The $450m New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part II: It Restores, It Sells, therefore It Is

ITEM 1: “Thomas Campbell, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, held that while the price was ‘eye-popping, it should come as no surprise in a market where speculation, marketing and branding have displaced connoisseurship as the metrics of value’. Todd Levin, an art adviser, told the New York Times: ‘This was a thumping epic triumph of branding and desire over connoisseurship and reality.’” – The Guardian 16 November 2017

ITEM 2: “The freakish sale of the Leonardo work – or, according to the detractors, the remains of a historic picture very partially by Leonardo and very largely by the hand of skilled restorers – caused not only incredulity and amazement but also a sort of stunned revulsion. This, some people felt, was just too mad. It was perhaps the first inkling that a market that is undeniably exciting and exhilarating might be on the edge of becoming seriously troubling.” – “The $400m question”, Jan Dalley, the Financial Times, 9/10 December 2017

ITEM 3: “Questions about Salvator Mundi’s authenticity, quality, and physical state were no match for the drive to possess this singular trophy. The acquisition also uniquely encapsulated art’s evolving role in the manufacture of soft-power and negotiation of geopolitics.” – “The Year in Visual Culture”, an Artsy editorial, 22 December 2017 [emphasis added]

ITEM 4: “As Christie’s aggressively marketed Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi before the work sold for an astonishing $450m last November, the art world raged anew with questions about the painting’s attribution– even though London’s National Gallery had largely settled the debate by including the work in its 2011-12 Leonardo show.” – Judith H. Dobrzynski, The Art Newspaper, January 2018 [emphasis added].

ITEM 5: “The painting Salvator Mundi will be shown at The National Gallery, London, exhibition: “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan” from 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012.
Leonardo is known [sic] to have painted the Salvator Mundi – an image of Christ holding a globe, with his right hand raised in blessing. The version in a private collection in New York was shown after cleaning to the Director of the National Gallery and to the Curator of the exhibition as well as to other scholars in the field. We felt that it would be of great interest to include this painting in the exhibition as a new discovery. It will be presented as the work of Leonardo, and this will obviously be an important opportunity to test this new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo’s. A separate press release on the Salvator Mundi is issued by the owner.” – A National Gallery press statement, July 2011

ITEM 6: “By 1500 onwards, the period in which the painted panel is said to have been executed, for want of time, Leonardo produced few works. Fra Pietro da Novellara, who visited his studio in April 1501, reported: ‘His mathematical researches have so much distracted him that he can’t stand the brush’, and, he added, ‘Two of his pupils make copies to which he adds some touches from time to time’. In 1501, he was commissioned to produce a Madonna of the Yarnwinder by Florimond Robertet (the French King Louis XII’s secretary) at the time when he was already creating both the major group The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ and the phenomenally accomplished Mona Lisa. Both panels were seen during their executions in October 1503 by Agostino Vespucci, an assistant of Machiavelli at the Signoria in Florence but he, too, made no reference to a Salvator Mundi. Giorgio Vasari says of the Mona Lisa’s execution that Leonardo, as a meticulous and slow-working painter had ‘toiled over it for four years’. Between May and August 1502 until early 1503 Leonardo was committed with Cesare Borgia as an architect and general engineer in the Marches and Romagna. He was then fully employed by the City of Florence during the Summer of 1503 as a military architect and, two or three months later, he worked fully on the commission of a huge mural (the now destroyed Battle of Anghiari) until late May 1506, before travelling between Florence and Milan up to mid 1508, because of his appointment as painter and engineer to the French King while serving Charles II d’Amboise, the new governor of Milan. Because of such taxing commitments – and all of the above were in addition to his intense scientific researches and literary activities – Leonardo increasingly resorted to workshop productions from 1500 onwards. The Salvator Mundi must, of necessity, be thought to be one of those works and, given the preceding it is very likely that a fully original version never existed.” – Jacques Franck, “Problems with the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part I: Provenance and Presentation”, 14 November 2017

ITEM 7: “The Board asked to be reminded of the Gallery’s policy on display of loan paintings which were or had been for sale. The Deputy Director confirmed that the Gallery would not display on long term loan any painting which was known to be for sale. In relation to exhibition loans, the Gallery would weigh up the advantage to the exhibition in including it: the benefit to the public in seeing the work and its contribution to the argument and scholarship of the exhibition as a whole. The work would be included solely on its own merits. The argument for the inclusion of such a work would usually be presented in the exhibition catalogue.” – Minutes of the National Gallery Board of Trustees – July 2011

ITEM 8: “One scholar [invited to see the Salvator Mundi] said that the consortium had turned down an offer of $100m for the painting. ‘I was told they’re asking $200m for it’” – Milton Esterow, “UPDATED: A Long Lost Leonardo” ARTnews, August 2011

“It’s a historic moment: we’ll wait”, said Christie’s Global President and auctioneer, Jussi Pylkkänen, when bidding dried on the New York Salvator Mundi at the 15 November 2017 sale of modern art. It was certainly unprecedented. In the excitement no one noticed (or divulged) that what smashed records and had sleeper-hunting dealers swooning over prospective $1billion privately-owned Leonardo studio works was not the last Leonardo in private hands, let alone Leonardo’s male “Mona Lisa”, as Christie’s claimed, but, rather, a switch in which a twice-restored and substantially repainted work (Fig. 1, below left), which no expert between 1900 and 2007 had ever thought a Leonardo, was re-presented in a further cosmetically-restored and modernised form – “Every generation finds its own Leonardo”, it has been remarked. (See Fig. 1, below right). To put it another way, what fetched nearly half a billion dollars was the third state of an intermittent twelve-year long twenty-first century restoration-in-progress during which the restorer had first re-restored her own restoration after looking at the Virgin of the Rocks in the National Gallery, and then re-restored it again at some undisclosed point or points between February 2012 and November 2017.

A RESTORATION SWITCH

Above, Fig. 1: The attributed New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi as exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011-12, left; and, right, as sold by Christie’s New York on 15 November 2017. The picture above right is not the same as that above left. (To see how the two halves of the face are now disconnected, see Fig.17 below.) So when; on whose authorisation; and, on what rationale was the one eclipsed by the other? The Salvator Mundi returned to New York in 2012 from the National Gallery and was sold the following year for $80m to a Russian collector’s agent. Had it been re-restored before that 2013 sale? Or while in Russia? Or when at Christie’s prior to its 15 November 2017 sale?

The first two restoration campaigns between 2005 and 2010 were said to have recovered a Leonardo but we do not know who first thought or said this. We do know that before 2007 none of the parties involved in the upgrading attribution thought the picture a Leonardo – not the then owners (a consortium with two identified members); not the restorer, Dianne Dwyer Modestini; not the restorer’s husband, [the now late] Mario Modestini. Mario, a man with an experienced Leonardo eye who had been commended by Berenson to clean the Kress pictures, who had attributed the Ginevra de Benci to Leonardo, who had reputedly brought a restoration-wrecked Rubens back from the dead, and who had wept for half an hour after seeing the National Gallery’s restoration-ruined pictures, thought the painting by a great artist a generation after Leonardo. In 2012 Frank Zöllner, the author of Leonardo’s catalogue raisonné (who had not been consulted on the new work’s authorship) saw the restored picture’s sfumato as being closer to a talented Leonardo pupil of the 1520s than to Leonardo himself. Zöllner further felt that the very extensive restoration of this “badly damaged painting” had made any assessment of the original condition extremely difficult.

Christie’s spoke of an unusually broad consensus of expert support but the group consulted was small – approximately fifteen compared with the thirty invited to appraise the version of the Madonna of the Pinks that was upgraded to Raphael after a National Gallery symposium and a major scholarly article in the Burlington Magazine (February 1992). With this Salvator Mundi upgrade, none of the invited experts has published a case for the attribution but the ascription was endorsed by the National Gallery and the picture was included in its major 2011-12 “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan” exhibition as “a work in which Leonardo set out to make his divine inspiration obvious to all”.

What had the undisclosed subsequent third restoration hoped to achieve – a better-than divinely inspired Leonardo? If an institutionally-celebrated Leonardo can be improved by a restorer, is the restorer a better artist than Leonardo – or a medium through whom he still paints? A question that might be considered is: Was the latest re-restoration undertaken to bolster an attribution rejected by four scholars in 2012 when reviewing the National Gallery exhibition, and challenged the year before – without apparent reply – in three Times letters (see Fig. 16 and ITEMS 5 and 7 above).

Above, Fig. 2: Detail – left, the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi, as at the National Gallery in 2011-12 and, right, as when up for sale at Christie’s New York on 15 November 2017.

Christie’s 2017 lot essay noted a “completion of conservation treatment in 2010” and gave no hint of a post-2012 restoration. Even though the painting had been known since 1900 in England as a Leonardo school work, had been rejected by Bernard Berenson, and had been spurned in Sotheby’s saleroom by Kenneth Clark in 1958 when it fetched £45, the National Gallery gave no hint of any further need for restoration when discussing the painting in its catalogue entry in 2011. Shortly before November 2017 the latest unacknowledged transformation was hiding in plain view in a subliminally brief time-lapse video puff where the painting morphs “miraculously” to a religiose musical accompaniment from its 1913 condition into its most recently restored state. This marketing wizardry can still be seen on the Guardian’s website here.

EVIDENCE OF AN UNDISCLOSED CAMPAIGN OF ALTERATION

Above, Fig. 3: Left, the drapery at the left shoulder of Christ, in 2011-2012 at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition; and, right, in Christie’s 15 November 15, 2018, sale.

In December 2017, Christie’s was presented with photographic evidence assembled by Dr Martin Pracher, a German Lecturer in technical art history, and an assessor of paintings’ condition, that showed changes to the shoulder drapery between 2012 and 2017. A spokeswoman disclosed that the picture’s original (2005-10) restorer, Dianne Modestini, had worked on the painting “Prior to its presentation for sale at Christie’s”. (See “Auctioneers Christie’s admit Leonardo da Vinci painting which became world’s most expensive artwork when it sold for £340m has been retouched in the last five years”.) Specifically: “Modestini partially cleaned the passage of paint in the shoulder and the dark streaks disappeared”. The spokeswoman added: “To imply something incorrect has taken place would itself be incorrect”. The recently “disappeared” folds, it was insisted, were not folds but “dark streaks” that appeared accidentally during the 2005-2010 restoration.

WHEN IS A STREAK NOT A STREAK?

In support of this claim, Christie’s cited part of the restorer’s report – “The Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci rediscovered History, technique and condition”. The auction house declined to supply the whole report to the Daily Mail even though it had been presented at a National Gallery conference in 2012 and published in 2014 in Leonardo da Vinci’s Technical Practice: Paintings Drawings and Influence, Edited by Michel Menu, Hermann, Paris. This selective presentation of a documentary record was seriously misleading. It was true that Modestini had claimed in her report that the changes were not changes to the forms of the drapery – “the black streaks at the [true] left shoulder of the Salvator Mundi’s blue mantle are not pleats…They are marks caused by the deterioration of the blue pigment made from the semi-precious stone, lapis lazuli…” – but that claim was quite implausible because material decomposition cannot mimic artistic designs and, besides, it was abandoned by Modestini herself in the same report when she acknowledged that the changes were changes to the drapery. The changes, she explained, were unintended consequences of invasive cleaning solvents: “Unexpectedly, the shadows of the folds over the proper left shoulder… became progressively stronger.” [Emphasis added.] Of those shaded folds: “I did not reinforce them… the effect of normal solvents, acetone, mineral spirits and ethyl alcohol mixtures, the initial varnish, and intermediate local varnishes containing ethyl alcohol, reformed the blanching to some degree…”

Photographic evidence published in Modestini’s report offers some credence to her solvent-led explanation (see Figs 5-7) but Christie’s December 2017 response strained credulity further with the extended claim that Modestini’s cleaning solvents, having first made visible what had been invisible, had recently made invisible what they had made visible a decade earlier. We sketch an alternative and more plausible hypothesis.

CHANGED DRAPERY DESIGN

Above, Fig. 4: In this greyscale sequence, we see the shoulder as exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011-12, left; as seen, centre, at Christie’s November 2017 (after Modestini’s only recently acknowledged intervention); and, right, as in an earlier infra-red image.

THE SALVATOR MUNDI ATTRIBUTION PROBLEM

In view of this work’s extraordinary recent conservation history and its extremely poor provenance, there are only two possibilities to entertain:

1) This work was, since its discovery in 1900, an unrecognised autograph Leonardo that had suffered massive restoration injuries and adulterations in the past, all of which, since 2005, have been successfully mitigated/masked/ by a single restorer’s further repairs and repainting, some of which have been recorded and some not.

2) This picture is a school work on which the master (Leonardo) intervened in one or two places and is not, therefore, a finished and entirely autograph Leonardo painted prototype for the group of twenty or so Leonardesque Salvator Mundi versions.

If we are to talk Leonardo da Vinci, we must talk of supreme painterly accomplishment. If we are to talk of an autograph painted protoype by Leonardo we should identify derivations from it in the many other Leonardesque Salvator Mundis and demonstrate a parity of artistic qualities with those encountered in historically recorded bona fide Leonardo paintings. If we are to talk Leonardo on the back of an only very recently upgraded, greatly injured and much restored painting, we must first talk of picture restoration’s methods, consequences and role in attribution upgrades.

WHAT RESTORERS DO (WRONG)

Restorers undo and redo pictures. The first is quasi-archaeological and risks misdiagnosis and abrasive/chemical injuries. The second is reconstructive in a quasi-artistic sense and risks adulteration or falsification.

Restorers strip off what they judge inauthentic and paint-on what they think might recover/simulate lost original and authentic appearances. The former is notoriously if not inherently destructive because restorers bear down with their solvents and scalpels on picture surfaces which carry artists most considered and final adjustments (see comments at Fig. 9). The latter is a fraught, presumptuous ambition that can be exercised with greatly varying levels of skill and artistic/anatomical comprehension (see figs. 10 and 11). Restorers are forever debating the ethics of attempting to reconstruct with their own modern materials the lost original surfaces of paintings. Whatever their outcomes, for good or ill, restorations facilitate attribution upgrades because “restored” works become new, hitherto-unseen works with “out-of-history” states that permit experts to discard previous judgements without professional embarrassment.

THE NEW YORK SALVATOR MUNDI’S CHANGING APPEARANCE

Above, Fig. 5: The drapery at the left shoulder of Christ. First left, as seen in 2005 when the Salvator Mundi was taken by one of its then owners, Robert Simon, an old masters dealer, to Modestini’s studio. Second left, in 2007 when the panel had been repaired and stripped of varnish and repaint. Third left, as exhibited in 2011 at the National Gallery. Right, as sold at Christie’s in November 2017.

