Leonardo's Lost Princess (13 page)

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but the prospect of a financial windfall surely improves one’s vision. Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime, and many great artists worth millions today hardly survived on their earnings.

The topic of the perception of art and its worth fascinates me. There is absolutely no question that value is a matter of perception. Here’s a case in point: This incident took place in a Washington, D.C., metro station on a cold January morning in 2007. A man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about forty-five minutes. During that time, approximately two thousand people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Only six people stopped and listened for a short while. About twenty gave money but continued to walk at their normal pace. The man collected a grand total of $32.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most famous musicians in the world. He serenaded the metro crowd with a violin worth $3.5 million. Two days earlier he had sold out a theater in Boston where tickets averaged $100 each.

Bell’s incognito appearance was part of an experiment dreamed up by the
Washington Post
to determine if passersby would recognize genius when it was disguised in an unfamiliar setting.
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I am almost certain that if Bell’s identity had been known, the metro would have been packed with appreciative listeners.

It would be untrue and hypocritical to say that Kathy and I never thought about the financial aspect of the discovery. We no longer live in a world where it would be considered crass to even suggest a valuation on something as precious as a work by the world’s most celebrated artist. However, it was not my primary thought or motivation. We had never been in serious financial straits, and I felt fortunate for that, so I was never in a situation where I had to “turn over”—as the trade would put it—a work of art that gave us both great pleasure and aesthetic satisfaction.

That is why we were able to build up a fine collection of works on paper, within our modest means, in the past quarter of a century. We basically bought with love and connoisseurship, in auction houses and from dealers throughout Europe and the United States. Sometimes we found things that others had missed. Occasionally we paid too much or missed wonderful things that we should have been prepared to pay more for. But we always had fun with the hunt and the idea that a new discovery, albeit more modest than a Leonardo da Vinci, might be around the corner at the next shop or salesroom.

The discovery of
La Bella Principessa
was no more than the same fun and satisfaction—just magnified a thousandfold. I doubted that our lives would radically change if the portrait were one day put on the market and actually sold, although we did enjoy daydreaming about having the money to establish a foundation for Renaissance and classical studies that would rival the workshops and salons of that era.

As for the question “What is she worth?” I had a standard reply for journalists. I asked them to Google the ten most expensive artworks and decide for themselves.
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If a bronze by Giacometti (one in an edition of twelve) could bring more than $100 million at an auction, a Jackson Pollock a bit more than that, a Picasso $106 million, or a drawing of a head by Raphael more than $50 million, what would be the value of the rarest of rare things: a drawing, more akin to a painting, by Leonardo da Vinci? Less then twenty full autograph paintings survive by the Master, five of which are portraits, and what are the chances of another work of his ever being discovered?

I also noted that there were many major art-loving and wealthy nations—China, Japan, Canada, and Australia, to name a few—that did not have a single Leonardo work within their borders. How would a billionaire in one of these nations value such a piece—and what would be the draw for museums? Leonardo’s light reflects on everyone it touches; his presence is capable of transforming the tourism industry of a nation.

Early in the process, when I was first investigating what it would take to display
La Bella Principessa
in museums, the subject of value came up in a most pragmatic context: insurance. How much insurance would we need to protect the work?

Simon Dickenson, the former head of Old Masters at Christie’s and considered one of the world’s foremost dealers, visited
La Bella Principessa
at its secure vault in Zurich and set the value at £100 million (over $150 million). This is the current insured value.

Sir Clifford had a point to make about the entire matter. He found the publicity quite distasteful. “The press coverage associated with this discovery has been both vulgar and unseemly,” he told me. “We should not be focusing so much on a trophy of discovery, which may or may not be worth a great deal of money, but on a glorious and previously unconsidered masterpiece by one of the greatest artists that has ever lived.”

I couldn’t disagree.

Shortly after I spoke with Clifford, I traveled to Florence, where I had the privilege of meeting Maurizio Seracini, the director of the Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture, and Anthropology. Seracini is a famous pioneer in the use of scientific diagnosis to study art. His background is in bioengineering and electronic engineering, and he has devoted his career to this pursuit.

In the mid-1970s, he participated in the Leonardo Project, sponsored by the Armand Hammer Foundation, the Kress Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institute, to locate the lost fresco
The
Battle of Anghiari
, and this has been his passion ever since. This painting is yet one more Leonardo mystery, albeit one with many clues.
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In 1504, Leonardo was commissioned by Piero Soderini, head of the government of Florence, to commemorate the republic’s military victory in 1440 over the Milanese on the plains of Anghiari with a large wall mural.

