Ben Smith Lewis

The Last Leonardo


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ways that suit each advocate (who too frequently has undeclared interests).’13 He has warned that commercial incentives and professional networks often trump scholarly reserve: ‘In extreme cases, curators of exhibitions might fix catalogue entries in the service of loans; museum directors and boards might bend their own rules.’4 To his credit, Kemp has long refused to accept a fee, or even expenses, if he inspects a work of art (although some might point out that there are many other incentives, besides direct financial gain, to discover a long-lost work by the world’s most famous artist). ‘As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,’ he told the New Yorker magazine.5

      Like many other Leonardists, Martin Kemp has been receiving scores of emails for years, ‘sometimes more than one a week’,6 he says, from individuals who think they own an unrecognised Leonardo. Some of these works are by Leonardo’s pupils, others are incompetent copies, and many have nothing to do with the artist. Most of the time he rejects the invitations to view the works; sometimes he can see from the images he is sent that the work is not a Leonardo. He knows that attributions are a murky business, and he has kept his distance. He says that he does not attribute works of art – he researches them. Back in Marvellous Works he wrote that ‘The speculative attribution of unknown or relatively unknown works to major masters is a graveyard for historians’ reputations.’7

      In March 2008, Kemp received an email with a jpeg file of a small drawing on parchment, 23 x 33cm. It was of a pretty young woman in profile, with piercing green-brown eyes and a delicate upturned nose. Her hair was swept back into an elaborate hairpiece, and there was a knotwork pattern on the sleeve of her garment, which was curiously plain and cheap. The picture had been bought at auction in 1998 for under $20,000 as a nineteenth-century work by a German artist, one of a circle which had been reviving and imitating Italian Renaissance painters.

      Get from Jean de Paris the method of dry colouring and the method of white salt, and how to make coated sheets; single and many doubles; and his box of colours.

      Despite his isolation, Kemp stuck to his guns, and became, like many connoisseurs in such a position, increasingly vociferous in his opinion and increasingly defensive towards his critics. Such is the way of these things that Kemp ended up working with a collaborator who soon became controversial. He invited a Canadian forensic art expert called Peter Paul Biro to look at the picture. Biro had made a name for himself authenticating works of art by discovering the hidden fingerprints of artists on them, deploying a multi-spectral-imaging camera with impressive powers of magnification which he had designed himself. He claimed to have authenticated pictures by Turner, Picasso and Jackson Pollock with his fingerprint cameras. Kemp invited Biro to examine the Bella Principessa and Biro found a fingerprint on the picture which, he said, was ‘highly comparable’ to another on Leonardo’s St Jerome. But in 2010 an article in the New Yorker by David Grann alleged that Biro had found Pollock’s fingerprints on paintings supposedly by Pollock but which, experts said, contained acrylic paint that had not been previously documented in his drip paintings.10

      Kemp blamed the failure of La Bella Principessa on its over-hasty exposure to the media by Silverman. ‘I call it premature ejaculation,’ he told The Art Newspaper. ‘There were things that came out before they were thought through. I would have much preferred to produce all the evidence when we had it, in one go.’11 Kemp said he had learned from the Bella Principessa debacle: ‘Above all, the public debut of a major item should be accompanied or preceded by the full historical and technical evidence being made available in the way scholars regard as proper.’12

      And yet, when Robert Simon invited Martin Kemp to see the Salvator Mundi, the Oxford art historian seemingly forgot all his own advice.

      * The Polish art historian Katarzyna KrzyŻagórska-Pisarek wrote an analysis of the drawing: ‘There is no real evidence that La Bella Principessa shows Bianca Giovanna Sforza, or that the vellum leaf comes from the Warsaw Sforziad … The vellum of the Warsaw Sforziad is of different quality/texture (white and smooth) than the support of La Bella Principessa (yellow and rough, with follicles) and its size is different too (by 0.8 cm). The drawing was also made on the inferior, hairside of the vellum, unlike Birago’s illuminations [contained in the Warsaw volume] … the “archaic”, formal and highly finished style of La Bella Principessa combined with the complex mixed media technique are unusual for Leonardo, and there is no evidence that he ever drew a full female profile (face and body), especially in coloured chalks on vellum …’

       The Blue Clue

      Mystery is the defining quality of Leonardo’s art. A seductive glance is thrown, we know not to whom. The Virgin and child take shelter with saints and angels in a twilight grotto, which has no address in the Bible. A smile, whose cause can only be imagined, begins to cross a woman’s face, if indeed it is a woman’s face, if indeed it is a smile. Around these strange incidents and encounters hover a few ambiguous facts open to a multitude of interpretations. Our understanding of Leonardo’s life and work rarely becomes more than a pool of theories, surrounded by a tangle of conjecture, suspended from a geometry of clues. Amidst this network of possibilities, the Salvator presents the most fundamental mystery of them all. In some respects, it appears to be the most compressed embodiment of the essence of Leonardo’s art; in other ways it is a stark anomaly. While other of Leonardo’s paintings ask questions like, Am I smiling? or What am I feeling?