Portrait of a Young Fiancée

"La Bella Principessa".

Portrait of a Young Fiancée, also called La Bella Principessa (Italian: La Bella Principessa), is a portrait in coloured chalks and ink, on vellum, of a young lady in fashionable costume and hairstyle of a Milanese of the 1490s. The work is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, although this attribution is still a matter of contention. Evidence from 2011 accounting for the provenance of the drawing is claimed to greatly strengthen its case as a genuine Leonardo. Those who dispute the attribution to Leonardo mostly attribute the portrait to an early 19th century German artist imitating the style of the Italian Renaissance.

The portrait was purchased by the present owner in 2007. Lumière Technology in Paris performed a multi-spectral digital scan of the work. The spectral images were analysed by Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art examiner, discovered a fingerprint which he claimed was "highly comparable" to a fingerprint on the unfinished St. Jerome in the Wilderness.

Description

The portrait is a mixed media drawing in chalk, pen, ink and wash tint on vellum, measuring 33 cm x by 22 cm (approximately 13 inches tall and 9 inches wide). If a Renaissance work it would have been executed between 1480 and 1490. It represents a girl in her early teen years, depicted in profile, the usual way in which Italian artists of the 15th century created enduring portraits. The girl's dress and hairstyle indicate that she was a member of the court of Milan, during the 1480s.

Provenance

In 2011 it was reported that the drawing is cut from a copy of the Sforziada, a printed book containing a verse account of the career of Ludovico Sforza’s father Francesco Sforza and his family. Some copies of it were printed on vellum and had added illumination. At the wedding of Bianca Sforza to Galeazzo Sanseverino, a commander under Ludovico Sforza, in 1496, one such copy was given to Sanseverino as a wedding gift. This Sforziada is presently at the National Library in Warsaw, and the vellum sheet with the drawing reportedly matches exactly the vellum and cut edge of a missing page in the book in Warsaw.

This association with the Sforziada suggests that the drawing is a portrait of Bianca Sforza, who was the daughter of Ludovico Sforza and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis. At the time of the portrait she was around thirteen years old. Leonardo painted various members of the family or court of Ludovico Sforza.

The work appeared in a Christie's sale on January 1, 1998, in New York, called Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress and catalogued as early 19th-century German, when it sold for $19,000. It was sold again in 2007 and was exhibited in And there was Light in Eriksberg, Gothenburg in Sweden, estimated by various newspaper reports to be worth more than $160 million.

Reflecting the subject of an Italian woman of high nobility, art historian Martin Kemp named the portrait La Bella Principessa, though Sforza ladies were not princesses.

Attribution to Leonardo

Detail of the upper left corner, revealing a fingerprint

The first study of the drawing was published by Dr. Cristina Geddo in Artes. Geddo attributes this work to Leonardo based not only on stylistic considerations, extremely high quality and left-handed hatching, but also on the evidence of the execution technique using black, white and red chalks (trois crayons or pastel). In fact, Leonardo was the first artist in Italy to use pastels, a drawing technique he had learned from the French artist Jean Perréal whom he met in Milan at the end of the fifteenth century. Leonardo himself acknowledges his debt to Perreal in the Codex Atlanticus. Geddo also points out that the "coazzone" of the sitter's hairstyle was fashionable during the same period.

A number of Leonardo experts have concurred with the attribution to Leonardo, including:

• Martin Kemp, Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University
• Carlo Pedretti, professor emeritus of art history and Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles
• Nicholas Turner, former curator at the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci in Vinci, Italy,
• Dr. Christina Geddo, an expert on Leonardo and his followers
• Dr. Claudio Strinati of the Italian Ministry of Culture, and
• Mina Gregori, professor emerita at the University of Florence.

Analysis

In 2010, after a two-year study of the picture, Martin Kemp published his findings and conclusions in a book, La Bella Principessa. The Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman. Kemp describes the work as "a portrait of a young lady on the cusp of maturity [which] shows her with the fashionable costume and hairstyle of a Milanese court lady in the 1490s". By process of elimination involving the inner group of young Sforza women, Kemp concluded that she is probably Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate (but later legitimized) daughter of Ludovico Sforza ("Il Moro"), duke of Milan. In 1496, when Bianca was no more than 13, she was married to Galeazzo Sanseverino, captain of the duke’s Milanese forces. Galeazzo was a patron of Leonardo. Tragically, Bianca was dead within months of her marriage, suffering from a stomach complaint (possibly an ectopic pregnancy). Kemp in his book pointed out that Milanese ladies were often the dedicatees of volumes of poetry on vellum, and that such a portrait of a "beloved lady" would have made a suitable frontispiece or main illustration for a set of verses produced on the occasion of her marriage or death. These assumptions were confirmed when the connection between the portrait and the Sforziada was made in 2011.

The physical and scientific evidence from multispectral analysis and first-hand study of La Bella Principessa, as described by Kemp, may be summarized as follows:

• The technique of the portrait is black, red and white chalks (trois crayons, a French medium), with pen and ink.
• The drawing and hatching was carried out entirely by a left-handed artist, as we know Leonardo to have been.
• There are significant pentimenti throughout.
• The portrait is characterized by particularly subtle details, such as the relief of the ear hinted at below the hair, and the amber of the sitter’s iris.
• There are strong stylistic parallels with the Windsor silverpoint drawing of A Woman in Profile, which, like other head studies by Leonardo, features comparable delicate pentimenti to the profile.
• The members of the Sforza family were always portrayed in profile, whereas Ludovico’s mistresses were not.
• The proportions of the head and face reflect the rules that Leonardo articulated in his notebooks.
• The interlace or knotwork ornament in the costume and caul corresponds to patterns that Leonardo explored in other works and in the logo designs for his Academy.
• The portrait was executed on vellum—unknown in the surviving work of Leonardo—though we know from his writings that he was interested in the French technique of dry colouring on parchment (vellum). He specifically noted that he should ask the French artist, Jean Perréal, who was in Milan in 1494 and perhaps on other occasions, about the method of colouring in dry chalks.
• The format of the vellum support is that of a √2 rectangle, a format used for several of his portraits.
• The vellum sheet was cut from a codex, probably a volume of poetry of the kind presented to mark major events in the Sforza women’s lives.
• The vellum bears a fingerprint near the upper left edge, which features a distinctive "island" ridge and closely matches a fingerprint in the unfinished St Jerome by Leonardo. It also includes a palmprint in the chalk pigment on the neck of the sitter, which is characteristic of Leonardo's technique.
• The green of the sitter’s costume was originally obtained with a simple diffusion of black chalk applied on top of the yellowish tone of the vellum support.
• The nuances of the flesh tints were also achieved by exploiting the tone of the vellum and allowing it to show through the transparent media.
• There are noteworthy similarities between La Bella and the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, including the handling of the eyes, the modelling of flesh tones using the palm of the hand, the intricacy of the patterns of the knotwork ornament and the treatment of the contours.
• The now somewhat pale original hatching in pen and ink was retouched in ink in a later restoration, which is far less fluid, precise and rhythmic.
• There have been some diplomatic re-touchings over the years, most extensively in the costume and headdress, but the restoration has not affected the expression and physiognomy of the face to a significant degree, and has not seriously affected the overall impact of the portrait.

Disagreement with attribution

The attribution to Leonardo is not unchallenged, and many scholars and connoisseurs expressed scepticism; however it is not yet clear how many have been won over by the connection with the book in Kracow, which was only revealed in 2011. Among the reasons for doubt are the lack of provenance prior to the 20th century – unusual given Leonardo's renown dating from his own lifetime, as well as the fame of the purported subject's family – and the fact that vellum lasts for centuries, which would facilitate a forger's acquisition of old sheets. Further, there exist around 4,000 drawings by Leonardo, none of which employ vellum as a surface. Leonardo scholar Pietro C. Marani discounts the significance of the drawing being made by a left-handed artist, noting that imitators of Leonardo's work have emulated this characteristic in the past. Marani is also troubled by the vellum surface, 'monotonous' detail, use of colored pigments in specific areas, lack of craquelure, and firmness of touch. A museum director who wished to remain anonymous believes the drawing is "a screaming 20th-century fake," and finds the damages and repair to the drawing suspicious. The work was pointedly not requested for inclusion in the 2011-2012 exhibition at the National Gallery, London, which covered precisely Leonardo's period in Milan; Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, said simply "We have not asked to borrow it."

Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina, Vienna, said "No one is convinced it is a Leonardo," and David Ekserdjian, a scholar of 16th century Italian drawings, wrote that he suspects the work is a "counterfeit." Neither Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the primary scholars of Leonardo's drawings, nor Everett Fahy, her colleague at the Metropolitan, accepts the attribution to Leonardo.

Several forensic experts on fingerprints have discounted Biro's conclusions, finding the partial fingerprint taken from the drawing too poorly detailed to offer conclusive evidence. Biro's description of the print as being "highly comparable" to a known fingerprint of Leonardo's has similarly been discounted by fingerprint examiners as being too vague an assessment to establish authorship. When asked if he may have been mistaken to suggest that the fingerprint was Leonardo's, Biro answered "It's possible. Yes."

Noting the lack of inclusion of dissenting opinion in Kemp's publication, Richard Dorment wrote in the Telegraph: "Although purporting to be a work of scholarship, his book has none of the balanced analysis you would expect from such an acclaimed historian. For La Bella Principessa, as he called the girl in the study, is not art history – it is advocacy."

Fred R. Kline, an independent art historian known for discoveries of "lost art" among the Nazarene Brotherhood of German painters suggested in a front page article in The Santa Fe New Mexican, that the creator of the drawing may actually be Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872), circa 1820, one of the Nazarene Brotherhood working in Rome during the early 19th century who revived the styles and subjects of Italian Renaissance masters. Kline found a related drawing on vellum by Schnorr, Half-nude Female, in the collection of the State Art Museum in Mannheim, Germany, as well as two other drawings on vellum by Schnorr. Kline suggests that La Bella Principessa depicts the same model who appears in the Mannheim drawing, but an idealized version of her in the manner of a Renaissance engagement portrait.

Comparative material-testing of the vellum supports of the Mannheim Schnorr and "La Bella Principessa" may occur in a New York federal court in the pending lawsuit, Marchig v. Christie's, brought on by the original owner of "La Bella Principessa" who is accusing Christie's of negligent misattribution and other damages. Christie's had auctioned Mrs. Marchig's drawing in 1998 as "German School, early 19th century".

Further reading

• Martin Kemp, with Pascal Cotte and Peter Paul Biro, Leonardo da Vinci: La bella principessa : the profile portrait of a Milanese woman, Hodder & Stoughton, (2010), ISBN 1444706268, 9781444706260
• O'Neill, Tom; Colla, Gianluca. Lady with a Secret: A Chalk-And-Ink Portrait May Be a $100 Million Leonardo, National Geographic Magazine, February 2012.

External links

• PBS documentary film "Mystery of a Masterpiece" (52:52) PBS film "Mystery of the Masterpiece" (52:52)
• Detailed attribution summary including video excerpts on multispectral scanning and Sforziad verification Enhancing the art of seeing - A Leonardo case study