His rival (and some say enemy) Michelangelo was assigned an opposite wall but left his portion undone when he returned to Rome to decorate the tomb of Pope Julius II. Leonardo continued Michelangelo’s work, and there are many drawings and writings as evidence of his intention to create a glorious, violent battle scene. Unfortunately, due to the materials he used and his technique, the wall began to disintegrate. (A similar deterioration occurred with
The Last Supper.
) It was one of Leonardo’s only known failures. In time the project was abandoned, and the wall was whitewashed. Some fifty years later, long after Leonardo’s death, none other than Giorgio Vasari was commissioned to paint a new work. It is Seracini’s belief that Leonardo’s original lies beneath, and he has launched an investigation, using all of the technology at his disposal.

In 2006, Seracini’s investigation into
The Battle of Anghiari
was exhibited as part of “The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci” at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. He believes that Leonardo himself would be enthusiastic about the use of scientific analysis for art understanding because the artist was immersed in the pursuit of engineering innovation. “We do justice to Leonardo,” he said. “We are using technology to understand the masterpieces. I think he would have been happy about that.”
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We talked about the ongoing mysterious aura that follows Leonardo and how many questions remain to be investigated. He promised to make time to view
La Bella Principessa.

After the initial media craze had died down, I found myself on a crowded flight to New York, squeezed unhappily between two passengers. I had placed a mock-up of the cover of a brochure for the Gothenburg exhibition on my tray table. There was no text on the page, just the portrait of
La Bella Principessa.

“That’s very beautiful,” one of my seatmates said conversationally.

I glanced in his direction. “Thank you,” I said, intent on my own musings.

“It’s a Leonardo, isn’t it?” he asked.

Now I stopped and looked at him with more interest. “Why do you say that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m an art lover, and it looks like Leonardo da Vinci to me.”

I gave him a big smile and said that his guess was correct. I didn’t elaborate. “I wish the museum world had your eye,” I said.

11

The $100 Million Blunder?

Experience does not err. Only your judgments err by expecting from her what is not in her power.

—Leonardo da Vinci

Madame Jeanne Marchig was eighty-four, but age had not stilled the passion this Swiss woman felt for animal rescue. It was her life’s work, memorialized in the Marchig Animal Welfare Trust, which was established in 1989 in memory of her late husband, the painter Giannino Marchig. Everything she did was focused on expanding and bettering the trust.
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As I traveled to see Jeanne in early 2010, I reflected on how strange it was that circumstances would bring the two of us together. I had always been a fierce animal lover. However, it was art, not animals, that the widow Marchig and I had in common.

When the news about
La Bella Principessa
hit the airwaves, Jeanne was stunned to see a face she was intimately familiar with. After all, the portrait of the young woman had been in her possession for fifty years. It was she who had turned it over to Christie’s for evaluation and sale. And it was she who now felt betrayed.

In 1955, when Jeanne married Giannino Marchig, he owned the pen-and-ink drawing with pastel highlights on vellum, and she was quite drawn to it. The profile of a young woman was exquisitely done, and it was one of her favorite works. Although unfortunately her husband never revealed how he had come to possess the painting—thus leaving the provenance uncertain—Giannino, a well-known art restorer with considerable expertise in Renaissance art, told her he was confident that it was a fifteenth-century Master drawing. He believed it to be a work of Domenico Ghirlandaio (a teacher of Michelangelo’s), dating from the fifteenth century. Ghirlandaio and Leonardo apprenticed at the same time, both under Andrea del Verrocchio, and certain similarities in style have often been noted. I too had originally guessed it might be a Ghirlandaio, before the left-handed shading was pointed out to me. Ghirlandaio was not left-handed.

Giannino Marchig’s story was somewhat remarkable. Before World War II, he had become acquainted with none other than the great Renaissance connoisseur Bernard Berenson (whom you may recall from the tale of the Hahn lawsuit in chapter 4). Berenson lived in a large estate just outside Florence, where he housed a substantial art collection. Giannino visited him there on many occasions, and the two men became friends. (The site is now the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies, housing Berenson’s art collection and library.)

Giannino restored many of Berenson’s paintings, but he performed a larger service when the Nazis came into power. Berenson chose to remain in his Tuscan home, ’I Tatti, during the war. Fearing that Berenson’s collection would be stolen by the Nazis, Giannino arranged to evacuate his most important pictures and documents.
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Could
La Bella Principessa
have been one of them? Martin and I extensively searched the Berenson archives at ’I Tatti. Unfortunately, we found no reference to
La Bella Principessa
, so we may never know for certain.