In 2012 Dianne Modestini reported the picture’s arrival at her studio in 2005: “I shudder to think what might have been used. There was relatively recent varnish, sticky and uneven, and some crude retouches which may have been done by the owner or a local amateur.”

Above, Fig. 6: In the top, left, row we see the drapery folds as exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011-12 and, right, as when sold at Christie’s in 2017. Anyone might establish the extent of the changes by simply tracing photographs as above, middle row. Recent digital advances have made it possible to “subtract” a former state from a later one and represent the “differences” as dark shapes on a light ground, as above, bottom row, right, in a graphic prepared by Gareth Hawker. That graphic indicates with the clarity of a brass rubbing the location of material that had been added within the confines of the shape of the blue drapery. Moreover, visual appraisals of the 2011 and 2017 states of the painting show that changes had not been confined to the shoulder drapery but were present throughout the painting. In the details shown above, for example, it is apparent that the circumference of the orb has been strengthened by darkening (as is discussed below).

THE FULL TIMELINE

Above, Fig. 7, top row: First left, an engraved copy of 1650 by Wenceslaus Hollar of a Salvator Mundi attributed to Leonardo in the collection of Charles I. Second left, a 1913 photograph of the present Salvator Mundi when in the Cook Collection, England. Third left, the Salvator Mundi as it arrived at Modestini’s studio in 2005. Right, the Salvator Mundi in 2007 after it had been repaired and cleaned.

Above, Fig. 7, bottom row: First left, the Salvator Mundi in 2007 after it had been repaired and cleaned. Second left, the Salvator Mundi in 2008, after its first restoration and when about to be taken to the National Gallery. Third left, when exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011. Right, as when sold at Christie’s in November 2017.

Above, Fig. 8: Top, one of the then owners, Robert Simon, holding the painting at his home the night before taking it to be viewed by a number of Leonardo specialists at the National Gallery, London, in 2008; above, the painting being examined in the National Gallery in 2011. (See “Da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ painting took a winding 60-year path from under $200 to a record-breaking $450 million”)

In the sequence above we see the painting near the end of its first stage of restoration in 2008, top, and, below it, at the end of its second stage of restoration in 2011. Here we use the term “restoration” in the specialised sense of restorers who often draw a distinction between cleaning (stripping down) and repainting (which they euphemise “retouching”). In such trade usage the term “restoration” is applied to the post-cleaning repainting, not to the whole treatment. Injuries can occur in both the stripping and the reconstructive stages.

THE TWO PRINCIPAL TYPES OF PICTURE RESTORATION DAMAGE

Above, Fig. 9: The face of St Anne in Leonardo’s The Virgin and Child with St. Anne before restoration, left, and after restoration, right. (See “Another Restored Leonardo, Another Sponsored Celebration – Ferragamo at the Louvre”.)

Restorers exult in liberating paintings from predecessors’ repainting, it being a principal justification for new restorations. The photographically demonstrable cumulative net result of successive restorations is the routine scrubbing away of pictorial heritage. With photo-records of modern paintings which can often be seen in their original untouched conditions, we still encounter the same long-standing patterns of destruction, as here shown with artists like Renoir and Klimt. (See “THE ELEPHANT IN KLIMT’S ROOM” and “Stone-washed Renoirs and the Shock of the Undone”)

WHAT RESTORERS DO AFTER STRIPPING PICTURES DOWN

Because of the decline in traditional art teaching practices the pool of painterly expertise is dwindling and for many restorers today conducting their own repairing stage, after stripping off earlier repairs, can induce panic (a workshop conference was called recently to enable restorers to pool experiences, swap recipes and “learn by looking and listening [in a] welcoming and supportive environment”). For more confident practitioners the occasion can unleash over-reaching quasi-artistic ambitions.

Above, Figs. 10 and 11: However good their intentions, however avowedly “ethical” their professional codes, restorers, like forgers (who are often themselves restorers or ex-restorers), cannot avoid leaving personal imprints and those of their cultural milieus in their repainting. The more ambitious the aspirant, the more deficiencies of artistic reading and anatomical understanding can be imposed on mute works of art. The Louvre Veronese restorer above seemed in thrall to the pneumatic forms and miniaturised features of Botero. That such eccentric aesthetic predilictions should ever have been institutionally authorised might augur badly for the Mona Lisa herself in a Louvre Museum today where curators are binging on radical restorations as they play catch-up with the technological adventurism long-encountered in British and American museums.

MODESTINI’S METHODS ON THE SALVATOR MUNDI

Dianne Dwyer Modestini is a highly skilled and highly regarded restorer who teaches at the prestigious Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. She is also refreshingly frank. In her 2012 report on the New York Salvator Mundi, she gives a more detailed account of her actions and the problems she encountered than is commonly recorded in restoration reports. She disclosed that her initial (2005-10) restoration was a two-stage affair. What is at issue here is not one of brutal cleaning or ham-fisted technique but, rather, of very great painterly skill applied on a conviction of authorship that is arguably unsound and in a treatment that may or may not have been entirely of her own making. She discloses, for example, having taken guidance from Luke Syson, the organising curator of the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition. Earlier, Syson had instructed a National Gallery restorer to alter the expression of the angel’s mouth in the gallery’s version of Leonardo’s The Virgin of the Rocks by removing a piece of ancient paint that had survived an earlier restoration by a National gallery restorer now notorious for his policy and muscular advocacy of “total Cleaning”. (See: “Something Not Quite Right About Leonardo’s Mouth ~ The Rise and Rise of Cosmetically Altered Art”.)

After the repairing and cleaning stages (2005-2007), Modestini worked for three years with her paint brushes on a picture that she, the owners and an accumulating group of experts increasingly took to be an autograph Leonardo painting. In a television interview she characterised her repainting as an attempt to “help it as much as you could while not in anyway suppressing this extraordinary virtual quality that it had”. Her goal of assisting a badly damaged work was executed slowly with fine brushes and synthetic paint:

“Most of the retouchings were done with dry pigments bound with PVA AYAB. Translucent watercolours, mainly ivory black and raw siena, were used for final glazes and to draw cracks. For the black background both AYAB and Maimeri Colori per restauro were used. Except for the background I mainly used treble 0 sable watercolour brushes in a series of vertical passes until the areas of loss matched the surrounding material.”

Restorers draw fake age cracks onto their own new painting to conceal its whereabouts – or, as they euphemise, to “integrate” it with surviving original paint. Forgers sometimes produce overall fake cracks by this method and sometimes they scratch them into the paint and rub dirt in. With restorers, no less than with forgers, the intention is to deceive the viewer by conferring an air of antiquity and an illusion of unbroken pictorial integrity. When the National Gallery restored Holbein’s The Ambassadors its restorers justified their deceiving false painted cracks on the ground that they had photographed their actions and that the photographs were held in the painting’s dossiers. The then director of the Gallery, Neil MacGregor, defended fresh reconstructive painting but did concede that “recovering the intentions of a long-dead artist is a complex and tentative business”. (See “The New Relativisms and the Death of “Authenticity”.)

Dianne Modestini’s notion of help without suppression is oxymoronic: you help or enhance by applying new paint onto…the surface you have stripped…and, thereby, suppress or amend the values you have revealed – why else would you intervene with paint at all? Conceptually speaking, restorers treat or present this part of their work work as a matter-of-fact mechanical/optical process when what you do is determined by what you think, how you see, how you “read” visual phenomena, how art historically informed you are, and, to an invevitable degree, by the professional circumstances under which you are operating. If you think and are assured that you are working on a Leonardo, how can you do other, in conscience, than steer the picture towards a more satisfactory realisation of your conception of that artist’s work?

There is another specific danger: if you apply lots and lots of paint over a long period you produce a progressively altering painting that is not only based on your own initial assumptions but one that is increasingly being made in accord with your own previously incorporated modifications. By stealth you confer a superimposing material form of your own conception of what the work should be like and should further become. Apart from any guidance that may be being given by others in the studio, this work is otherwise done privately, free from external professionally disinterested appraisal and artistically informed criticism. Modestini disclosed in a television interview that she became greatly attached to the painting and found her eventual separation from it emotionally painful.

On the extent of her retouching, Modestini said that aside from damage resulting “from past cleanings [which] can be seen in some passages where the final modelling is lost…” elsewhere, “apart from the discrete losses, the flesh tones of the face retain their entire layer structure, including the final scumbles and glazes. These passages have not suffered from abrasion; if they had I wouldn’t have been able to reconstruct the losses. The blessing hand is intact.” Thus, the initially declared object of retouching was simply to bring discrete losses up to the values of surviving original paint and, in places, to reconstruct assumed lost final modelling layers. Crucially, the face was said to require no reconstruction or repair of any sort, aside from to certain clear and self-contained losses. On that account, the face as exhibited in 2011 at the National Gallery should have looked (largely) as it had emerged from cleaning by 2007. And, certainly, there should have been no difference between the face as exhibited at the National Gallery in 2011 and as sold at Christies in 2017. This was not the case (see Figs. 17-19). Modestini disclosed in 2012:

“There were actually two stages of the current restoration. In 2008 when it went to London [see Fig. 8] to be studied by several Leonardo experts, there was less retouching. I hadn’t replaced the glazes on the orb, finished the eyes, suppressed the pentimenti on the thumb and stole, and several other small details but, chiefly, the painting still had the mud-coloured modern background that was close in tone to the hair. Two years later I was troubled by the way the background encroached upon the head, trapping it in the same plane as the background. Having seen the richness of the well-preserved browns and blacks in the London Virgin of the Rocks and based on fragments of the black background which had not been covered up by the repainting, I suggested to the owners that it might be worthwhile to try to recover the original background and finish the complete restoration.”

MAKING “A DIFFERENT ALTOGETHER MORE POWERFUL IMAGE”

With her decared ambitions to finish a “complete restoration”, after seeing the National Gallery’s restored Virgin of the Rocks, Modestini begins to take an overarching artistic possession of the painting as a painting. Permission, she recalled, was granted to strip and repaint the entire background:

“The initial cleaning [i. e. paint removal] was promising especially where the verdigris had preserved the original layers. Unfortunately, in the upper parts of the background, the paint had been scraped down to the ground and in some cases the wood itself. Whether or not I would have begun had I known, is a moot point. Since the putty and overpaint were quite thick I had no choice but to remove them completely. I repainted the large missing areas in the upper part of the painting with ivory black and a little cadmium light red, followed by a glaze of rich warm brown, then more black and vermilion. Between stages I distressed and then retouched the new paint to make it look antique. The new colour then freed the head, which had been trapped in the muddy background, so close in tone to the hair, and made a different, altogether more powerful image.”

SO WHY CHANGE THE OVERALL APPEARANCE OF AN ACREDITED LEONARDO?

Above, Fig. 12: In this sequence we see how the face’s distinctive bug-eyed, long thin bent-nosed monkey-like anti-classical appearance on acquisition in 2005 had persisted throughout the 2008 visit to the National Gallery and into the 2011-12 stay in the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition.

What might account for the substantial covert post-2012 re-restoration? In the absence of information and reports we must speculate. It can be said that for the credibility of so elevated an ascription as an entirely autograph Leonardo da Vinci it is imperative that a clear “fit” be evident with secure works within Leonardo’s oeuvre. Anything anomalous or discordant becomes a threat that must be explained away by being incorporated as an especially confirming feature within the attributed work’s New Narrative . For example, when Professor Martin Kemp was actively engaged as an advocate of another proposed Leonardo, the mixed media drawing on vellum he dubbed “La Bella Principessa”, he contended that atypical or previously unknown features (including working in a medium “that has not previously been seen”) can safely be taken as a “new facet” of the artist’s engagement with his circumstances. Perhaps. But when a work has been specifically likened to the greatest and most maturely sophisticated works of Leonardo the bar has been set extremely high and the scope for great surprises is reduced. For the owners and professional champions of this Salvator Mundi – a work that was very soon afterwards to be offered to the market – the scholarly rejections that attended the National Gallery exhibition might have seemed disappointing, if not alarming.

Today we see three principal cross-linked concerns with the painting that has recently sported two separate identities – the one displayed at the National Gallery and the one worn for the recent sale. The problems are: the painting’s appearance; its (lack of) provenance; and the (over-heated) means of its promotion and accreditation.

GHOST SCHOLARSHIP

This Leonardo ascription has been made on almost no published scholarship. It rests on a largely unstated and, therefore, unexamined art critical case. Apart from the restorer’s report and the National Gallery exhibition catalogue’s entry by its curator, Luke Syson, almost nothing, so far as we know, has been published in support of this Leonardo. Christie’s lot essay appealed to the authority of the unpublished researches of one of the original owners, Dr Robert Simon, a New York art dealer, and to Modestini’s and Syson’s accounts when they, too, both acknowledged indebtedness to the researches of Simon. After twelve years, serial restorations and two sales at a combined total of over half a billion dollars, those researches have yet to be published. It is impossible to know whether or not weaknesses in the two published accounts derive from or fairly reflect Simon’s still unpublished material but dangers must lurk in an unexamined triangulated loop of research in which much seems to be assumed or borrowed and from which little concrete evidence emerges – and where caveats abound. Luke Syson writes:

“The re-emergence of this picture, cleaned and restored to reveal an autograph work by Leonardo, therefore comes as an extraordinary surprise” but, he adds, of Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraved testimony (see below): “None of this, of course, is evidence for the picture’s autograph status. After all, the pictures by pupils copying Leonardo’s design may sometimes have been rather good, and one such might easily have been owned by Henrietta Maria.” Quite so. And in view of Jacques Franck’s account above (ITEM 6), that very possibility, as advanced by Ludwig Heydenreich, is the first mountain that any “Autograph Leonardo Salvator Mundi” aspirant must be seen to have scaled. It is now six years since Syson alerted us that “This discussion anticipates the more detailed publication of this picture by Robert Simon and others” but he gave little indication of any corroborative evidence being to hand. It would sometimes seem that Simon’s researches on the New York candidate echo or adapt the extensive researches earlier conducted by Joanne Snow-Smith in her support of the unsuccessful Paris candidate, the so-called de Ganay Salvator Mundi (see Fig. 13). If Syson should prove to have been a dutiful student of Simon we might be in for a daisy-chain of hypotheses in which awkward and peculiar features are advanced as material corroborations with rhetrorical flourishes. Syson ends his account thusly:

“Snow-Smith has shown that King Louis XII and his consort, Anne of Brittany, were particularly devoted to Christ as Salvator Mundi, and that they could connect this cult with the Mandylion of Edessa twice-over we now see. Given the date – around 1500 – of Leonardo’s preparatory drawings [only two sheets of drapery studies], the style of the picture and its association with a French princess, Louis and Anne become the most likely patrons for Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, probably commissioning the work soon after the conquest of Milan and Genoa. This would therefore be one of the French commissions mentioned by Fra Pietro Novellara. And it was perhaps to accommodate their wishes that Leonardo based Christ’s features, the set of the eyes, the heavy lower lids, and especially his smoothly arched eyebrows [sic] down into a long nose, on the Christ of the Mandylion of Edessa.” Emphases added.

