forever against the allure of beauty, money and fame. Or it may be because, over a long and distinguished career, it is impossible to avoid every patch of academic quicksand.
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.
Kemp thought it ‘zinged decisively’. He authenticated it as a Leonardo and named it La Bella Principessa, although there was no evidence that it was of a princess. Eventually he published a book about the painting, which he said depicted a bride, Bianca Sforza from the ruling family of Milan, for whom Leonardo worked, and that it came from a late-fifteenth-century bound vellum book in a Warsaw library which commemorated the wedding. He observed Leonardo’s hand in the left-handed cross-hatching, the glassy pupils and traces of fingerprints. ‘Leonardo has evoked the sitter’s living presence with an uncanny sense of vitality,’ he said.8 However, Leonardo had never done any other drawing on vellum; nor is there any document naming the sitter. The only scrap of supporting evidence Kemp could find for the choice of medium was a note Leonardo had once written asking a French court painter about this technique:
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.
Kemp observed that there were tiny holes in the side of the drawing which showed that it had once been bound into the Warsaw book. But the holes were in the wrong places, there weren’t enough of them, and the type of vellum was not the same as that in the book. In addition to that, the Bella Principessa was wearing a costume that was too dowdy for a wedding, and a strange slit in her sleeve was inexplicable.* To add to the case against, the drawing’s owner claimed to the Sunday Times that he had found the picture in a drawer at a friend’s house in Switzerland.9 The Italian art historian Mina Gregori agreed with Kemp about the attribution, but most other Renaissance art historians reacted with doubt, or worse, derision. Kemp and the painting’s private owner, Peter Silverman, wanted it to be exhibited in a major public institution, and allowed the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the painting in its labs, with a view to showing it, but the museum director reported back that he didn’t think the work was genuine.
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 …’
CHAPTER 6
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? or even Who is winning?, the Salvator asks Am I a Leonardo?
Leonardo’s paintings have left a trail of documents behind them – contracts for commissions, legal filings from irate clients, eyewitness statements from admirers, oral histories recorded by the children of men who knew him, and even notes in the margins of books on completely different subjects. Such documents are a mine of information.
There are legal agreements for many of Leonardo’s commissions, each of which contains its own set of illuminating details about Leonardo’s profession and character. The one for his first major work, the Adoration of the Magi, offered him a piece of land as payment, which he couldn’t sell for three years, while he had to pay for all the paints and gold leaf himself. He was soon behind schedule, and the monks wrote to him telling him to hurry up. Within a year they had given up, writing off the small sum they had already advanced Leonardo so he could buy wheat and wine. Leonardo was a genius, but also temperamental and, by turns, a self-critical perfectionist: he worked slowly and left many works unfinished, much to the exasperation of his clients. A trail of lawsuits followed him wherever he went.
In 1500 another set of angry monks, this time Milanese, from the Confraternity of Immaculate Conception, refused to pay for the Virgin of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery in London, saying it hadn’t been finished. Leonardo countersued, arguing that the previously agreed fee was too low for the quality of work he was providing. The dispute lasted years. In 1506 a judge ruled in favour of the monks, arguing that there was not enough of Leonardo’s hand in the picture, and that he had to return to Florence and finish it. He went back reluctantly, but it is not known what additional work he carried out on the painting.
Another important