Contemplating these events, I wondered if,
had
he seen
La Bella Principessa
, it was possible that the great Berenson did not recognize the hand of Leonardo in the drawing. Perhaps not, but when one considers how far we have come in understanding Leonardo in the past sixty years, it would not surprise me.
Lady with an Ermine
,
La Belle Ferronnière
, and
Ginevra Benci
were not universally accepted as Leonardo’s works in Berenson’s day. Furthermore, many works previously attributed to Leonardo were later shown to be not his after all. I myself own a major monograph on Leonardo, published in the 1960s, that includes drawings attributed to Leonardo that are clearly by right-handed artists. So it is conceivable that Berenson might not have recognized the portrait as Leonardo’s. Berenson might have passed on a correct attribution for
La Bella Principessa
because, like others after him, he had no point of comparison in another work by Leonardo on vellum. And although he was capable of “feeling art with his whole being”—according to Meryle Secrest, author of
Being Bernard Berenson
—perhaps his intellect got the better of his intuition in this case.
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Jeanne Marchig confided to the journalist Simon Hewitt that “it is certainly conceivable that
La Bella Principessa
may at one time have been in the possession of Bernard Berenson”—because the men were so close and her husband had saved Berenson’s art collection during the war.

Giannino lovingly restored the portrait on at least one occasion, using pastels produced by Lefranc of Paris. Jeanne still has the boxes the pastels came in. The restoration was so masterful that the Louvre restorer Catherine Corrigan, the first to examine
La Bella Principessa
under a microscope, stated that she would not recommend further restoration or attempt it herself—a tribute to Giannino’s talent and Corrigan’s integrity.

Giannino Marchig died in 1983 at the age of eighty-five. Although the portrait had not been on display during his lifetime—he had not wanted to expose it to the light—Jeanne took it out after his death and hung it in a dimly lit corner of the house so she could enjoy it.

Many years after her husband’s death, looking to raise money for her wildlife trust, Jeanne presented the portrait to Christie’s for evaluation and possible auction. She and Giannino had had a long-standing relationship with Christie’s, and it didn’t occur to her that she would be led astray. Indeed, the Marchigs were regular clients of Christie’s and had consigned many works over the years. After her husband’s death, Jeanne continued the relationship, consigning major works from Renaissance Florence, including Piero di Cosimo’s 1499
Jason & Queen Hippolyte with the Women of Lemnos
, sold at Christie’s London for £200,000 in July 2007, and a paneled
Portrait of a Young Gentleman
(ca.1505) by Giuliano Bugiardini (who apprenticed under Ghirlandaio); though long attributed to Raphael, it fetched a triple-estimate £700,000 in London in July 2009. Both works were sold to aid the Marchig Trust.

When Jeanne decided to sell the portrait, she told Fran¸ois Borne, Christie’s resident expert for Old Master drawings, about her husband’s belief that the work was a fifteenth-century piece, perhaps by Ghirlandaio. She was quite surprised when after examining the picture for a mere fifteen minutes, Borne summarily rejected the Renaissance provenance.

Borne wrote to Jeanne saying that he was fascinated by her “superb German drawing in the taste of the Italian Renaissance.” He suggested that it would sell at an auction for between $12,000 and $15,000. He also wrote, “I would be tempted to change the frame in order to make it seem an amateur object of the 19th century and not an Italian pastiche
.
” Although Jeanne did not agree to change the frame, Christie’s removed it without her knowledge and sold the portrait unframed. (She never received the original Italian frame back.)

Jeanne was disappointed in Christie’s judgment, but she trusted Borne completely. She and Giannino had always been happy working with Christie’s, and without her husband by her side, she did not want to rock the boat. Besides, she was extremely vulnerable at the time, suffering from what she calls “a deep depression,” and she felt pressured by Borne into accepting his judgment in spite of her reluctance. She was devastated when she learned that major authorities were now calling her portrait a work of Leonardo da Vinci.

I found the changing of the frame particularly curious, so I consulted a friend—a major dealer in Old Masters—about frames and their importance. He suggested that had
La Bella Principessa
been presented at the auction in a Renaissance frame, potential buyers would have viewed the portrait in a different light, as possibly older than nineteenth century. Perhaps Christie’s changed the frame to conform with Borne’s opinion. My source told me that it is highly irregular for auction houses to change frames on pictures consigned by clients in this way.

As soon as I found out that
La Bella Principessa
was a Leonardo, I decided that Christie’s should be informed. I contacted Noël Annesley, international head of Christie’s Old Masters department. I had known him for over thirty years and bought many wonderful paintings and drawings at Christie’s, where he was both expert and auctioneer. He was quite courteous and willing to hear me out. I told him, “I believe I have discovered a Leonardo da Vinci that was sold at auction in 1998 as the work of an unknown nineteenth-century artist. It’s going to come out, and I’m giving you a heads-up.” I added, “Instead of your making a double mistake, I invite you to come to Zurich and view the portrait and then admit you made an error.”