How can you extract a “would therefore be” from a “could”, a “most likely”, and a “probably”? In lieu of a single hard shiny fact, we are offered a forest of fancies, maybes, perhaps’s and scholarly borrowings.

THE HOLLAR AND DE GANAY CONNECTIONS

Even if the claimed correspondence between the New York Salvator Mundi and Hollar’s etched copy had been visually compelling – which on many counts it is not – the etching’s ascription to Leonardo would still need treating with caution. Max Friedlandler warned in On Art and Connoisseurship: “The inventories of princely galleries – such as those of Margaret of Austria, Vicereine of the Netherlands, or of King Charles I of England…are to be utilized sceptically and to be taken seriously only to the extent that facts derived from style criticism do not contradict them.” With the New York Salvator Mundi’s countless stylistic incompatibilities, attempts to press a correspondence with the Hollar are quite counter-productive.

Above, Fig. 13: Top row, left, the “de Ganay Salvator Mundi” (the painting had formerly been in the collection of the Marquis de Ganay, Paris); top row, right, the 1650 Hollar etching. Bottom row the New York Salvator Mundi in 2011, left; and in 2017, right.

The de Ganay picture, top left, was proposed in a scholarly article in 1978 and a book of 1982 to be an original Leonardo painted prototype for around twenty Leonardo-like Salvator Mundi paintings. That attribution did not find general favour but the case advanced for it by the scholar Joanne Snow-Smith provided a template for the New York Salvator Mundi. It, too, was said to have been the painting etched by Hollar, above, top right. Its material composition was also said to have passed the technical tests of its day. Its paintwork, too, betrayed no discernable brushwork – in this last respect both of the proposed Leonardo protypes are physically unlike such secure but heavily cracked bona fide Leonardo works as the Mona Lisa and the St. John the Baptist.

While both of the two painted versions shown above, left, are said to have provided the model for Hollar’s etching, in neither case is this plausible. Both have the complicated and rather ugly configuration of drapery folds at the true left shoulder in which a horizontal fold runs below the below the shoulder creating an epaulette-like touch of power-dressing that is not present in Hollar’s copy. The alteration of the New York version’s shoulder drapery thus might be thought to have conferred two stylistic benefits: it makes a closer fit with the Hollar copy and it puts distance between itself and an earlier failed contender as an original painted prototype by Leonardo.

The 2012-17 repainting might be thought to have brought other benefits vis-à-vis the very marked departures from the Hollar seen in the New York Salvator Mundi. In the etching there are two principal sources of light: a strong, top left corner-down natural light source that imparts a pronounced chiaroscuro on the figure (– and even an unremarked cast shadow from the raised arm) and, a source of radiance (“nimbus”) behind Christ’s head. Although the newly imposed uniform blackness of the background is counterproductive in terms of the claimed correspondence with the historic Hollar copy, the recent general beefing-up of tonal contrasts – and particularly so with the foreground arm drapery and the orb – has mitigated to a considerable degree the previous deadening flatness (of which we have complained see: “Mystery over Christ’s orb in $100m Leonardo da Vinci painting”.)

The face in the Hollar is long thin, bearded and tapering, as is that in the de Ganay painting. In contrast, the face in the New York picture emerged from the first restoration with an entirely disqualifying lopsided shape that was markedly wider at the jaw than at the cheekbone and thus combined a chipmunk-like aspect with a monkey nose. The latest post-2012 shading on the face of the New York picture has served to narrow the lit lower face and make the overall aspect more symmetrical. Similarly, Modestini’s widening of the right nostril aperture (see Fig. 19) masks another anatomical solecism in a purportedly hierarchic frontal classical face, which, Modestini assures us was “deliberately adapted by Leonardo from a Byzantine prototype and also used by Giotto in the Peruzzi Altarpiece in Santa Croce, with which he was certainly familiar…” Similarly, too, for Syson the question is re-begged: “the face of Christ – rigid, symmetrical, absolutely frontal – is deliberately archaic. He seems to have been aware of the central panel of a polyptych ascribed to Giotto and his workshop…” Two asserted “deliberatelys” do not a secure fact make. The idea of Leonardo as a backward looking archaistic figure is a notion that finds realisation in only two works: the proposed Leonardo drawing “La Bella Principessa” – which has no history before its emergence in 1996 from the studio of a painter who became a friend of Berenson and a restorer of …Leonardo, among others; and, the recently upgraded New York Salvator Mundi. The argument is circular. If ever Leonardo might have been tempted to do a frontal, backward-looking hierarchic face of Christ it would have been on his triumphantly frontal, wall-asserting mural The Last Supper. Instead, of course, he carved space by playing every head and limb off against the unseen picture plane.

THE PROVENANCE

Without the Hollar connection this Salvator Mundi’s provenance begins only at 1900 four centuries after its supposed execution. The pre-1900 history is problematic. It is not known from whom, where or when the picture had been acquired by Sir Charles Robinson who bought the work as a Bernardino Luino for the Cook Collection. We have been informed that an English fossil-hunter, Thomas Hawkins (1810-89), seems to have donated a “Leonardo Salvator Mundi” in 1848 to a church in Birmingham. That church was closed down in 1895, at which date its collection was presumably disbursed. Had Robinson bought it from that church? Or, were there two claimed Leonardo Salvator Mundi versions then at large in England? To complicate matters, the whereabouts of a third version formerly in the Worsey and Yarborough Collections is presently unknown. So there might have been three Leonardo Salvator Mundi candidates in 19th century England.

The Cook collection picture’s provenance ran into the ground in 1958 when sold by Sotheby’s for £45. Between 1900 and 1958 no one thought the New York Salvator Mundi to be a Leonardo. Christie’s 2017 sale provenance ended: “Kuntz, Private Collection USA”. Sotheby’s have no additional information on Kuntz. Wiki has an entry on a US artist Roger Edward Kuntz, a talented painter who wavered between abstraction and representation and died in 1975. In the early 50s he and his wife travelled for four months in Europe so that he could visit museums. They had a daughter in 1951. If Kuntz, an artist with a “pensive, thoughtfully naturalistic sensibility” made another European trip in 1958, might he have had £45 (at that date about a month’s wage for an unskilled worker in Britain) to spare on an old Italian painting? Roger Kuntz died in 1975 but was succeeded by his wife and daughter. If not that Kuntz family, what of others in the United States? A Kuntz family in Louisiana used to be avid collectors of paintings, antiques and historical documents. Rosemund E. and Emile Kuntz had two sons, one of whom donated a majority of their collection to Tulane University in New Orleans. As things stand we do not know the identity of the vendor in 2005 or the venue of the sale – which might seem odd in the world’s most information-rich country in the twenty-first century. Given the still sticky varnish present on the New York Salvator Mundi in 2005 when the painting was bought for $10,000, it could be useful to establish the identity of the previous owner who would have information on the previous restoration and very possibly photo-records of the painting from 1958 onwards.

THE SALVATOR MUNDI’S APPEARANCE

Above, Fig. 14: Details of the Hollar etching and the 2017 version of the New York Salvator Mundi.

If the removal of the “epaulette” and the rounding off of the shoulder brings the painting a little closer to the etching, the painted orb has become even more at variance. In the Hollar copy the orb accumulates light around its circumference in contrast to the pools of darkness at its centre but that symbolic tonal logic is inverted in the New York painting and the line of three reflected lights on the surface recorded by Hollar contrasts with a triangular configuration which some see as a depiction of stars in the southern hemisphere but which again, is nowhere else encountered. As if oblivious of all this conflicting testimony, Syson writes of the New York painting’s orb: “This perfect sphere is seen both to contain and transmit the light of the world.” And again, against visual evidence he writes: “Moreover, Christ’s hand remains miraculously undistorted. Leonardo has therefore created an object that would be understood as a piece of divine craftsmanship, but still be his own invention. Never did he make the connection between his own creativity and God’s more explicit.”

A key part of the case advanced for the New York version is that it contains a number of pentimenti. Luke Syson writes “There is, for example a major pentiment in the thumb of Christ’s proper right hand, and other, lesser adjustments of the contours elsewhere (such as in the palm of the left hand seen through the transparent orb).” Syson contends that such are typical of Leonardo and would be surprising “in a copy of an existing design”. He fails to explain why, had this painting provided a fully realised painted prototype for all the other versions (as opposed to having provided studies and possibly a cartoon, as other have concluded), no other version depicted the hand holding the orb in the manner of the New York picture – as we discussed in Part I and will examine further in Part III. No other version shows as much of the palm of the hand and all show what little is seen of the hand and the thumb itself to be on a rising diagonal (see Fig. 15), as does the Hollar copy. Perhaps Robert Simon has assembled in his researches an explanation for how it came about that Leonardo painted a hand, as presently in the New York version, and how, then, when Hollar copied it a century and a half later, he opted to make it both smaller and rotated from its horizontal axis to a diagonal one? Modestini describes the collective thinking/handling of one of the other changes of position:

“A pentimento of the thumb [on the blessing hand] appeared as soon as the varnish was removed. It had been covered over by successive layers of background paint and, when these were scraped off, was itself damaged in the process. It was never a complete thumb, only the bright pink underpaint, rather amorphous because of the damage. Normally I like to see pentimenti, sometimes veiling them slightly if they are too prominent and disturb the image. In this case I tried various solutions, including: reconstructing it, after which it was too assertive; toning it down with dark translucent glazes; pushing it back with scumbles containing green to subdue the bright pink. It never looked right and interfered with the well-preserved hand. I was greatly relieved when Luke Syson agreed that, under the circumstances, it could be completely suppressed.”

Above, Fig. 15: In the top row above we see how greatly more commanding and authoritative is the design and sculptural massing of forms in the small etched copy by Hollar than in the much larger New York painting. It is inconceivable that Hollar, if copying the New York picture, would have changed so many aspects of the design and so greatly intensified the overall theatre of lighting and form-evoking shading. In the Hollar we see the central drapery ridge descending from the shoulder in a convex sweep before entering the orb’s circumference and then abruptly inverting from convexity to concavity – which aspect it maintains throughout its passage within the orb until, on exiting, it immediately reverts to convexity. In the centre of our own glass “orb” (which lies on the surface) in the lower picture we see how the narrow parallel white division between the two photocopied diagrams at first disappears from view and then reappears, within the orb curving outward slightly on one side and more dramatically so on the other before beginning to converge at the approach the circumference. If the New York painting were a Leonardo that had been copied by Hollar, how likely would it be that the latter copyist took the liberty of making a more complex and scientifically astute optic within the orb than was present on the painting he believed to be by Leonardo?

Above, Fig. 16: Left, two ArtWatch letters to the Times on the orb; right, Professor Martin Kemp’s endorsement of the Salvator Mundi’s Leonardo attribution, as set out in the 2011 edition of book Leonardo. His illustration, being that of the 2011 state, is now obsolescent. His dating (c. 1504-07) places the picture chronologically (and therefore stylistically) between the Mona Lisa and the St John the Baptist. In an earlier entry in his book’s “Gallery”, Kemp also endorses the mixed media drawing on vellum glued onto an oak panel which he dubbed “La Bella Principessa (Portrait of Bianca Sforza?)” – see Fig. 20. He dates that proposed Leonardo at c. 1495-6 in tandem with the beginning of Leonardo’s Last Supper. He states as fact that this drawing had been cut from the Warsaw copy of the Sforziada produced for Galeazzo Sanseverino. He and the owner of the drawing each made a trip to Warsaw with a National Geographic crew to locate the spot in the codex from which the sheet was cut. They both found the spot, or rather, two different spots. Kasia Pisarek established that neither could have been the case because the book had been bound with five double stitch holes, when the drawing has only three single holes. (See “Fake or Fortune: Hypotheses, Claims and Immutable Facts”)

Above, Fig. 18: In the top row detail of St. Anne, we see how a major bona fide Leonardo in the Louvre has borne the commonplace “reductive” pictorial material-shedding brunt of radical restorations. Restorers, when challenged on their sculpturally flattening modernist impositions, invariably insist that what critics lament as losses were no more than dirt, disfiguration and arbitrary alien accretions. Curators should know better and for the longest time in the 20th century those at the Louvre did do so. In the bottom progression we see how Modestini avoided one picture restoration affliction only to effect another by imposing a ceaselessly-evolving painterly elaboration which comes to constitute a series of variations on a theme.

Fig. 19, above: As mentioned, when considering great artists the primary evaluation must always be one of artistic quality. In Part III we examine the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi with regard to the great bona fide Leonardo works to which it has been likened. Here, above, we show a close-up of Christ’s (changing) face as seen in 2012 left, and 2017, right. Above it we show the eyes as in 2007 when cleaned but not yet repainted. The attentive viewer will see how Modestini has variously changed the expression of Christ by: raising the right-hand side of the parting line of the lips; by de-fluffing some of the beard on the left upper mouth; and, by further adjusting the misaligned eyes. There is as yet no published record or account of the reasons for making these changes. As seen, Syson saw in the (2011) eyes of this Salvator Mundi Leonardo’s accommodation with the wishes of certain historical figures with whom no connection has been established. We do have Modestini’s account of the induced appearance of the eyes, as they were seen in the 2011-12 National Gallery exhibition:

“Since both eyes have been abraded, the left one to a greater degree than the right, the ambiguity between abrasion and highlight made the restoration extremely difficult and I redid it a number of times. As little as possible was done to the left eye. No attempt was made, for example, to emphasize the pupil which is reasonably well preserved in the right eye. Carefully following the remnants of original, which contain a line of drawing to place the lower lid, resulted in eyes of slightly different size; the left is smaller than the right. Imposing a more logical or definite shape caused the eyes to completely change character.”

Above, Fig.20: Left, the cover of Joanne Snow-Smith’s 1982 book THE SALVATOR MUNDI OF LEONARDO DA VINCI; Centre, the cover of the owner’s account of his (so far vain) quest to authenticate the “La Bella Principessa” drawing; Right a poster for a talk given by one the original owners of the New York Salvator Mundi at the 2014 Annual Brunch for Friends of the Uffizi Gallery.

