Leonardo's Lost Princess (6 page)

For many people, the case still isn’t closed. The obstinate consensus of the art world, based on so little, reminds me of the same wall of denial that I have experienced. John Brewer, who wrote about Hahn’s painting in his 2009 book,
The American Leonardo
, found the experience sobering. He said, “Working on this book I was often astonished at the cavalier (and, as far as I could see, largely groundless) judgments made by members of the art world, comments based more on fitting in with a consensus or on hearsay than any careful deliberation or consideration of evidence.”
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I hasten to add that for me the case
was
closed as soon as I saw the work. I found it to be a very nice copy, and I probably would have barely given it a nod had it come up for sale in a Paris auction room. I don’t think it’s worth a tenth of what it made at the auction. My verdict is that the hope of a Leonardo da Vinci miracle created worth where there was none.

I am aware that history is filled with disputes about provenance and authenticity, with the eye of the connoisseur the only evidence. But what of opposing connoisseurs? We long for surety but often have to make do with trust. Now we are entering a new era, when science can deliver a verdict with a level of proof we are unaccustomed to. A collaboration between connoisseurship and science seems in order. The connoisseur can shuffle the cards, but we must leave it to science to cut the deck.

I was about to enter just such an arrangement.

5

The Magic Box

Nature never breaks her own laws.

—Leonardo da Vinci

After Nicholas Turner and Mina Gregori both expressed the view that my portrait might be a Leonardo, I could hardly contain my excitement. Could it be? On one level I was stunned by the possibility of it. On another, I was able to bring the critical eye of a collector to my find. Was she or wasn’t she?

Was there perhaps another way to find the truth? I contacted my old friend Giammarco Cappuzzo, an independent art consultant in Paris. I’d known him for more than twenty-five years, and he had all the right contacts. “Where do I begin the authentication process?” I asked him.

His response was immediate. “Take it to Pascal Cotte at Lumiere Technology,” he said. “He and his partner, Jean Penicaut, have quite an operation.”

“Never heard of him,” I replied. “Are you sure he will help this thing along?”

“So sure,” Giammarco replied, “that I’ll bet you a dinner at La Tour d’Argent.”

“That’s a bit pricey. How about lunch?” I offered.

He agreed. I didn’t want to lose the high-priced bet, but at the same time I was hoping I would find answers from Pascal Cotte.

As a young boy growing up in Paris, Pascal Cotte was obsessed with the
Mona Lisa.
He recalled his mother telling him it was the most beautiful painting ever made, and at the tender age of eleven he took the metro to the Louvre to see for himself. He stood before the painting and had been studying it for two hours when a curious guard approached him. “Young man,” the guard said with a smile, “would you like a chair?” Cotte nodded, and he was soon seated in comfort. Tourists who wandered into the hall assumed that the precocious young man was there in some official capacity, and they began asking him questions. He answered enthusiastically, emphasizing what he saw inside and behind the painting.

He found the experience thrilling. He was hooked.

Cotte returned again and again throughout his youth, spending hours gazing at the face, curious about the secrets inherent in Leonardo’s most famous portrait. The
Mona Lisa
had long been characterized by variations of the word
secretive
. As Oscar Wilde proclaimed, “The picture becomes more wonderful to us than she really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing”
1
More recently, the writer Umberto Eco weighed in, saying,

I don’t think that in painting the
Mona Lisa
Leonardo just thought of himself as painting a portrait of a lady. I believe that he knew very well that he was creating something that would spark people’s curiosity for centuries to come. He must have known that generations of people would busy themselves trying to unravel a great mystery—a mystery which may or may not exist. Leonardo was a great clown, and he knew better than anyone how to play with people’s imaginations in order to create an impression of mystery.
2

It can be fairly stated that entire libraries could be filled with the speculations about this lovely lady and her mysterious smile. Young Pascal Cotte was merely joining a rather large fan club.