To Annesley’s credit, he agreed to travel to Zurich, accompanied by the director from Paris. Good for them. Unfortunately, they didn’t take my advice and consider how they might turn a bad situation into a positive. Instead, on his return from Zurich, Annesley called Jeanne.

“Mrs. Marchig,” he told her, “I’m afraid you’re in for a bit of a shock. Please be prepared for the news coming out that the drawing we sold for you is being claimed as a Leonardo. We assure you that we don’t believe this is true, but we want you to be prepared.”

Jeanne did not take kindly to this news. She immediately contacted Martin and asked if he could see her. Sitting across from Jeanne, Martin was struck by the seriousness of the matter. He recognized her as a savvy art lover, and he was distressed that this had happened to her. He gladly walked her through the evidence, and he watched the expression on her face change from mild concern to alarm.

After her meeting with Martin, Jeanne knew she had to act. She was not willing to just lie down and accept the error. She wanted compensation—not a lot, as she explained to Annesley. She was not greedy. She certainly didn’t need the money for herself. She was eighty-four and childless and a wealthy woman. But she thought it was appropriate that Christie’s give her something for her animal welfare trust. She described it as a “gesture.” (What that “gesture” meant I can only speculate. Perhaps $3 to $5 million.)

Jeanne told Annesley that she hoped they could resolve the matter amicably, and he concurred that he shared that desire. But time ticked on and there was no action. Eventually, Jeanne received a communication from Sandra Cobden, Christie’s senior counsel and head of dispute resolution, who restated the company’s confidence that the matter could be resolved amicably—but she ominously added, “One of the things I find most interesting is how many experts have decided to stand on the sidelines.” Then, switching gears, Cobden wrote about her family’s four rescued cats and burbled about the good work Jeanne’s trust performed. Jeanne was not amused. She was expecting action, and she was getting more stalling. She told Hewitt that she thought Christie’s might be “playing for time, hoping [she’d] die.”

Finally, Jeanne got fed up and called a lawyer. By the time she contacted Richard Altman, a notable art lawyer in New York, she had worked herself into a lather. She was angry at Christie’s officious attitude. She believed she’d been wronged. Altman was a lawyer of long experience. When I later met him, I found him to be a mensch as well. He was a perfect choice for Jeanne.

On May 3, 2010, Jeanne’s lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, for an undetermined amount. The suit alleged, “The drawing sold at a price far below its actual value, solely because of defendant’s willful refusal and failure to investigate plaintiffs’ believed attribution, to comply with its fiduciary obligations to plaintiffs, its negligence, its breach of warrant to attribute the drawing correctly, and its making of false statements in connection with the auction and sale.”
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There were several compelling aspects to Jeanne’s lawsuit. The first was a claim of breach of fiduciary duty. She charged that Christie’s had failed to investigate whether the drawing could have been attributed to an Italian Renaissance artist. It did not take the most fundamental steps of investigating the age of the drawing using carbon dating or use other routine methods of analysis and connoisseurship. Had Borne taken Jeanne’s suggested attribution seriously, it was likely that the drawing would have at least been identified as a fifteenth-century Italian drawing valued far in excess of $22,000, regardless of the artist to whom it was attributed. Submitting the work, as I did at the outset, to a specialist restorer would have most certainly indicated that it was fifteenth century.

Jeanne also had a claim of negligence. Christie’s, she contended, failed to exercise due care and act as a reasonably prudent expert. Jeanne also claimed that Christie’s fiduciary relationship with her gave rise to a special bond of trust and confidence sufficient to sustain a claim of negligent misrepresentation. That is, Jeanne believed that Christie’s knew she required accurate information in order to sell the drawing at the highest possible price and that she intended to rely on Christie’s opinion of its attribution.

Would Jeanne’s lawsuit have any chance of succeeding? One issue was whether there was a statute of limitations. This was potentially an insurmountable barrier. However, since Jeanne had an ongoing working relationship with Christie’s, she could make the argument that the statute of limitations did not apply.

A month after the lawsuit was filed, Jeanne heard from Cobden, who told her that Christie’s had reexamined the portrait and “to be blunt . . . the painting simply [did] not appear to [their] eyes to be a work by Leonardo da Vinci.” No surprise there. Cobden’s reasoning was that there was a heavy layer of what seemed to be shellac on the surface, “which obscures many of the painting’s details.”

When Hewitt was researching the story for the
Antique Trade
Gazette
, he asked Pascal to comment on Cobden’s statement about the shellac, since Pascal had already completed his thorough examination of the portrait. Pascal told him that the substance was not shellac but a covering of gum arabic that was laid to protect the painting, and it wasn’t accurate to say that it was heavy. Pascal added that even though it may seem to obscure the view if one is looking with the naked eye, the multispectral camera easily saw through the layer.