Michael Daley, 2 February 2018

January 1, 2018 | Categories: blog | Leave A Comment »

Problems with the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi Part I: Provenance and Presentation

The Art Newspaper reports that questions of authenticity, provenance and attribution constitute the greatest risks to the art market according to 83% of wealth managers and 81% of art professionals (“Ultra-rich will spend $2.7 trillion on art by 2026 says Deloitte”).

Above, Figs. 1 & 2: ArtWatch UK members’ Journal No.31 and its lead article. For membership details please contact Helen Hulson at hahulson@gmail.com .

In our current Journal (above) we carry a report on the crisis triggered by the collapsing numbers of scholars who possess specialised expertise in particular artists and fields, and on whose authority and powers of appraisal the art market relies. Scholarly shortcomings are also evident in a widespread disinclination to conduct rigorous, visually comparative interrogations of restored and/or attributed works – perhaps out of deference to institutionally-powerful picture restorers who nowadays call themselves Technical Art Historians. Some museum curators openly farm out responsibility for attributions…to private collectors. At elevated scholarly levels the highest ascriptions are sometimes attached to what are only the best surviving versions of lost works.

TELL-TALE CROPPING

The late Sir Denis Mahon supported as original and authentic a version of Annibale Carracci’s Venus, Adonis and Cupid, of c. 1588-90 until the Prado restored its own version and declared it the authentic original. Mahon saw vindication in an instantly switched allegiance:

“When I first wrote about this composition, some fifty years ago, my observations on style and chronology were based not on the Prado painting, since this was as yet unknown, but on the excellent early copy in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and on the preparatory drawings for the figure of Adonis in the Uffizi. When the Prado painting was first published in 1965, by Pérez Sánchez, it was gratifying to realize that, although all those of us who concerned ourselves with Emilian painting had mistakenly assumed that the Vienna picture was Annibale’s original, one’s intuitions about the importance of the work and where it fitted in the artist’s evolution were confirmed.”

So that was alright then? No. Sir Denis was parading methodological laxity. Even before the Prado picture emerged, he should have appreciated that an old engraved copy testified that the original work was larger and compositionally richer than the cropped version he was espousing. Cropped digits and limbs are so commonly encountered in copies as to constitute attribution alarm bells. They are found (as we showed in “Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship”) in works given to Caravaggio, Rubens and Leonardo. Just as the thumb on Christ’s left hand in the New York Salvator Mundi is inexplicably cropped (- and nowhere addressed), so are Samson’s toes in the National Gallery’s Rubens Samson and Delilah and so are the legs and part buttocks of a slain infant in the Old Masters world record-beating Lord Thomson Rubens Massacre of the Innocents. In the National Gallery’s (second) version of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks, the foot of the infant Baptist runs off the painting whereas it falls comfortably within the edge of the composition in the unquestionably autograph first version in the Louvre. It is being claimed that the New York Salvator Mundi (Fig. 3) is the prototype original for all other versions when it is in fact the only version to carry a cropped thumb (see Fig. 4). Did every other artist ignore/correct a mismanaged painted prototype composition by Leonardo?

Above, Figs. 3 and 4: Top, the New York Salvator Mundi which, since 2011 has been attributed to Leonardo (photo. courtesy of Christie’s); Above, details left, of the so-called de Ganay Salvator Mundi; centre, of the Detroit Institute Giampietrino Salvator Mundi; and, right, of the New York, Leonardo Salvator Mundi.

Above, Fig. 5: Left, the proposed but rejected de Ganay Leonardo Salvator Mundi; right, the New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi.

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF THE NEW YORK SALVATOR MUNDI

The New York Salvator Mundi is billed as a miraculous once-in-a-century discovery when it is the second such claimant drawn from a pool of more than twenty clearly Leonardo-derived and sometimes partially Leonardo-assisted Salvator Mundis. In 1978 and 1982 Joanne Snow-Smith, with the support of the Leonardo scholar Ludwig Heydenreich, proposed that the de Ganay Salvator Mundi (above, left) was the original autograph Leonardo prototype for all other variants.

Earlier, Heydenreich had concluded on the evidence of the various treatments seen in this group – which included the then lost, now New York Salvator Mundi – that Leonardo had more likely executed designs or a cartoon to inform his assistants and associates than to have executed a finished painted panel.

THE LEONARDO SALVATOR MUNDI FIELD

Although the quality here is very poor we reproduce below at Figs. 6–10 all of the reproduced images included in Heydenreich’s neglected but, as Frank Zöllner holds, “enduringly significant” 1964 study “Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’”. The initial images set the scene and context of the subject, others are examples of the score or more Salvator Mundi works now associated with Leonardo.

Above, Fig. 10: This image is crucial to the attribution, being the two (Windsor Castle) drapery studies that comprise the entire extant material evidence for Leonardo’s involvement in the genesis of the large associated group of Salvator Mundi works. Characteristic Leonardo drapery fold motifs in the two studies recur in varying ways in many but not in all of the associated works. These two sheets provide a small base for a claimed Leonardo attribution for a particular painting. At the heart of this present (contested) Leonardo Salvator Mundi attribution is, therefore, the question of whether Leonardo provided further designs, studies, cartoons and some painterly assistance to his students (as Heydenreich held and Frank Zöllner now holds), or whether Leonardo painted a prototype painting which provided the basis for all of the many variant Salvator Mundis. What is for sure is that there exists no study by Leonardo for an otherwise out-of-character fully frontal view of Christ’s face, or for the distinctive and recurrent hand/orb motif.

This quest for an autograph prototype Leonardo painting might seem moot or vain: not only do the two drapery studies comprise the only accepted Leonardo material that might be associated with the group, but within the Leonardo literature there is no documentary record of the artist ever having been involved in such a painting project. The first record of a work of this subject by the (attributed) hand of Leonardo occurs only in the 17th century in England.

THE OPPORTUNITY FOR LEONARDO TO PAINT A SALVATOR MUNDI

That there should be no more than a couple of drapery studies and absolutely no mention of Leonardo’s involvement on such a painting fits with records that do exist of his activities at the post-1500 period. Jacques Franck, the expert of Leonardo’s painting techniques and a restoration adviser to the Louvre, notes that:

“By 1500 onwards, the period in which the painted panel is said to have been executed, for want of time Leonardo produced few works. Fra Pietro da Novellara, who visited his studio in April 1501, reported: ‘His mathematical researches have so much distracted him that he can’t stand the brush’, and, he added, ‘Two of his pupils make copies to which he adds some touches from time to time’. In 1501, he was commissioned to produce a ‘Madonna of the Yarnwinder’ by Florimond Robertet (the French King Louis XII’s secretary) at the time when he was already creating both the major group ‘The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne’ and the phenomenally accomplished ‘Mona Lisa’. Both panels were seen during their executions in October 1503 by Agostino Vespucci, an assistant of Machiavelli at the Signoria in Florence but he, too, made no reference to a Salvator Mundi. Giorgio Vasari says of the ‘Mona Lisa’s’ execution that Leonardo, as a meticulous and slow-working painter had ‘toiled over it for four years’. Between May and August 1502 until early 1503 Leonardo was committed with Cesare Borgia as an architect and general engineer in the Marches and Romagna. He was then fully employed by the City of Florence during the Summer of 1503 as a military architect and, two or three months later, he worked fully on the commission of a huge mural (the now destroyed ‘Battle of Anghiari’) until late May 1506, before travelling between Florence and Milan up to mid 1508, because of his appointment as painter and engineer to the French King while serving Charles II d’Amboise, the new governor of Milan. Because of such taxing commitments – and all of the above were in addition to his intense scientific researches and literary activities – Leonardo increasingly resorted to workshop productions from 1500 onwards. The ‘Salvator Mundi’ must, of necessity, be thought to be one of those works and, given the preceding it is very likely that a fully original version never existed.”

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF THE NEW YORK SALVATOR MUNDI

Christie’s lists a broad group of international scholars and experts to whom the painting had been shown at various points between 2007 and 2010, which is to say only after “the initial phase of conservation” had been completed between 2005 and 2007. It says also that there exists a “broad consensus that the Salvator Mundi was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, and that it is the single original painting from which the many copies and student versions depend” with most placing it in the later 1490s while some date it slightly later and believe it to have been painted over a number of years. The following experts are listed:

Mina Gregori, Nicholas Penny, Carmen Bambach, Andrea Beyer, Keith Christiansen, Everett Fahy, Michael Gallagher (restorer), David Allan Brown, Maria Teresa Fiorio, Martin Kemp, Pietro Marani, Luke Syson and David Ekserdjian.

However, of the thirteen, one, Carmen Bambach, can hardly be considered a supporter of an autograph Leonardo attribution. In a review in Apollo, February 2012 (“Seeking the universal painter”) she wrote:

“The attribution of the Salvator Mundi…is an important addition to the scholarship, but requires a more qualified description, for its severely damaged original painting surface exhibits a large proportion of recent integration [i. e. new, superimposed painting]. In the present reviewer’s opinion, having studied and followed the picture during its conservation treatment, and seeing it in context in the [National Gallery’s 2011-12 major Leonardo] exhibition, much of the original surface may be by Boltraffio, but with passages done by Leonardo himself, namely Christ’s proper right blessing hand, portions of the sleeve, his left hand and the crystal orb he holds.”

Of the remaining twelve, how many have written publicly in support of an unreserved Leonardo attribution? We recently asked one of those listed if he supported the Leonardo attribution unreservedly but have yet to receive a reply. One seeming casualty of the (heavy) promotion of the Salvator Mundi as the last chance to buy a Leonardo is the mixed media drawing on vellum known as “La Bella Principessa”. Is that work no longer on the market? Its Leonardo ascription was supported by two of those listed in support of the Salvator Mundi – Mina Gregori and Martin Kemp, but then, two listed supporters of the New York painting, David Ekserdjian and Pietro Marani, have roundly rejected the “La Bella Principessa” – as presumably also did Luke Syson and Nicholas Penny when the work was excluded from the National Gallery’s 2011-12 Leonardo exhibition to the annoyance of its owner and its scholarly advocates.

In addition, there is a glaring absentee on the Christie’s list – the author of the catalogue raisonné Leonardo da Vinci – the Complete Paintings and Drawings, Frank Zöllner. In the revised 2017 edition of his book, Zöllner says in his entry on the New York Salvator Mundi that while it surpasses the other known versions in terms of quality, nonetheless, it:

“also exhibits a number of weaknesses. The flesh tones of the blessing hand, for example, appear pallid and waxen as in a number of workshop paintings. Christ’s ringlets also seem to me too schematic in their execution, the larger drapery folds too undifferentiated, especially on the right-hand side. They do not begin to bear comparison with the Mona Lisa, for example. It is therefore not surprising that a number of reviewers of the London Leonardo exhibition initially adopted a sceptical stance…(Bambach 2012; Hope 2012; Robertson 2012; Zöllner 2012). In view of the arguments put forward to date and the above-mentioned weaknesses, we might sooner see the Salvator Mundi as a high-quality product of Leonardo’s workshop, painted only after 1507, on whose execution Leonardo was substantially involved. It will probably only be possible to arrive at a more informed verdict on this question after the results of the painting’s technical analyses have been published in full (Dalivalle/Kemp/Simon 2017).”

In his book’s revised 2017 preface, Zöllner writes:

“With regard to Leonardo da Vinci’s oeuvre, finally, the most sensational discovery to date has been the Salvator Mundi… The painting of Christ making the sign of the blessing has been known to art historians [only] since the start of the 20th century but subsequently disappeared from view. In 2005 it appeared on the art market and in 2011 was presented to the public in a spectacular exhibition in London (Syson/Keith 2011); since then its attribution to Leonardo da Vinci has been the subject of heated debate. This attribution is controversial primarily on two grounds. Firstly, the badly damaged painting had to undergo very extensive restoration, which makes its original quality extremely difficult to assess. Secondly, the Salvator Mundi in its present state exhibits a strongly developed sfumato technique that corresponds more closely to the manner of a talented Leonardo pupil active in the 1520s than to the style of the master himself. The way in which the painting was placed on the market also gave rise to concern.”

The long-promised delivery of the Dalivalle/Kemp/Simon technical accounts has now retreated to 2018 – seven years after the work was exhibited as a Leonardo in London and five years after it was first sold (for $80m) as a Leonardo. In 2012, Charles Hope wrote (New York Review):

“Much more suspect, however, is a recently cleaned painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi from a private collection. This was recorded in a print of the mid-seventeenth century, and the composition is known in other versions. But even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation, it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull.”

As shown below, the print (Fig. 11a) mentioned by Hope is crucial to the New York Salvator Mundi enjoying any provenance prior to 1900.

A HEAVILY-HYPED SALE AND THE NEW YORK SALVATOR MUNDI’S SCANT PROVENANCE

A sleeper-hunting dealer/blogger has written: “I’ve been impressed by how Christie’s have marketed the picture – in fact, I’d say that they’ve taken marketing Old Masters to a whole new level. A well deserved AHN pat on the back to all involved.” Christie’s, New York, is offering the work it describes as “The Last da Vinci” on November 15 2017 in a sale of contemporary art:

“Salvator Mundi is a painting of the most iconic figure in the world by the most important artist of all time,” says Loic Gouzer, Chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art, “The opportunity to bring this masterpiece to the market is an honour that comes around once in a lifetime. Despite being created approximately 500 years ago, the work of Leonardo is just as influential to the art that is being created today as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries. We felt that offering this painting within the context of our Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale is a testament to the enduring relevance of this picture.”

Few will likely be persuaded that Leonardo exerts as much influence on today’s artists as on those of his own times, and some might feel that removing the work from the context of an old masters sale will be helpful to its chances, given its heavily damaged condition and its very recently and substantially reconstructed twenty-first century appearance. There are other problems. The first concerns provenance, where the facts come late and are grafted onto a daisy-chain of hypotheses, claims and assumptions.