Later, Cotte’s career ambitions led him to focus on engineering and invention rather than art criticism. He wanted to see beyond—to take the art apart and look inside. His cheerful round face, jaunty attire, and absentminded-professor air masked the dead-on seriousness of a scientist, the ability to meander in highly technical arenas. A brilliant engineer and scientist, Cotte had long been intrigued by the possibilities of bringing new photo technology to the business of art examination.

He and his partner, Jean Penicaut, established Lumiere Technology in 1989—
lumi
è
re
means “light”—with the goal of illuminating the previously hidden secrets of the world’s great art.
3
The centerpiece of his company was a very special camera that allowed a process called multispectral digital imaging, which electronically uncovered each layer of a painting, enabling one to see, in Cotte’s words, “like Superman.”
4

This revolutionary camera allowed a work to be digitalized at a resolution of 1,570 pixels per millimeter.
5
To put that in perspective, a conventional professional camera achieves a resolution of 100 pixels per millimeter. It was as though one could see into the soul of a painting, to study each stroke and shading, and to do it digitally without in any way harming the original.

The technique was also revolutionary because it resolved a problem that had plagued the discipline for more than a century: accurate, or true, color. The technology allowed each pixel to be given an exact scientific measure. In traditional photography, color data was restricted by two factors: (1) the conventional RGB (red-green-blue) system of primary colors, and (2) the light source used. That is, a photographer in New York did not have the same light as a photographer in Paris or Madrid, so their photographs could not be scientifically comparable.

In April 2000, the European-financed CRISATEL project endorsed the use of Lumiere Technology’s multispectral camera and its lighting system for the archiving and digitalization of museum works. In 2004, armed with this endorsement, Cotte went to the Louvre with a bold request. He explained that his camera allowed him to photograph any painting, and he wanted permission to use the process on the
Mona Lisa.
The museum agreed!

This was a particularly exciting venture for art historians, who had agonized over the question of how to properly separate the original from the protective varnish that had been applied in later restorations. Thanks to Cotte, there was a way to accomplish digitally what had been perilous physically.

The session was scheduled to take place after hours. A nervous group of curators and security personnel gathered to supervise the delicate removal of the painting from its bulletproof case. With a full contingent of guards surrounding it, the
Mona Lisa
was carried to the photograph room in the basement of the Louvre while technicians constantly monitored the temperature, which was required to be 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees Fahrenheit), with 50 percent humidity.

Standing by as the frame and the glass were removed, Cotte felt his heart flutter. “I am not an artist or a curator,” he said later, his voice filled with awe. “But when you see
Mona Lisa
like that, naked, unadorned, you understand why the whole world says, ‘Wow!’”
6
He had no doubt that he was gazing on the object of a lifetime’s love. It was proof, he thought, that any dream can come true.

Once the
Mona Lisa
was ready, Cotte set up his camera. It was large and ungainly, and the technology was entirely new.

Here’s how it worked: The camera projected a ray of white light across the surface of the painting. The ray passed over the surface thirteen times before re-creating a computerized version of the image that was, in Cotte’s view, closer to the original than one could imagine possible. The thirteen photos resulting from the scan accurately split the light spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared at the limit of the optical laws—into 240 million pixels (as opposed to 20 million by the highest performance commercial camera), generating 22 gigabytes of data. The result ran the spectrum from objects visible to the human eye to those that were invisible.

Cotte began with a digital photograph of
Mona Lisa.
By digitally “removing” layers of varnish, he was able to construct a virtual image of the picture, unveiling its true colors—before time and restorers had altered them. The light actually went inside the painting, in a manner that seemed almost magical, superimposing all thirteen images on top of one another to form an accurate whole.

Eighteen hours after entering the Louvre, Cotte emerged, ebullient, quipping, “I spent the night with
Mona Lisa.
”
7
He had reason to be thrilled.

For the first time in centuries, the true colors of the painting could be viewed. Most copies of the
Mona Lisa
are very dark, but the original colors, Cotte found, were quite vivid. For example, the sky was revealed as brilliant blue, painted with lapis lazuli, a very expensive pigment. Cotte also detected a fur-lined coat resting on the woman’s knee that is invisible to the naked eye, which helped to explain the odd position of her hand.

