegeren. In a dramatic twist, the revelation was made by the forger himself under some obvious duress, because he was about to be indicted by the Dutch government for collaborating with the Nazis during the war. The charge: he had sold Dutch patrimony—
Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus
, the alleged Vermeer—to the notorious Nazi art lover Hermann Goering. Revealing the secret of the forgery was the only way to exonerate himself! So, before the tribunal and to the incredulity of scholars and the world press, van Meegeren showed how he painted his “Vermeers,” including
Christ and His Disciples at
Emmaus.
Van Meegeren was sentenced to a year in prison but died six weeks after he was sentenced. He is still cited as an enduring reminder of how art connoisseurship can sometimes go dreadfully wrong.

How did van Meegeren succeed in fooling so many learned and competent individuals? The painting had even passed the test of the museum restorer’s examination. Van Meegeren had developed an ingenious technique for aging the canvas, including damaging parts of it and then restoring those areas in order to give the picture an aged appearance. He was even adept in creating a network of fine cracks in the painting surface (
craquelure
) so that to the naked eye the picture would appear to meet one of the criteria one looks for in a seventeenth-century work. The eye of the beholder, alas, was completely fooled by the overall effect created by an artist who chose to use his uncanny talent for hoodwinking the powers that be.

I must say, however, that standing in front of that picture, and benefiting from today’s vastly greater understanding of Vermeer’s style as well as having viewed nearly every painting he ever painted, I thought the van Meegeren creation wasn’t that convincing from an aesthetic viewpoint. The facial types and the lighting effect do not correspond to what we know about Vermeer today. Today’s connoisseur would no doubt dismiss it outright, and a scientific examination would further confirm that it was a forgery. In fairness to the experts of that time, it is necessary to acknowledge that today we have so much more scholarly knowledge about artists and their techniques at our disposal, and a lot of this information is the result of scientific technology that has exploded in the last few decades.

Another fascinating story about the potential for forgery involves none other than the
Mona Lisa
itself.
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On August 21, 1911, the
Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Louvre early in the morning. Rather bizarre is that when the guards noticed that the painting was missing, they assumed it had been taken to be photographed, and an entire day passed before the theft came to light. The
Mona Lisa
would remain at large for more than two years. In the process of a worldwide investigation, hundreds of people were questioned, including Pablo Picasso. Picasso was wrongly implicated because he had once purchased two stone sculptures that were later found to be stolen from the Louvre, and he had returned them.

For twenty-seven months, the investigators scoured the world looking for the lost treasure, only to learn that the
Mona Lisa
had been in Paris and Florence all along. Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian carpenter who had once worked at the Louvre and had helped to build the glass case for the
Mona Lisa
, was found to be the culprit. Peruggia was discovered trying to sell the painting to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence for 500,000 lira (about $100,000). When the museum reported him to the police, he was caught in the act.

In spite of seeking a large sum of money, Peruggia claimed his motivation was purely patriotic. “I am an Italian patriot [who] was seized by the desire to return to my Italy one of the treasures that Napoleon stole from her,” he said.
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The recovered painting went on display in Italy for a month before being returned to the Louvre in January 1914. Peruggia was sentenced to a little more than a year in prison, but his sentence was later reduced to seven months and nine days. Once released, he went on to lead an uneventful life. However, the
Mona Lisa
’s adventure did not end there.

In 1931, a reporter named Karl Decker came forth with some startling information. Decker said that at the time the
Mona Lisa
was found and returned to the Louvre, he had interviewed a man named Eduardo de Valfierno, who told a different story about the theft. Sworn to secrecy until Valfierno’s death, Decker was only now coming forward. Valfierno had been in the business of selling forged Spanish Master paintings with his partner, a conservator and skilled forger named Yves Chaudron.

In 1910, the pair moved to Paris, and according to Valfierno’s account, they hatched a plan to produce forged copies of the
Mona Lisa.
Valfierno convinced Peruggia to steal the painting so that its whereabouts would be in question. Chaudron would make several copies, which he would sell as the original to private foreign collectors, who might each be persuaded that his or her copy was the missing painting. He reasoned that if the
Mona Lisa
were ever recovered, he would simply tell his investors that the one in the Louvre was a fake and only they had the real thing.

When the alleged plot was revealed, people immediately became concerned about the authenticity of the lady at the Louvre. However, none of the supposed fakes ever emerged, and the Louvre has authenticated its treasure to the satisfaction of the art community. Even so, every once in a while there is a whisper: Is she for real?

Nicholas Turner himself had been something of a sleuth while curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in the 1990s, and he was at the center of arguably the greatest controversy of the museum’s history. Shortly after starting in his position in 1994, Turner made the astounding declaration that six major drawings attributed to Renaissance Masters were forgeries. They included a pen-and-ink drawing of a woman attributed to Raphael, a portrait of an infant attributed to Fra Bartolommeo, and several other pieces, some attributed and some not. Turner was appalled by the apparent clumsiness in the works, which to his trained eye screamed forgery. One example was a Desiderio da Settignano, which the Getty had just bought for $349,000. A figure on the bottom of the Desiderio turned out to be identical to the figure on the left edge—but in reverse. Mixing and matching elements from different compositions by the same artist is one typical forger’s ploy.

Indeed, a supposed Fra Bartolommeo drawing, a black-chalk study of an infant’s head, had caught Turner’s eye as being the near replica-in-reverse of a study in a German museum—same child, same artist. The baby used to face right; now the baby faced left.

After Turner raised the alarm, Ari Wallert, an associate scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, examined a supposed Raphael with X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and found that it contained titanium oxide, which was not in existence at the time. Turner believed that this was proof of fakery. But just as Turner was about to pursue the matter, Getty shut him down. What ensued was a very messy and bitter affair that culminated in Turner’s dismissal. As part of his severance, he was paid a substantial amount of money to waive any disputes with the museum, including his assertion that his predecessor had purchased forgeries. He was not content, however, to walk away, and he sued again. To allow known forgeries to stand was an insult to the conscience of a curator.

In a lengthy article about the claims in the
New York Times Magazine
in 2001, Peter Landesman hit the nail on the head when he wrote,

We want to walk into a museum and know that what we find there is real. “Museums act as a guarantee of the authenticity of what’s on display, but the sources of authenticity are decreasing,” [Mark] Jones [head curator of the British Museum’s “Fake?” exhibition] says. “People are more geographically mobile than their parents were. The past is some sort of fiction. The loss of certainty about what is and what is not real, and the increasing fictionalization of the past, means that museums have found themselves acting as psychic anchors. . . . But the knowledge that we don’t always know what is real—and neither, always, do museums—infects us with doubts that corrupt all of our other dealings with the culturally sacred. Experts are fallible. We have to take responsibility for what we look at. “If a museum contains things which are inauthentic,” Jones says, “then what it is saying becomes a lie.”
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In subsequent years, Turner did not give up on his quest. His primary suspect was a man named Eric Hebborn, a brilliant forger of Old Masters who actually revealed all in the 1980s. Hebborn never admitted to the Getty forgeries, but he did brazenly acknowledge his role as a forger in general in 2004 in a book—
The Art Forger’s Handbook
—in which he boasted of his methods and philosophy. He had a particularly bold explanation for his actions:

There is nothing criminal in making a drawing in any style one wishes, nor is there anything criminal about asking an expert what he thinks of it. “But what about gaining pecuniary advantages by deception?” My answer to this is that I can see no reason why I should give my work away. Furthermore, I can truly claim never to have asked or received sums of money for my Old Masters in excess of what an artist of my reputation can command for his own work.