As mentioned, this work, now unequivocally described as a fully autograph Leonardo painting that is the artistic equal of the Mona Lisa, first materialised in 1900 when bought as by Leonardo’s follower, Bernardino Luini (- it was later taken to be a copy of a copy by Boltraffio). That purchase and what followed immediately afterwards are in the realm of verifiable facts until the painting went missing before reappearing in 2005. What is suggested to have happened before 1900 is speculation and/or contention. The first reference to such a Leonardo subject is in 1651. Christie’s provides the following provenance:

“(Possibly) Commissioned after 1500 by King Louis XII of France (1462-1515) and his wife, Anne of Brittany (1477-1514), following the conquest of Milan and Genoa, and possibly by descent to
Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), by whom possibly brought to England in 1625 upon her marriage to King Charles I of England (1600-1649), Greenwich;
Commonwealth Sale, as ‘A peece of Christ done by Leonardo at 30- 00- 00’, presented, 23 October 1651, as part of the Sixth Dividend to
Captain John Stone (1620-1667), leader of the Sixth Dividend of creditors, until 1660, when it was returned with other works upon the Restoration to
King Charles II of England (1630-1685), Whitehall, and probably by inheritance to his brother
King James II of England (1633-1701), Whitehall, from which probably removed by
Catherine Sedley, Countess of Dorchester (1657-1717), or her future son-in-law, John Sheffield, 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby (1648-1721), and probably by descent to his illegitimate son
Sir Charles Herbert Sheffield, 1st Bt. (c. 1706-1774); John Prestage, London, 24 February 1763, lot 53, as ‘L. Da. Vinci A head of our Saviour’ (£2.10).
Sir [John] Charles Robinson (1824-1913), as Bernardino Luini; by whom sold in 1900 to
Sir Francis Cook, 1st Bt. (1817-1901), Doughty House, Richmond, and by descent through
Sir Frederick [Lucas] Cook, 2nd Bt. (1844-1920), Doughty House, Richmond, and
Sir Herbert [Frederick] Cook, 3rd Bt. (1868-1939), Doughty House, Richmond, as ‘Free copy after Boltraffio’ and later ‘Milanese School’, to
Sir Francis [Ferdinand Maurice] Cook, 4th Bt. (1907-1978); his sale, Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, lot 40, as ‘Boltraffio’ (£45 to Kuntz).
Private collection, United States.
Robert Simon, New York.
Private sale; Sotheby’s, New York.
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Pre-Lot Text
Property from a Private European Collection”

Thus, from a claimed execution either before or after 1500 (the supporters are divided on a possible position within Leonardo’s oeuvre) it is said to have passed through four centuries via a “(Possibly) Commissioned”; “Possibly by descent”; “by whom possibly brought to England”; “probably by inheritance”; “from which probably removed”; “and probably by descent” to 1900. It then took a further 111 years for this work to gain accreditation as a Leonardo when it was included in the National Gallery’s special exhibition “Leonardo, Painter at the Court of Milan” after a long and highly problematic restoration.

THE HOLLAR RECORD

Above Fig. 11: Left, the Hollar copy declared by the engraver to be of a Leonardo; right, the New York Salvator Mundi

The 2011-12 London National Gallery Leonardo show catalogue entry on the New York Salvator Mundi was written by the (then) National Gallery curator Luke Syson, who acknowledges indebtedness to “the more detailed publication of this picture by Robert Simon [the then owner] and others…to be presented in a forthcoming book.” At first, Syson is dismissive of the seventeenth century engraved copy by Hollar which had been cited in 1978 and 1982 in support of the de Ganay version (Fig. 5a) on the grounds that the copyist, Wenceslaus Hollar, “might very well have been copying a copy.” Indeed. However, two paragraphs later Hollar commands centre stage:

“The re-emergence of this picture, cleaned and restored to reveal an autograph work by Leonardo, therefore comes as an extraordinary surprise. Though Hollar’s Christ is very slightly stouter and broader, the two images coincide almost exactly…There can be no doubt that this is the picture copied by Hollar.”

The general extent to which the Hollar copy fits the present New York Leonardo Salvator Mundi is (as seen above) is considerable, as Syson notes, but then, so too is the number of ways in which it departs from that record. Both will be examined in Part II.

Michael Daley, 14 November 2017

November 14, 2017 | Categories: blog | Leave A Comment »

Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship ~ Part II: Paper (sometimes photographic) Fakes and the Demise of the Educated Eye

7 January 2014

“…Works on paper, however, have not been so completely studied and categorised, so there remains scope for mis-identification and skulduggery.”

~ Michel Strauss, “Pictures, Passions and Eye: A Life at Sotheby’s”, London, 2011.

An anonymous bidder has reportedly acquired a manuscript by the late forger Eric Hebborn for more than sixty times its reserve price – “Mystery bidder buys forger’s key to fakes in top museums”,

The Times, 25 October 2014.

“The only attributions that I have discussed neither in the text nor in the Catalogue Raisonné are of drawings. We have no assurance that any of Domenico’s drawings has survived. None was given to him in Berenson’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1938) or by Salmi (1936 and 1938). The ascription of a group of drawings to Domenico by Degenhart and Schmitt (1969) lacks credibility, and scattered earlier attributions by Wickhoff (1899), Böck (1934), Geiger (1948), and Grassi (1961) seem equally implausible. The absence of drawings – Domenico Veneziano must have been a tireless as well as a brilliant draftsman – is the oddest of the many gaps in our knowledge of this great artist.”

~ Hellmut Wohl, “The Paintings of Domenico Veneziano”, Oxford and New York, 1980.

“The state of methods and protocols used in attribution is a professional disgrace. Different kinds of evidence, documentation, provenance, surrounding circumstances of contexts of varied kinds, scientific analysis, and judgement by eye are used and ignored opportunistically in ways that suit each advocate (who too frequently has undeclared interests). Scientific evidence is particularly abused in this respect. The status of different kinds of evidence is generally not acknowledged, particularly with respect to falsifiability. It is generally true to say that the most malleable of the kinds of visual evidence are those that bear in most specifically on issues of attribution (e.g. the individual artist and precise date), while those that are least malleable (e.g. pigment analysis) are only permissive (i.e. nil obstat) rather than highly specific. I will attempt to bring some systematic awareness into this area, which is a necessary first step in establishing some rational protocols. The case studies will be drawn from Leonardo.”

~ Martin Kemp, a synopsis for a paper – “It Doesn’t Look Like Leonardo” – delivered on May 7th, 2014 at a congress at the Hague on “Authentication in Art: What happens when the painting you are buying, selling, investigating, exhibiting, insuring – Turns Out to be a Fake or a (Re)Discovery…”

In the early 1990s we noted that damaging restorations and misattributed works stemmed from common failures of visual discrimination, or lapses of connoisseurship – which are the same thing. Almost an entire generation of scholars had swallowed official defences of the controversial Sistine Chapel restoration and, generally, had seemed to have stopped appraising restorations – and especially those at the National Gallery (London) where cleaning controversies had run from the institution’s earliest days. In the late 1960s, the gallery had broken the spirit of many scholar-critics with its artful spinning of the (ruinous) restoration of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne as a triumph of the restorer’s art (see …Titian and Great Women Conservators). In 1977 a former director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark, declared picture cleaning to have been a battle won by restorers and pro-cleaning museum curators like him.

Scholarly failures to respond to restoration-induced injuries ran in tandem with failures to “read” pictures when assigning authorship. The National Gallery’s curators had made extraordinary contortions to sustain the attribution to Michelangelo of an unfinished painting (The Entombment of Christ) that was clearly the product of two separate hands working perhaps a generation apart. At first it was claimed that the two radically different manners of painting stemmed from separate campaigns of work by Michelangelo, one during 1504-08 before work began on the Sistine Chapel ceiling and another sometime after 1515. In the first stage of work, it was said, Michelangelo had painted smooth and enamel-like, as in the Doni Tondo of c. 1507. In the second stage his looser freer brushwork was said to reflect the experience of having painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Later, it was claimed that this unfinished painting in two styles and manners had been entirely painted by Michelangelo when he was only twenty-five years old in 1500. Cecil Gould had held that such technical and stylistic anomalies stemmed from the fact that the young Michelangelo was: “…ranging forwards or backwards within his own development, reworking one motive…or anticipating another”.

The doyen of British Michelangelo scholarship, Michael Hirst – a key supporter/adviser of the Sistine Chapel restoration – has endorsed this reading (of Michelangelo’s sole authorship). Professor Hirst’s stance in both cases seems visually obtuse: during the restoration Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings had lost many unquestionably original features that had been copied during his own lifetime; the Entombment’s so-called “anticipations” were not of Michelangelo’s subsequent work but of later work by artists like Rosso Fiorentino and Pontormo (who were both six years old at the time – see Figs. 7 and 8). We said of such visually unsupported hypotheses: “The fact that our scholars and technical experts flit quite so promiscuously through time and space might suggest uncertainty of connoisseurship and ability to ‘read’ paintings” (“How to Make a Michelangelo”, Michael Daley, Art Review, October 1994). We had appealed earlier that year to the authority of the educated eye in the May issue of The Art Newspaper in response to a restorer’s hostile review of the James Beck/Michael Daley book Art Restoration ~ The Culture, the Business and the Scandal:

“…this concern [over restorations] is shared by others. The current director of the Prado, Calvo Serrraller, has condemned the Sistine Chapel restoration as a misguided ‘face-lift’. A restorer in St Petersburg complains of the ‘perniciousness of radical British restoration techniques’. A curator of New York’s Metropolitan Museum condemns the ‘strident tones’ produced by ‘the exuberant cleaning of paint surfaces, for which the National Gallery has unfortunately become famous’. It is a pity that the National Gallery staff are not prepared to debate these matters directly. It is a pity that discussion should be necessary at all when, to educated eyes, the evidence of injury contained in before and after cleaning photographs is so unmissable.”

Three years later, in connection with another visual evidence-denying National Gallery attribution (its Rubens Samson and Delilah) we wrote: “In recent years the art of connoisseurship has become entangled with the scientific analysis of paintings. Problems of attribution, once resolved by the educated ‘eyes’ of individuals, are increasingly seen as the property of interdisciplinary teams of curators, restorers and scientists who enjoy the technical, financial and professional support afforded by large museums. But how sound are the new procedures – and how reliable are the published accounts given of them?” (“Is this really a Rubens?” Michael Daley, Art Review, July/August 1997).

Mixed campaigning results

After two decades of campaigning on these cross-linked issues, there are signs of resurgence in old-style connoisseurship – or at least, of support in principle for it. In May 2014 the Mellon Centre hosted a conference titled “The Educated Eye? Connoisseurship Now” and one speaker, Bendor Grosvenor, the editor of the Art History News blog, cited the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling as proof of failures of connoisseurship among restorers. At the same time, the art market is processing more upgraded and elevated studio works and copies than ever before, almost always doing so on the authority of some conservation “investigations” and treatments. “Rediscovered” Rubens’s, van Dycks, Michelangelos, Caravaggios or Leonardos are appearing on an almost monthly basis. Autograph preparatory drawings or studies have undergone similar expansions: with Michelangelo, where only 250 sheets of drawings were accepted in the 1960s, over 600 sheets are accepted today. In the same month, as indicated above, a congress was held on the great problems of establishing authenticity today: “Authentication in Art: What happens when the painting you are buying, selling, investigating, exhibiting, insuring – Turns Out to be a Fake or a (Re)Discovery”.

It is hard to exaggerate how far and how fast we have moved away from visually alert and sound scholarly practices. In 1980, as the Sistine Chapel restoration began, Hellmut Wohl published a monograph on Domenico Veneziano as a study of Florentine art in the early Renaissance. It was the fruit of three decades of researches. As indicated above, Professor Wohl made no attempt to discuss drawings that had been attributed to the artist for the simple reason, he explained, that surprising as it was, there was no evidence that any (of the very many) drawings he must have made had survived. In his catalogue raisonné, Wohl discussed sixty-two attributions to Domenico, his workshop and his immediate followers, which he considered to be apocryphal. The force of that analysis is still accepted (see caption at Figs. 4a and 4b). His study offered no new attributions or documents and confined itself to a re-examination of the artist himself through his known works, documents and sources in the light of various art historical readings. Judging Domenico to have been one who was “centrally involved in the artistic process of his time and place”, Wohl began his study not with consideration of the artist’s early works but of his St. Lucy Altarpiece, which stands chronologically and conceptually at the centre of his extant oeuvre. His reason for doing so was because the work’s sacra conversazione and predella “provide the richest, most complex and most revealing testimony of the anatomy of his art.” In discussing this crucial work, Wohl saw that it was artistically imperative to acknowledge its condition:

“In its original state the sacra conversazione, which was drastically overcleaned at the end of the nineteenth century, must have been one of the most luxurious examples of tempera painting in its time. Even in its present condition we can follow the shaping of its forms in untold layers of brushstrokes, responsive to the subtlest directional nuances, and weaving a pattern within which each form emerges as spatially alive and as a bearer of light.”

If this seems like exemplary visual and conceptual analysis, it gets better:

“The nature of Domenico’s modelling is such that light seems to be embedded in the fabric of each coloured surface – a method which is one of the unmistakable indications of Domenico Veneziano’s hand, and one that contributed much to that ‘change of vision’ by which the figure was no longer seen in isolation, but as part of a given field,’ which Offner (1924) recognized in Piero della Francesca…”

Such writing and scholarship not only illuminates, it arouses curiosity, whets the visual appetite, makes one want to see for oneself. There are fourteen excellent black and white plates of the altarpiece in Wohl’s book. The now forever restoration-damaged work itself is in the Uffizi, Florence – the scene of this particular crime against art: it had been in a good state until taken to the Uffizi, where, as the scholar Cavalcasselle had protested it had been subjected to:

“so disgraceful a cleaning and to so many retouchings as to lose much of its original quality, and thus to produce a disagreeable impression, having been left with a cold tonality, with its paint surface laid bare (‘posto allo scoperto’) unevenly in several places, and gone over.”

Wohl meticulously and eloquently lays out the hazards to interpretation that are presented by bad and restoration-damaged condition:

“The present condition must be kept in mind as a corrective in estimating style. The blue mantle covering the knees of the Virgin has been reduced to a state of semi-transparency, its barest patches have been filled in with a flat tone that roughly matches the remaining original blue. The Virgin’s dress and part of the mantle around her left arm are similarly worn. The extent of the damage to the faces of the Virgin and the Child can be gauged from the relative rigidity and opaqueness of their expressions as compared with the mobility and subtlety of expression in the head of Madonna at I Tatti. The transparent veil which originally covered the hair and forehead of the Virgin has disappeared except for a remnant of its fringed border on her shoulder. The niche behind the Virgin, especially its shell, is so heavily repainted that it no longer functions properly as a hollow in the pictorial space. The figures of the saints have suffered somewhat less, the Baptist very little. The habit of St. Francis is worn in the shadows, and there are repairs above his tonsure and around his ear and lower lip. There is damage along the left edge of the face of St Zenobious. The contour of his skullcap has been redrawn. The dress and mantle covering the shoulder of St. Lucy are very threadbare. The contour of her profile has been reinforced, and her face retouched, especially to the left of her eye. The background above and to the right of her head is also extremely thin. The effects of the ‘disgraceful’ nineteenth-century cleaning and retouching of the sacra conversazione are not, however, confined to these areas, where they are particularly conspicuous, but show throughout the panel…”

If a scholar could still write so aptly and freely in 1980, how had the cat got the tongues of so many by 1990? Why had so many been blind or indifferent to the even more disgracefully injurious and art historically corrupting “restoration” of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling? Is it not shaming to the profession that it took a sculptor, Venanzo Crocetti (who had worked as a young man on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling during the mid 1930s), to blow the whistle in the 1980s? Is it not shaming to the profession that when James Beck, an esteemed scholar and a brilliant, popular teacher at Columbia University, sided with the artist critics of the restoration and advanced an art historically informed critique that the art historical sky fell on him?