Cotte was able to give special attention to the woman’s luminous face by enlarging portions with his powerful camera to more than 4,000 pixels per square millimeter. In the process, he solved the mystery of the missing eyebrows and eyelashes. This was something that had always disturbed and fascinated him. He could not imagine that an artist such as Leonardo, who worked with impeccable anatomical accuracy, would forget to give his subject eyebrows and eyelashes.

He was not alone in this fascination. Art scholars have long debated the barren brow, trying to make sense of it. Most peculiar was the evidence that eyebrows and lashes once existed in the painting. Giorgio Vasari, who wrote the book
The Lives of the Artists
in 1550 (considered the first art history book, in the modern sense), describes the
Mona Lisa
thus: “The eyes are bright and moist, and around them are those pale red and slightly livid circles seen in life, while the lashes and eyebrows are represented with the closest exactitude—with separate hair drawn as they issue from the skin.”
8

Although it is uncertain that Vasari ever saw the portrait in person, he did know the Giocondo family so it is possible he might have viewed it. Vasari was also a great admirer of Leonardo’s writing at one point, “Occasionally heaven sends us someone who is not only human but divine, so that through his mind and the excellence of his intellect we may reach to heaven.”
9

Evelyn Welsh, a professor of Renaissance studies at Queen’s College in London, wrote extensively about women’s styles and fashions of the period. She declared, “I would absolutely stake my life on it that
Lisa
had eyebrows. She had eyelashes.”
10

Was she right? Using his magical technology, Cotte was able to discover a single strong brushstroke in the eyebrow area. Thank God—the Master did not leave his subject without! They had merely been lost to time and restoration. (It is unlikely, however, that the real eyebrows will ever be restored, except in digital form. Physically touching the painting would be a task fraught with danger. I know of no one who would be willing to take it on, now that the painting has achieved such iconic status.)

Buoyed by his success with the
Mona Lisa
, Cotte now had a new ambition: to digitalize all of Leonardo’s paintings and create a database. His next stop was the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków, Poland, where Leonardo’s
Lady with an Ermine
was on display. This was one of Leonardo’s most famous works, a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, who was a mistress of Duke Ludovico il Moro Sforza’s at the Court of Milan during the period when Leonardo was working there in the 1490s.

Invited by Prince Czartoryski and his foundation to digitalize the portrait, Cotte set to work. Studying his digital impressions of
Lady with an Ermine
, he found that Leonardo’s brilliance was masked, to some extent, by overly rigorous restorations and overpaintings.

“Although the painting’s overall condition is excellent, it is covered with innumerable tiny repaints,” he reported. “Those have been suppressed by computer, thus freshening up the tones in the Lady’s lovely face, her décolleté, the embroidered ribbon around it, the pearl necklace, her right hand, the black ribbon of the sleeves, the blue mantle and the red velvet of the gown, etc. The ermine had been retouched in the past equally. Thanks to the computer restorers its white fur, meticulously depicted by Leonardo, can be viewed again.”
11

He also discovered, to his horror, that restoration work had resulted in the partial removal of Cecilia’s eyebrows and eyelashes, and he wondered if the same fate had befallen the
Mona Lisa.

Cotte’s multispectral imaging camera opened up a new arena of art exploration and authentication. Leonardo’s blending method—called
sfumato
—was delicate and integrated. Prior to the existence of the digital process, there was no way to remove restoration touches or varnish without jeopardizing the integrity of the art itself. Indeed, one expert in the Leonardo technique once fretted that to touch the face in the
Mona Lisa
would be to potentially erase the famous smile. But now Cotte had found a way to do the job without jeopardizing the painting.

In time, Lumiere Technology began to emerge as a vital player in the expertise and study of art history with a process that modified the traditional methods of investigation used by experts and museum labs to achieve high-definition digitization in one operation. Cotte and Penicaut were quick to assert that they were not replacing conventional expertise. Explaining and defending their process, they wrote the following: