Leonardo's Lost Princess (9 page)

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Leonardo's Principles

Men and words are ready-made, and you, O Painter, if you do not know how to make your figures move, are like an orator who knows not how to use his words.

—Leonardo da Vinci

While Pascal and Martin—we were all on a first-name basis by now—labored over their analysis of
La Bella
Principessa
, the project began to attract the attention of scholars who brought their connoisseurs' eyes to the project. In particular, they were attentive to Leonardo's ideals of beauty and the human face, which he wrote of in great detail in his notebooks. He urged artists to choose beauty over the grotesque, writing,

It seems to me to be no small charm in a painter when he gives his figures a pleasing air, and this grace, if he have it not by nature, he may acquire by incidental study in this way: Look about you and take the best parts of many beautiful faces, of which the beauty is confirmed rather by public fame than by your own judgment; for you might be mistaken and choose faces which have some resemblance to your own. For it would seem that such resemblances often please us; and if you should be ugly, you would select faces that were not beautiful and you would then make ugly faces, as many painters do. For often a master's work resembles himself. So select beauties as I tell you, and fix them in your mind.
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For Leonardo, anatomical rules and the ideal of beauty might have been one and the same. The animating principle of his work was to paint a living thing—and therefore always know what that living thing is doing and thinking. He wrote:

A picture or representation of human figures ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognize, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds. Thus, if you have to represent a man of noble character in the act of speaking, let his gestures be such as naturally accompany good words; and, in the same way, if you wish to depict a man of a brutal nature, give him fierce movements; as with his arms flung out towards the listener, and his head and breast thrust forward beyond his feet, as if following the speaker's hands. Thus it is with a deaf and dumb person who, when he sees two men in conversation—although he is deprived of hearing—can nevertheless understand, from the attitudes and gestures of the speakers, the nature of their discussion. I once saw in Florence a man who had become deaf who, when you spoke very loud did not understand you, but if you spoke gently and without making any sound, understood merely from the movement of the lips.
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Leonardo believed that the only way to paint an image authentically was to understand and accommodate what was going on underneath. Thus he did not just paint a man with a jacket over bare skin; rather, he made accommodations for an undergarment, even if it remained unseen. His studies of the human organs were quite advanced. Dr. Sherwin Nuland, who in addition to being a medical doctor and a renowned author (of
How We Die
, among other books) is also a recognized expert on Leonardo's anatomical studies. Dr. Nuland said:

He was the first person, for example, to realize that the heartbeat and the pulse were synchronous. This is something clearly everybody thinks is automatically understood, but it wasn't at that time. And the way he did it was simply to watch farmers who were slaughtering pigs. They would put a large tube right through the chest wall into the pig's heart to let the blood go out. And, of course, there would be twenty, thirty beats before all of the blood was gone. And he would watch the heartbeat. He would feel the animal's pulse at the same time, and he would synchronize the two of them, plus the sound of the heart thumping against the chest wall. So he was able to identify the fact that the heart functioned like a muscle, that it leaped forward each time it beat, and that it, in fact, caused the pulse.
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It is apparent that such studies were made in the interest of authentically portraying a living person in his painting.

What makes Leonardo's work so captivating is the intense human feeling coming from his subjects. With their postures and expressions they beckon us to know them and to know, as Leonardo put it, their
purpose.
As the scholars began to examine
La Bella Principessa
, they were in agreement that the portrait met not only Leonardo's rules of anatomy but also his rules of artistic motivation.

The first outsider to study
La Bella Principessa
at the lab was Cristina Geddo, a noted scholar of Leonardo's workshops. An attractive, dynamic powerhouse in her late thirties, Geddo was passionate about Leonardo's Lombard period. Showing impressive initiative, Geddo presented herself at Pascal's laboratory, stating her interest in looking at his digital renderings. Pascal agreed. After reviewing the work and Lumiere's spectral images, Geddo wrote a lengthy article about her findings, which was published in
Artes
, the scholarly journal of the University of Pavia.

The
Portrait of a Young Woman in Profile to the Left
, which recently surfaced in a private collection, impresses itself from the very first encounter as a work beyond the ordinary, not only for the remarkable high quality of its conception but also because of the distinctiveness of the technical means by which it has been realized. It is with a mixture of surprise, caution and embarrassment that the name Leonardo comes readily to mind and, indeed, takes root with time, removing any possible alternative, beginning with the names of his pupils––not one of whom was capable of attaining this level of accomplishment nor mimicking so accurately and to so high a degree the art of his master.
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Geddo based her strong conviction on four fundamental arguments: the unequivocal character of the style and of the physiognomy, the unrivaled quality of the execution, the irrefutable evidence of the recurring left-handed shading, and the experimental technique with which the portrait itself was realized. Of the subject, she wrote,

The portrait represents a young woman, blonde and angel-like, the most seductive that ever came out of Leonardo's hands, but at the same possessed with a true and vibrant intimacy, reserved in how she offers herself, and inert in her proud firmness of posture. The crystalline eye, offset from the axis of the profile, is slightly tilted and rotates towards us, yet cannot cross our gaze. From this barely perceptible infringement of the rule—that of the absolute profile—comes the “motion of the mind” of our protagonist, an internalized, ineffable look that captures the attention of the beholder with magnetic force.

Reading Geddo's analysis, Kathy remarked, “I can almost feel the sitter come to life in her eyes.” I can, too. And we were itching to find out the identity of this beautiful and mysterious young woman.

Meanwhile, Giammarco Cappuzzo, our friend and independent art consultant, was urging me to arrange for Alessandro Vezzosi to see digital images. Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Leonardo's birthplace of Vinci, was arguably one of Leonardo's most passionate fans. A charming man and a serious scholar, Vezzosi had nearly single-handedly built the museum into a stunning tribute to Leonardo. The museum is a marvel, with large-scale models of Leonardo's great inventions, such as flying machines, war machines, and a helicopter built to the specs of his writings and drawings.

In 2005, Vezzosi had spearheaded a “trial” in Vinci of Dan Brown's bestseller
The Da Vinci Code
, summoning art experts and historians to weigh in on the accuracy or, as Vezzosi saw it, the scandalous belittlement of the great Master by Brown's popular prose. Vezzosi found it an affront that so many readers of the pulp novel actually believed some of its claims—in particular, that Leonardo had belonged to a secret society, the Priory of Sion, which knew the secret of the Holy Grail, and that he'd buried the code in his art. The book had sold eighteen million copies worldwide and was being made into a film. It was a grand moneymaking machine for countless business ventures that wanted to cash in on its popularity—everything from tours to a weight-loss diet. In the process it infuriated, among others, art scholars, citizens of Vinci, the Vatican, and traditional Catholics.

Although Brown and his representatives were not present, Vezzosi's mock trial was attended by hundreds of Vinci residents and other interested parties. Vezzosi made the case for the prosecution, using more than a hundred slides in defense of Leonardo. For instance, Brown's assertion that Leonardo was homosexual was “pure invention,” he said, along with his claim that the artist designed instruments of torture. Leonardo did include a drawing of a scythed chariot that sliced people into pieces in one of his works, but he did not
invent
it. In any case, Leonardo's interest was in protecting oneself from the onrush of the deadly chariot, not in using it to harm others.

A high point of the trial was testimony by two members of Opus Dei, who were there to defend the organization from Brown's characterization. The central villain in the book was an evil albino Opus Dei member named Silas, whose mission it was to eradicate the four people in the world who knew the secret of the Holy Grail, because if the truth were known it would spell the destruction of the Catholic Church. Silas was all the more intriguing, or perhaps grotesque, because he wore a sharp instrument of self-flagellation, which was supposedly part of the Opus Dei rubric.

“I've come to tell you what Opus Dei really is,” announced Massimo Marianeschi to the breathless audience. “It is not a sect; it's not black, criminal, or catastrophic. I do not flog myself or mortify my flesh. It's a lay organization with no monks. It's not Machiavellian, we don't assassinate people, we don't sanction any negative acts.” He received applause from the audience, but there was also a hint of skepticism.

Martin Kemp also testified at the trial, suggesting that the choice of Leonardo by Brown was publicity driven. “The ‘Michelangelo Code' would not have had the same impact,” he said. Later, in an interview with
ArtNet
magazine, Martin expanded on the idea. “I often ask myself whether the book would have been as popular if it had been
The Michelangelo Code
or
The Shakespeare Code
,” he mused. “Would it have had the same sales? And I think the answer probably is no. There is an element of strangeness and something almost magical about Leonardo, both in terms of his work and personality. He served Dan Brown's needs incredibly well.”

The interviewer wondered if
The Da Vinci Code
had harmed Leonardo in some way by diminishing his work and his persona. Martin only laughed. “I am not too worried about that. The book is irresponsible in places because it's not just saying, ‘I am a novel,' but it is setting itself out as having a certain factual basis, which is not honest. I am on the other hand happy that people are engaging with the historical character and I am keen to build on that interest. Leonardo is not damaged by that. If you do a crappy production of Shakespeare . . . it will not harm Shakespeare. He is still there and Leonardo is still there despite whatever misleading ideas people might have. I would rather people have some engagement than no engagement at all.”
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The trial garnered a lot of publicity, and in Vezzosi's mind it vindicated Leonardo, although he could do nothing to stop Dan Brown's steady rise to fame and fortune. (Brown became one of the wealthiest authors on the planet in the process.) Now Vezzosi was in the process of completing an important monograph, titled
Leonardo Infinito
, with an introduction by Carlo Pedretti, the world's most senior Leonardo specialist and director of the Armand Hammer Foundation.
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Cappuzzo suggested that Vezzosi might be willing to include
La Bella Principessa.

Vezzosi was interested in seeing the portrait, but he warned that his monograph was literally on the verge of going to press. I asked whether there was any window of opportunity. Just the tiniest, he replied, because he was unwilling to lose the chance completely.

We arranged for Vezzosi to see digital images and the Lumiere lab work, and he was immediately struck with a strong sense that it was the real thing. It just so happened that when I learned that Vezzosi was contemplating including
La Bella Principessa
in his monograph, Mina Gregori was at our home writing her own opinion.

“Call him,” I insisted, “and share your thoughts. The strength of your reputation and opinion will carry a great deal of weight.”

Mina put down her pen and made the call. Afterward, Vezzosi stopped the presses and added a piece on the portrait, giving it full attribution. He wrote: “There now emerges a singular novelty: a splendid portrait of a young woman in profile, carried out in pen and ink and tempera on parchment and measuring 33 × 23.9 cm [12.9 by 9.3 inches]. Dealing with an unpublished work as important as it is unexpected calls for caution. However, the refined intensity and aura of mystery that distinguish its quality and purity are such as to make the recognition of Leonardo's authorship the logical conclusion of a series of simple and clear investigations.”
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