Crocetti’s testimony on the AB 57 cleaning method (a thixotropic cocktail of solvents and detergents) then being used on Michelangelo had been as percipient as it was damning. He noted that while the first 3 minute-long application left the frescoes looking cleaner, the second on the following day left them with altered and considerably degraded colours. He believed that the first applications effectively “degreased” the surfaces leaving them open to greater penetration by the second applications. He was convinced that the immediately apparent visual effects of these twin applications would not be their final outcome. He argued – correctly, it has turned out, see below – that their corrosive actions would continue because of the absorption of the water rinse operations (after each application of the chemically-loaded thixotropic gel) to a depth of half a centimetre. Some days after the second applications he noticed (from the scaffold itself) the appearance of “whitish oxidations of variable intensity” over large zones. These have been reappearing throughout on a massive scale since 2010 and have created panic measures and diversionary technical “initiatives” at the Vatican. (See “Michelangelo’s disintegrating frescoes” and “Sistine Chapel frescoes turning white”.) The official explanation for the oxidations is that they are caused by the combination of humidity given off by the press of visitors (up to 2,000 in the chapel at any one moment) and the atmospheric pollution in the chapel itself. At least as likely a cause is that the humidity is activating the water-soluble ammonium and sodium salts that were washed into the fabric of the frescoes.

The unfounded restoration premise

Crocetti considered the restorers’ claimed discovery of “stratifications of dirt gathered on the frescoes over the centuries” to be both exaggerated and misleading, and he held that the early photographs of the lunettes by Anderson made the extent of this exaggeration clear. He believed that the ferocity of the AB 57 cleaning agent made any finely tuned cleaning gradated to meet local conditions impossible. He believed that the greatest injury was to the chief feature of the frescoes – their disposition of lights and shades, and not their local colours. He believed that the restorers, in their pursuit of more intense colours, had penetrated the frescoes to their brighter, less modulated preparative layers. He felt confident that he had seen at first-hand how, with “cleaning”, the figures in the lunettes had been remade, becoming “false in form and colour” alike. He saw that many of the shadows from which the figures had formerly emerged had simply disappeared. He saw that corrections which Michelangelo had, with mastery, made invisible, had been exposed. Above all, he confirmed that the condition of the frescoes had remained “excellent” at the time of the restoration, and that this in part had been due to the absorption over the centuries of greasy substances of chapel smoke which had “strengthened the colour. Leaving upon it a glittering shift of the lightest varnish [thereby counterbalancing] the aridity and fragility” of old fresco. Having worked on the restoration in the 1930s and known Michelangelo’s work intimately, he found himself in despair.

We believe that today’s independent scholars are even shyer to speak against bad restorations and misattributions because of the above mentioned grip of restorers, scientists and curators in museums under the new collective ground rules of the so-called Technical Art History. This hybrid activity is not so much art history as an art historical gloss that is put on whatever state pictures are left in by museums’ technical ‘conservators’ whose own actions, for art-political reasons, can never be gainsaid. This collectivist or interdisciplinary practice precludes external input and appraisal and does not recognise the legitimacy of other independent sources of disinterested criticism. It may also be because many scholars and curators today have been educated under the so-called New Art History – a species of study that seems to leave students ideologically averse to the very notion of connoisseurship – which practice is held synonymous with snobbery, amateurism and art market shenanigans. For scholars in today’s academic world, it would seem to be professionally safer to view art through the distancing sociological prisms of Marxism, Feminism and such, rather than to heed and appraise its physical and, therefore, aesthetic condition (which action can upset owners, public or private). it can seem safer, too, not to scrutinise attributions (which can upset owners, public or private). In some countries, and the USA in particular, scholars harbour legal anxieties about challenging an attribution.

Running the Risks

At our annual memorial lecture (see CODA below) in honour of Professor James Beck of Columbia University, the Renaissance scholar and founder of ArtWatch International, a modest prize is awarded for services to art in memory of a another founder member of ArtWatch, the painter Frank Mason. In 2014 the prize was awarded to Martin Eidelberg for the launch of his excellent Watteau Abecedario, a developing online catalogue raisonné of the artist. In an ArtWatch International interview, A Weight of Evidence, Professor Eidelberg said of the problem of misattributions:

“First of all, the oeuvres of Watteau’s followers have been clouded over because works not worthy of their master have been assigned to them in a haphazard manner. It takes time to sift it all out. Wrong attributions have serious repercussions for our understanding of these artists. Impartiality is the key to it all. The dealer, auction house, and collector alike don’t want to hear bad news about paintings being downgraded. That’s one of the major dangers these days for the catalogue raisonné-er. There are cases where people whose works of art were downgraded became belligerent or litigious. Legislation currently pending in the New York State Assembly would prevent people from suing someone who is preparing a scholarly catalogue raisonné just because they disagree with your opinion.”

On the reluctance of some scholars to say as much as they might on the subject of attributions and misattributions and the possible effects of the pending New York State legislation, Eidelberg noted:

“There are important questions surrounding this pending New York legislation. Whom will it protect? Will it protect only an art historian working in New York State? Or will it protect Americans in general? And what about on the international scale? I don’t think France or Germany will abide by New York State legislation. That needs to be dealt with. What if an ordinary person like myself, who has no financial investment, gets involved in a lawsuit? The expense involved is incredible. Lawyers charge several hundred dollars an hour, and a case can go on for several years. The opposition can wear you down just by the incredible demands they put on your lawyer, whom you are financing. And if you win, what do you win? You don’t win money to pay even for your legal representation. That is a serious issue, because there are a lot of people in the art world who are dealing with large sums of money. When a painting sells for millions of dollars, there is strong motivation for wanting positive attributions.”

The Consequences of Bad attributions

One reason why professional neglect of condition is so unfortunate is that paying due attention to it increases capacities and skills when making or appraising attributions. It is too easy to mock the notion of the connoisseur. If its more peripheral exponents can sometimes resemble the narrator of the classic Croft Original Sherry advertisements (“One instinctively knows when something is right”) we should note that Daumier’s depictions were as affectionate and respectful as they were wry. Those collectors and dealers who can identify not only the author of an engraved print but its state and edition have eyes and scholarly expertise running in harmony. The high costs of neglecting the development of the ability to recognise by eye the difference between one thing and another in an otherwise very similar grouping; and of vacating the entire arena of condition to restorers who, like the professional aristocrats they have been allowed to become, never apologise for or acknowledge any of their errors, has become apparent within the last two decades at the Sistine Chapel where what little was left of Michelangelo’s work is now disintegrating. Any professional culpability for this outcome, however, would be joint and not restricted to the restorers (who, for all we know, may have been “under orders”). The initial, almost universal art historical acceptance of the apologia for the visible consequence of that restoration’s singular cleaning method, as offered by the Vatican and its prominent adviser/supporters, permitted a contested folly to continue when it might still have been halted. The original peddling of claims to have discovered a “New Michelangelo” (for whom no corroboration is to be found in art history or in the many copies that were made of the Sistine Chapel ceiling) was as egregious a pollution of scholarship as the actions of the restorers were artistically destructive.

If, as might seem to be the case, many of today’s art historians still cannot recognise a gross adulteration that left Michelangelo’s ceiling as a false witness to its own original state, how likely are they to be able to distinguish between an autograph work and a very good studio copy – or a clever forgery? In a field where, as every blockbuster exhibition and new monograph now testifies, the consequence of successive restorations is that the great majority of works have been left as restoration-reduced shadows of their former selves, how are scholars to formulate and retain mental pictures of an artist’s distinguishing “bedrock” traits so as to avoid errors of attribution? With so many now many-times restored and progressively adulterated works failing to resemble their original selves, scholars are effectively left making judgements on the authority of works that have themselves become partial fakes. In an aesthetically corrupted critical milieu fakes can be extremely seductive. They spring fully-formed with artfully planted reassurances (see below and Fig. 1). They enter our world not emaciated and debilitated by successive restorations but freshly minted and at the peak of their calculatedly deceiving powers. When scholars lack the confidence even to acknowledge the grossest restoration injuries and adulterations; when they have lost the habit of appraising condition, how secure might their critical defences be against outright forgeries?

The value of fake drawings

Drawings, as the former auctioneer Michel Strauss has noted, are an especially sensitive and forgery-prone sphere, being both easier and cheaper to produce than paintings or sculptures. They can also be more pernicious in their effects. A badly attributed, supposed preparatory drawing can trigger a chain of misattributed paintings (as with the National Gallery’s Rubens Samson and Delilah and the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Rubens Massacre of the Innocents). And, yet, visual warnings are always present: the supposed preparatory drawings on which questionable painting attributions stand frequently display features that are unusual or unprecedented within the artist’s oeuvre. The National Gallery’s Michelangelo Entombment and its Rubens Samson and Delilah are two such cases – see below and opposite. With the latter, the supposed original sketch drawing shows distinct signs of being a 20th-century forgery, as does also the recently claimed Leonardo drawing that has been dubbed “La Bella Principessa” by its principal art historical supporter, the Leonardo authority, Professor Martin Kemp (see below).

With drawings, the need to maintain vigilance against fraud is particularly urgent precisely because the field itself is insufficiently studied. As for the success of forgeries (which always seems inexplicable and incredible in retrospect) Michel Strauss offers this explanation for the phenomenon of initial too-ready acceptance of problematic works:

“It is a strange and curious factor that looking now at de Hory’s fakes, they seem so facile and such obvious, unlikely pastiches. It turned out that Frank Perls, with whom I compared notes, and I, were the only ones, to my knowledge, among many experienced international experts and dealers, who sussed him out at that time. I can only explain this as an example of the herd instinct: if one accepts, then the rest will follow…”

Artists’ assistance on spotting fake drawings

Fortunately, in the detection of fake drawings, much assistance can be had from artists (whose own eyes are constantly educated through engagement in the practices of art). Drawings are the most purely autographic category of visual works – successful artists might delegate parts or stages of paintings to assistants but rarely do so at the crucial designing or drawing stages. The skilful faker may get many things right but to escape detection he (- it invariably is a he?) needs to get everything right. Conversely, the connoisseur needs to spot only a single disqualifying error. This task should be made easier by the fact that drawings are the most direct and speedy manifestations of thought and purpose. How plausibly a drawing speaks of its role as an aid to the production of another and more substantial work constitutes a crucial indicator of authenticity. The forger might mimic a given artist’s graphic effects but, like a restorer (which he often is) he can never enter the mind of bona fide creative artists so as to grapple with and replicate an original and imaginative purposive graphic intent.

By long tradition artists have been outspoken on dud attributions. In the early 1900s the artist, M. H. Spielmann, F.S.A., wrote a series of articles for The Magazine of Art, which he edited. In one, “Art Forgeries and Counterfeits”, Spielmann listed no fewer than eight members of “the picture-trickster’s profession”. His second category was that of The Cleaner, who “unhappily includes the restorer; and both, in the vast majority of cases are the sworn enemy of a picture’s quality. Though the cleaner may skin the picture of its glazes as well as of its dirt and discoloured varnish, though he may destroy the work of art, aesthetic criminal though he be, he is, more’s the pity, no law-breaker. He may scrape a picture to the under-painting, and he may ‘restore’ what was never there; still, in the eyes of the law, he is as honourable as the original artist.”

Another forgery specialist was The Monogrammist, a student and scholar of art history who “knows exactly how an artist signed his name at different periods of his career, in what portion, on what spot…in what manner…” His cousin The Sealer acquires “quite a little gathering of […] seals from the most important collections, and he can then command a fair price for attaching one or other of his ‘certificates of quality’ to any picture that may be brought to him for the purpose.” The erudite old Genealogist then steps in: “to make things more certain still. He, too, is a student of the movement of art, and he uses his knowledge to determine what lineage he may safely attribute to a picture, and what he may not attempt…”

Scholars beware

Spielmann articulated the most critically instructive category of all, that of The Portmanteau Picture, the work in which motifs plundered from a number of authentic works are fused into a temptingly plausible synthesis. If a work looks reassuringly familiar at first glance it might well be because, in its component parts, it is already familiar from a number of “borrowed” sources. In the case of the putative Leonardo “La Bella”, a useful question to consider would be this: “If a twentieth century forger had wished to produce a profile female portrait in the manner of Leonardo, where would he most likely have found useful motifs that might plausibly be assembled into an identikit Leonardo-like whole?” (We suggest a number of candidate works opposite.)

If there is one source of advice potentially more helpful to connoisseurs than that of an artist, it is that of an artist gone-bad. There is a literature of garrulous fakers who have exulted in their powers to deceive professional experts. One, the notorious forger of drawings, Eric Hebborn, single-handedly left a small library of instructions to forgers and connoisseurs alike. In his 1997 The Art Forger’s Handbook, Hebborn effectively provides a Guide for the Connoisseur on the detection of fake drawings.

TWO CASE HISTORIES

In art criticism, as in the appraisal of restorations, comparisons can be instructive. In the previous post we discussed a “van Dyck” drawing that became a Rubens ink sketch and, a “Veronese” – from the same dealers – that collapsed after sixty years and presently stands on offer as an attributed Agostino Carracci. Here, we reconsider that supposed, upgraded and now accepted Rubens ink sketch which recently sold for more than £3 million, along with a claimed autograph Leonardo, the so-called “La Bella Principessa” which sold in 1998 as a not-Leonardo for $21,850. On its current Leonardo claims it has been estimated, perhaps optimistically, to be worth some £150 million.

The two attributions were made nearly a century apart. While the now-Rubens has been officially accepted with the previously described chain of consequences, the latter is locked in an increasingly acrimonious international battle for critical acceptance. In both cases, espousal of the work has generated implausible art historical narratives and an over-riding of technical and aesthetic alarms. In both, indications of modern forgery are present, and – apropos Hebborn’s disclosures – in both there happens to be a strong close-by candidate as a potential forger.

The history or “provenance” of two dubious works

Both drawings were foundlings deposited on the art market’s doorstep. The now-Rubens ink sketch emerged in dealers’ hands in 1926, as a van Dyck (it is initialled V. D.) and with no history of prior ownership or existence, some 316 years after its presently claimed date of execution. The would-be Leonardo appeared in 1998 – a full five centuries after its now-claimed 1496 execution – and, again, with no history of prior ownership or existence. It was offered in a 1998 sale of old master drawings at Christie’s in New York as “German School, early 19th century” and “the property of a lady”. It only later transpired (after a vain legal tussle launched against Christie’s by the anonymous vendor on hearing of the drawing’s claimed worth of £150 million) that the lady in question was Jeanne Marchig.

Giannino Marchig

Jeanne Marchig was the widow of the painter and restorer Giannino Marchig (1897-1983). For some years she had been selling works under cloak of anonymity from her late husband’s collection to fund animal charities. Marchig was said by his widow to have kept the now-claimed Leonardo drawing in a portfolio and to have held it to be by Domenico Ghirlandaio (see Fig. 5). As the only known owner of a work with a five centuries-long provenance lacuna, Giannino Marchig must be considered as a potential Leonardo forger. He was a talented artist who worked with facility in a variety of manners and showed in his own drawings a fondness for female figures with faces in profile (see Fig. 17). He had studied in the studios of artists in Trieste and became Professor of Drawing at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s, immersing himself in works that reflected his studies of the old masters. After achieving some success as an artist, winning prizes, exhibiting in Paris, Berlin and the USA, as well as participating in the 13th Venice Biennale in 1922, in the 1930s he met Bernard Berenson and, thereupon, switched from art to art restoration and publishing. He spent the war assisting Berenson who had remained in Italy under aristocratic protection. At the end of his war time diaries (written in 1947 and published in 1952 as Rumour and Reflection) Berenson thanks his “dear friend, the delicate restorer and picture expert, Giannino Marchig” for helping to conceal his collections from the Germans.

The Berenson connection hardly augurs well for the drawing. Kenneth Clark, himself a former assistant of Berenson, recalled in 1977 how the great scholar “sat on a pinnacle of corruption” and that “for almost forty years after 1900 he did practically nothing except authenticate pictures”. Clark knew of what he spoke: his own extremely youthful positions as director of the Ashmolean Museum and then of the National Gallery had been achieved on the commendations of Berenson’s partner in attributions, the dealer Lord Duveen. In the 1950s, after some sort of crisis, Marchig abandoned Italy and moved to Geneva where he met his wife, Jeanne, and began practising as an international picture restorer.

(It should be said that none of the above was known when “La Bella” first began to attract support as a Leonardo, and that one of the drawing’s earliest advocates, Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the British Museum and the Getty Museum, has a courageous record of challenging misattributed drawings in museums – including those of Eric Hebborn. If the present battle between camps of experts over this proposed attribution is sharply contested and heated, it is being fought by all parties as a matter of scholarly/artistic judgement and advocacy.)

The spectre of forgery

Although the identity of the vendor emerged late, among the chief present supporters of the Leonardo attribution, Professor Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte of Lumiere Technology (the joint authors of the 2010 book The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci: La Bella Principessa – see review opposite), have said that: “At the time of the writing of the book, the ownership of the portrait before 1998 was not known, leaving it’s supporters open to the charge that it might be a recent forgery undertaken with knowledge of modern technical examinations of Leonardo’s paintings – even though the modern technical examination of the portrait itself seemed to preclude this.” Given those initial suspicions, it might be wondered how the subsequent disclosure of an intimate connection with a restorer and confidant of Berenson had laid them to rest.

For Kemp and Cotte, the fact that Marchig had “worked internationally as a respected restorer, and in 1976 undertook major conservation on one of the two prime versions of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder, then owned by Wildenstein’s in New York”, the possibility of the drawing being a modern forgery can now be ruled out. This is upside down: when artists work as restorers on old master paintings, they are licensed precisely to forge original work at their “retouching” stages. (At the National Gallery, restorers even paint false lines of craquelure onto their own fresh and speculative synthetic repaints, in a technique known as “deceptive retouching”). Marchig’s experience of working on one of the two prime versions of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder would hardly disqualify him as a forger able to work “with knowledge of modern technical examinations of Leonardo’s paintings”.

The material composition of the drawings

With both the “Rubens” and the “Leonardo” drawings only the front of the sheet can be examined. Both have been glued onto secondary supports. The “Rubens” ink drawing has been glued onto a second sheet of paper. The visible side of the second sheet is heavily abraded in a manner that might suggest a ham-fisted attempt at its removal. In one corner, part of this “backing” sheet has been removed, exposing (unintelligible) chalk lines on the “recto” of the ink drawing. It is never safe to take signs of age and previous treatments as proofs of antiquity, let alone of authenticity. In his section “Creating an atmosphere of age” (p. 51) of The Art Forger’s Handbook, Hebborn writes:

“If our work is to convince it must have a feeling of having a past. That is to say it should show signs of having been through the hands of former dealers and collectors…Three forms of protection for drawings have traditionally been used: pasting them into albums, putting them into mounts for storage in boxes, and framing them…the most obvious sign of a drawing having once been stuck down is when the work is still attached to the page of an album. This, of course, is very easy for us to imitate. We simply paste our drawing on a blank page taken from an old book. A nice refinement is to show signs of another drawing having once been stuck on the back of the page, and to do this you really do stick a drawing on the back. Wait for a week or so until the ‘old’ glue or paste has hardened, then remove the drawing. There is no need to be over-careful about this procedure. If you should leave a little of the paper of the drawing adhering to the mount, or of the mount to the drawing, it adds a very convincing touch…”

An unusual support

The claimed Leonardo “La Bella” is made with three coloured chalks, body colour and brown ink on a sheet of vellum. That is to say, this work was executed in mixed-media of a kind nowhere encountered in Leonardo and on a support never encountered in Leonardo. Much has been made of the fact that it has been established by Cotte’s technical examinations and by some astute art historical research that the vellum may be of a late 15th century origin, one of a number of vellum leaves – some of which were blank – removed at an unknown date from a Renaissance volume or “codex” held in Poland. If correct, this circumstance would be no proof of the authenticity or antiquity of the drawing that is presently found on the only recently encountered sheet. Even if the presently hypothecated origins and antiquity of the support were somehow to be established, neither the date when the sheet might have been removed (by knife or razor) from the book, nor that of the drawing executed upon it would be known. By coincidence, Jeanne Marchig was Polish and, it has been said, an artist of sorts herself. She proudly preserved the box of pastels with which she said Giannino restored the “Principessa”. So, the Marchigs themselves claim responsibility for a restoration that might otherwise have implied a degree of antiquity in the drawing and the fact remains that the first and only known owner of this supposed Leonardo of 1496 was a 20th-century artist/restorer whose widow put works on to the market anonymously.

Wide margins of error

In addition to Pascal Cotte’s “La Bella” examinations, carbon dating tests of the drawing’s vellum support were made by the Zurich Institute for Particle Physics. The dating itself came with a customarily wide margin of error. There was said to be a 95 per cent probability of the vellum having been made at some point between 1440 and 1650. Note: in betting parlance, this is to say only that the odds, on this technical evidence, were three to one against it having been made before or by 1496, the now-contended date of execution. Suggestions that this analysis has somehow determined “once and for all” that the drawing is not a later pastiche are hardly credible. Kemp himself says no more than that the carbon dating “greatly diminishes the possibility of the drawing being a clever forgery”. Much, too, has been made of the fact that this drawing bears signs of age and restorations, but old supports can be bought and “evidence” of restoration can easily be forged (see below).

Cod antiquity and dodgy backs

This particular vellum sheet has been glued onto an old oak panel – on the face of it, an improbable and inappropriate treatment, given that wood expands and contracts and would therefore threaten to tear or buckle an affixed sheet. The presence of the panel is taken by Pascal Cotte to testify to the drawing’s antiquity:

“The vellum was at some point laid down on an old oak board, which has been repaired on two occasions with butterfly joints. Jeanne Marchig identified the later pair of untinted joints as characteristic of those made by hand by Giannino. The portrait has been subject to at least two campaigns of restoration, including that by Marchig over 50 years ago. It seems likely that the vellum had been laid down on the panel long before it entered his hands. On the reverse are two customs stamps: DOUANE CENTRALE/ EXPORTATION/ PARIS. This stamp seems to have been introduced in 1864 but it is unclear when it ceased to be used in this form. The likelihood is that it is not later than the early 20th century. In any event, the stamps indicate the presence of the panel in France, presumably with its attached portrait and probably framed (as indicated by the brown paper strips around its margins). Whether it was owned for a period in France or imported temporarily is unclear.”

Again, nothing here helps to establish the antiquity let alone the authenticity of the drawing. The unsupported phrases,“seems likely” and “presumably”, have little force because anything can be stuck to anything at any point. In terms of making an attribution, the primary support (the vellum), and the secondary support (the panel), should be kept conceptually apart. The source of neither has been established and nor has the date at which they came together. All that we know is that if Marchig had repaired splits in the panel as well as carrying out one of the “restorations” on the drawing, his finger prints are everywhere on this artefact. His widow advanced no information on any possible owner before her late husband but did once hint that it might have been “acquired” from Berenson’s collection. Berenson himself had been taken in by forged paintings and kept one of them in his home as a means of testing the art critical credentials of his visitors. Nothing material here might refute a suggestion that Marchig was the drawing’s author, working on old vellum that was at some point attached to an old, previously repaired and labelled panel, thereby conferring a spurious antiquity and concealing the back of the vellum.

From the time the work was presented by Marchig’s widow for sale in 1998 no owner has thought to remove the vellum from the panel as a precautionary conservation measure or to permit an examination of the sheet’s recto. Cotte says of this: “Unfortunately, since it is laid down on panel (and separation would be hazardous) the verso of the vellum is not visible”. Hebborn commends the acquisition of old panels to forgers:

“…and this brings us to one of the big problems with panel pictures: their tendency to bend out of shape or split due to changes in humidity. The best precaution against warping and cracking is to use thoroughly seasoned wood, and no wood is more seasoned than that of a truly old panel picture. Artistically worthless old pictures on wood do come up for sale from time to time, and these provide the support that suits our purpose best. Panels from old furniture are also desirable. Unfortunately they are no less desirable to our colleagues engaged in the making of new ‘antique’ furniture, so we have to pay quite a lot for them…Just like old paper, old panels and canvases need no ageing…”

Left-handedness

Much has been made of the seeming left-handedness of the drawing’s author when such indications are easily forged (sheets can be rotated). The hatched shading of the background was not spontaneously drawn in the manner seen, for example, in Leonardo’s drawing at Fig. 18, but comprised a careful, deliberate “inking-in” of previously drawn ultra fine chalk lines. How often, if ever, did Leonardo work in such a slow and deliberated manner carefully and fastidiously shading in one medium and then even more fastidiously covering and concealing his first efforts? For a copyist or a forger to proceed in such a cautious manner would be quite unremarkable.

Uncharacteristic features

Drawings that are said to have been made as preliminary studies for what are problematic upgraded paintings commonly contain features found nowhere else in the claimed master’s oeuvre. Two drawings have been especially associated with the National Gallery’s Entombment (see Fig. 7). One is widely accepted as autograph and the other is not. The two are drawn in different manners that correspond to different stages of Michelangelo’s graphic evolution (the earlier being in ink, the later in chalk) and they have been dated as being as much as thirty years apart – which constitutes a considerable problem as claimed preparatory studies for a painting which itself is now said to have been entirely made by Michelangelo when he was twenty five and had not yet started drawing in chalk. The more challenged of the two, an ink drawing, is claimed to be a study for a kneeling figure in the painting, but even supporters of its attribution acknowledge that it contains problems as a Michelangelo: it is clearly drawn from a girl, not from a man; it is drawn very carefully on a pink ground in three separate stages; the plane of the ground is, uncharacteristically for Michelangelo, indicated; its Michelangelo ascription has often been challenged. Bernard Berenson took it to be by Passerotti or to be an engraver’s copy.

Although it is owned by the Louvre, it is not accepted as a Michelangelo by the museum. As with the supposed Rubens Samson and Delilah ink sketch, its chief perceived qualification is its close resemblance to a figure in a separately problematic and challenged painting. Both of these challenged and problematic National Gallery paintings (the Samson and Delilah and the Entombment) happen to lean on their problematic and challenged supposed preparatory ink sketches. Thus, the attributions of both drawings stand in circular fashion on their close resemblance to figures in the challenged paintings. As attributions, these two drawings and two paintings are as sand built upon sand.

A once well-accredited “Portmanteau” fake goes down…

Less than four years after the publication of Hebborn’s guide to connoisseurs and forgers, another small profile portrait, A Young Woman (Fig. 1), was down-graded at the Detroit Institute of the Arts to “Imitator of Verrocchio” (after sixty-five years good years as a Leonardo/Andrea del Verrocchio), by David Alan Brown, curator of Italian Renaissance art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. Brown describes the painting as having been revealed as “a probable forgery by its anachronistic materials and unorthodox construction” (– see the catalogue to the Washington National Gallery of Art’s 2001-02 exhibition, Virtue and Beauty, p. 18). Thus, this work can now be considered a product of the 1930s, the period when Marchig was working for Berenson. One disqualifying feature that it has in common with “La Bella Principessa” is its depiction of an abnormally beefy “stevedore’s” arm in a young woman.

“La Bella Principessa” (13 x 9 and 3/4 inches) and A Young Woman (14 and 1/4 x 10 inches) are small works on panels of almost identical format. The “unorthodox construction” of A Young Lady really does seem to have been most unorthodox, even in the realm of the forged. Technical examination shows it to have been painted on “what appears to have been photographic paper applied to a wood panel that was repaired before it was readied for painting”. Also working against any possible retention of a Verrocchio or Leonardo attribution is the fact that at least one of the pigments on the painting is modern – zinc white. Further, what is described by Brown as “preliminary” examination disclosed the fact that worm-holes, which appeared to testify to the antiquity of the panel, had been filled before the gesso ground was applied.

Hebborn had another word to say on the importance of obtaining old wood. In his section “Ageing old panels” he advised “If you have not been able to procure a period panel, then you must find the oldest wood available. Even for a decorative painting, plywood and such stuff is anti-aesthetic, so at least have sufficient respect for your work to get a real piece of timber. This acquired, you may make worm holes and darken the wood to match the age required. Nevertheless, there is no way that these things can be artificially achieved well enough to deceive the connoisseur.”

The Detroit Young Woman was acquired in 1936. It was one of a group of three works judged by the Detroit Institute’s Director, W. R. Valentiner, to be (“tentatively”) by Leonardo. Valentiner was struck – and reassured – by a similarity between the curls in the painting and those encountered in both Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci painting and the Verrocchio marble Bust of a Lady in the Frick Collection (Fig. 2), which attribution is doubted by Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, London. Carter Alan Brown suspects that “further examination” might confirm that the painted profile of A Young Woman was indeed made over a photograph of the profile of the Frick’s marble Bust of a Lady. In truth, the reassuring curls, properly read, constitute a disqualification – see opposite.

How to obtain old paper

As for the no-provenance van Dyck drawing that was immediately upgraded to a no-provenance Rubens, obtaining paper of the desired antiquity (it was described simply as “laid” paper by Christie’s) would have posed no problem for an early 20th century forger. As Hebborn testifies:

“The best places for handling genuinely old sheets of paper prior to buying them are: the saleroom, where you can rummage through the unframed lots of prints and drawings; the print-seller, who has similar folders of unframed pictures, and the antiquarian bookseller, where you may find the end-papers more interesting than what lies between them…Books are particularly useful for the beginner because the date and the place of publication are normally to be found on the title page, and these more often than not indicate the date and the provenance of the paper on which it is printed…”

Previous restorations

The ink drawing on the “Rubens” sheet bears little sign of restoration or rubbing – the ink lines have a lovely glossy chestnut colouring – but the sheet on which the drawing was made shows signs of acute physical distress for reasons described opposite. Concerning wear, tear and earlier restorations, Hebborn counsels that old drawings must always show signs of rubbing. This may be achieved for drawings in soft media by “a soft cloth (an old woollen sock serves admirably)”, and for ink drawings by means of “a gentle rubbing with pumice powder or the application of the very finest grade of sandpaper”.

Potential executors of fakes

A question often posed by defenders of challenged attributions is: “If not by artist X, then by which other artist?” This ploy precludes the possibility of the author being a forger. A question that might always be considered prudent with unsupported attributions that emerge from nowhere centuries after their supposed creation is: “If not by artist X, then by which artist, copyist or forger?” Although it is not necessary to identify a faker when suggesting that a work might be a forgery, it so happens that in both of our cases a highly graphically competent artist and teacher of art hovered close by at the moments of “discovery” in 1926 and 1998 respectively.

The then van Dyck but now-Rubens and the then Veronese but now hopefully-Agostino Carracci emerged in the hands of a firm of dealers “R. W. P. de Vries, Amsterdam”. There were two R. W. P. de Vries’s. Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries Senior lived from 1841 until 1919 and was a respected antiquarian dealer (chiefly books and maps but also drawings and other works of art). With relatives, he ran the firm “R. W. P. de Vries, Amsterdam”. When de Vries Snr. died the firm continued until its liquidation in 1933. Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries Junior was born in 1874 and lived until 1953. He was a talented painter, graphic artist, book cover designer, print-maker and author. Like Giannino Marchig, de Vries Jr. was also a teacher of drawing (at a high school in Hilversum from 1913 to 1953).

We have no firm grounds for suggesting de Vries Jr. to be the author of the now-Rubens Samson and Delilah ink drawing that has sold for over £3million to an anonymous buyer, or of the no longer-Veronese drawing, but given that there are strong grounds for considering the Rubens drawing to be fake (see right), and that de Vries Jr. was, at the time the drawing emerged in his family’s business, a fifty-two year old teacher of drawing, he might properly be considered a candidate, if only because he was perfectly placed both to acquire the necessary materials to forge period drawings, and to offload them safely onto the market. Even if the firm was generally honourable, would it be inconceivable for an in-the-family forger to be indulged in a certain extra-curricula activity?

In any event, for reasons given in the previous post the drawing is quite implausible as a Rubens first-thought sketch. What makes it such an immediate suspect as a forgery (quality aside) is that when it came onto the market from nowhere it contained a feature that is nowhere encountered in Rubens’s many surviving ink sketches: a drawn enclosing box that implies a pre-determined format for the painting, and an artistic intention on Rubens’ part from the very beginning to crop the toes of Samson in just the manner of those found in a painting that was very shortly to come onto the market, not (yet) as a Rubens but as a Honthorst. This might have been taken as a coincidence, were it not for the fact that the immediate upgrading of the Honthorst painting to Rubens was made on the authority of the then recently upgraded drawing. The scholar who upgraded the painting, Ludwig Burchard, was the man who had upgraded the ink drawing from van Dyck to Rubens – and he is now known to have made many (over sixty) Rubens attributions that have subsequently fallen. Moreover, in upgrading the drawing and the painting, Burchard knew that the two contemporary copies of the original and long lost Rubens’ Samson and Delilah painting show that the toes of Samson had not been cropped at all; that they were set well and comfortably within the painting. The persisting institutional determination (despite informed protests) to retain the attribution of this implausible drawing, and of the equally implausible painting it was swiftly pressed to validate, has generated a sub-set of scholarship that flies in the face of visual evidence. That this untenable position is held without any attempted account being offered for the contra-testimony of the two contemporary copies of the original painting speaks of a contempt for the historic record and a preparedness to lower the bar of artistic quality for inclusion within within Rubens’ oeuvre.

Barriers to any acceptance of La Bella Principessa

As for for the so-called “La Bella Principessa” being an autograph work by Leonardo da Vinci, there is a single feature in it that should be seen by any educated eye to be instantly disqualifying – the drawing of the subject’s eye. This particular eye is so anatomically weak and ill-conceived; so out of perspective; so improperly wandering in its gaze; so planar and “Cubist” in its articulation; and, so comprehensively out of character with both Leonardo’s treatment of eyes and those of other artists working within the strictly regulated female portrait profile type that generated entirely sideways-on elevations of the head and bust of young ladies in emulation of likenesses on ancient coins, as to be inconceivable as a work of the period let alone one executed by Leonardo. At the supposed date of execution (1496), the profile portrait type attempted in “La Bella Principessa” had virtually run its course. By that date portraits – and most especially Leonardo’s own – favoured more complex perspectives and increased levels of psychological engagement with the subject. One Leonardo scholar, Frank Zollner, sees Leonardo’s 1478-1480 painting Ginevra de’ Benci (Fig. 3b) as the point at which Leonardo broke away from “the profile view traditionally employed in Florence for portraits of women” in favour of the three-quarters view, previously the preserve of portrayals of men, and in order to impart “a pyschological dimension to his sitter – something that would become the hallmark of Renaissance portraiture”. If Leonardo really had opted to work against his development and artistic practice by working within an archaistic form he had superseded, in this proposed drawing he would have been eclipsed by lesser artists, as is shown right.

The fact that in addition to its technical shortcomings, this singular drawing resembles nothing within (or adjacent to) Leonardo’s oeuvre obliges Martin Kemp to make his art historical case for its inclusion on the grounds that it “reveals a previously unknown dimension in the way in which he [Leonardo] fulfilled his duties at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza”. This hypothesized rationale for a (regressive) departure within Leonardo’s oeuvre is given a defence that might itself be taken for special-pleading: “Any important new work, to establish itself, must significantly affect the totality of Leonardo’s surviving legacy over the longer term.” Acceptance of this drawing would certainly expand that totality but it would do so in an art historically injurious manner.

This previously unknown work and its hitherto unsuspected manner of working which a (minority) group of scholars would situate within the oeuvre is a mongrel work. It is a drawing that thinks it might also be a painting. In terms of graphic and pictorial laws it is neither fish nor fowl but something of both. That this conflation is a not a product of Leonardo’s hand is evident in the laboured, stilted and monotonously uniform handling. It purports to constitute a kind of “presentation” drawing of which Michelangelo made a (dazzling) few but Leonardo none. The depicted figure is static, ponderous and matronly for a supposed child bride who had died by her fourteenth year (see Figs. 23a – 24b).

The anatomy is poorly realised and evasively handled – where might the arm be situated? And what are its dimensions? The drapery is perfunctorily and unconvincingly evoked and might seem positively designed to shirk the problem of depicting a convincing arm that would give life and expression to the pose (see Figs. 22a and 22b). The pose here is bereft of lateral movement in the body/neck/head equation. This is true even of the individual features of the face’s profile where the features seem to be individually conceived and stacked one on top of another rather than to mark the “terminus” of a unique and humanly distinctive head, as seen for example in Figs. 20, 21, 23a and 25. There is nothing to convince one that is a drawing made from life. The treatment of the coiffure is monotonous and crude. In its formulaic treatment it is bereft of the adornments that are characteristic of this particular portrait type which fused notions of the classical “ideal” and literary “virtues” with ostentatious displays of wealth. (See Figs. 21, 25, 27 and 28b.)

As if in an insurance policy safeguard against this glaring lacuna Martin Kemp assigns a second, alternative historical moment of execution, suggesting that this may not, in fact, have been a drawing made from life in celebration of a fabulously privileged child bride, but was instead a commemorative work made after her death. If it had been so the question would arise how might so-detailed and laboured a study of a head have been made from memory? Or was it made after some other, now-lost, portrayal? If one dons a forger’s hat and asks which other works a twentieth-century forger might have selected to assemble a “portmanteau” image for such a purpose, it is quite easy to identify candidates – see Figs. 20, 21, 23a, 25 and 27.

Some might be bemused that among many experts, a small group should have become such impassioned partisans of so eccentric and problematic a work. Perhaps Michel Strauss has it right: there exists an ingrained human herd instinct to which even the most distinguished figures might not be immune. Perhaps the indicator of inauthenticity lies in this: although the quality varies, with every other work of this type shown here, something novel, fresh or idiosyncratic is brought to the party. Not one work looks as if derived from any other, or from any small group of others, or – and least of all – from “La Bella Principessa”. Did Leonardo ever make a portrait of a woman that made no waves; that left no trace; and that aroused no comment in half a millennium?

CODA

The Inaugural James Beck Memorial Lecture

Our annual memorial lecture (which alternates between London and New York) is given by distinguished scholars in honour of Professor James Beck of Columbia University, the Renaissance scholar and founder of ArtWatch International. The inaugural lecture was given most fittingly in London in June 2010 by Hellmut Wohl, a scholar whose methodological rigor and scrupulous connoisseurship is widely considered by his peers to be exemplary (as in the review below, and the caption at Figs. 4a and 4b ). Professor Wohl’s lecture, “The Integrity of the Work of Art: The case of the Early Michelangelo”, comprised a demolition of a group of early Michelangelo attributions and it was published in the ArtWatch UK Journal No. 27, as shown on this attached pdf.

Review of Hellmut Wohl’s The Paintings of Domenico Veniziano by Anne Markam Schulz, in the June 1981 Art Bulletin.

Anne Markham Schulz, an independent scholar and Visiting Scholar at Brown University, is a prolific author of books on Italian Renaissance sculpture, including Antonio Rizzo: Sculptor and Architect (1983) and Giambattista and Lorenzo Bregno (1991). Her Art Bulletin review began:

“This monograph is exemplary in every way, it treats with respect the works of a supreme painter and by way of its percipient and lucid analyses of their techniques, style, and iconography demonstrates their high artistic worth. It is thorough: there is no source of information it overlooks and every particle of evidence provided by the documents, the sources, the paintings themselves and the works of Domenico’s contemporaries is made by judicious scrutiny to yield its quota of meaning. To the extent that words can interpret the characteristics of a painter’s style, this book does so. That Wohl should have conceived this a goal worth pursuing he no doubt owed to the tutelage of Richard Offner, under whom his dissertation on Domenico Veneziano was prepared many years ago; indeed, Offner’s scrupulous method informs this book. For Wohl, as for Offner, definition is its own justification: Domenico’s art is not correlated with historical events, and even its impact on contemporary artistic currents is narrowly portrayed. But to have explicated, to the extent possible, the subject of each painting, when and under what circumstances it was made, the sources and the characteristics of its style, and the evolution of its composition, is to have amply fulfilled the obligations of a monographer.”

Michael Daley

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A RECENTLY EXPOSED FAKE LEONARDO/VERROCCHIO

Above, Fig. 1: A Young Woman bought in 1936 by the Detroit Institute of Arts as a work by Andrea del Verrocchio or Leonardo da Vinci. The attribution was made on the strength of correspondences with a sculpture in the Bargello (Fig. 3a) which is given to Verrocchio (or, sometimes, Leonardo), and with the treatment of curls in Leonardo’s painting Ginevra de’ Benci (Fig. 3b).

Following technical examination, this work is now described as being by an “Imitator of Andrea Verrocchio in about 1880-1920” – a polite, museum-world way of saying “it is a rotten forgery”.

Above, Fig. 2: A marble bust at the Frick Collection, A Young Woman, given to Andrea del Verrocchio.

After an early challenge, the Verrocchio attribution was reasserted on the bust’s remblance to the Bargello Lady with a bunch of Flowers in Florence (Fig. 3a) which most scholars accept as a product of Verrocchio’s maturity at c. 1475 (although some attribute it to Leonardo, as shown below). Nicholas Penny challenges the Frick Verrocchio’s attribution on its author’s interest in “evanescent effects” and the extensive use of drilling in the hair. Eleonora Luciano, in the catalogue to the Washington National Gallery 2001-2002 exhibition, “Virtue and Beauty”, adjudicates as follows:

“While the Frick lady is more softly modelled, especially in the face, and endowed with a greater gentility of expression than the Bargello sitter, her affinity to the latter is evident in the overall proportions of the head and torso. Perhaps some shop intervention may account for the less innovative character of the sculpture and the more extensive drilling of the hair.”

However, the marked differences of appearance and handling in the two sculptures do not speak of a lack of care or finesse but of different sensibilities and purposes. Aside from the uncertainties of authorship, scholars variously date the Frick bust to the 1460s, the 1470s and, to c. 1480.

Above, Figs. 3a and 3b: Left, the Lady with a Bunch of Flowers. Right, Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci (hypothetically extended).

Some have attributed the Bargello sculpture to Leonardo on the grounds that its subject was Ginevra de’ Benci, the subject of Leonardo’s painting at Fig. 3b. In Leonardo da Vinci and the Art of Sculpture, 2010, Gary M. Radke holds that the works show differences between the two artists that emerged in the mid-1470s. Against this, it has been suggested that the painting might have borne a closer relationship to the sculpture with a possible inclusion of hands in a fuller length treatment. A study of hands by Leonardo was incorporated in a hypothetical and digitally realised extension of the painting by David Alan Brown (Fig. 3b). Against that, Frank Zollner sees the painting as marking the point (1478-1480) at which Leonardo broke away from “the profile view traditionally employed in Florence for portraits of women” in favour of the three-quarters view in order to impart “a pyschological dimension to his sitter – something that would become the hallmark of Renaissance portraiture”.

Above, Figs. 4a and 4b: Left, the right-hand side (here mirrored) of the Frick A Young Woman; right, the Detroit A Young Woman.

The Detroit young woman’s remarkably close correspondence with both the Frick bust’s profile and the curls on Leonardo’s Ginevra de’ Benci might have aroused suspicion rather than reassurance. Pronounced correspondences with traits found in different works are classic give-away signs of “Portmanteau Forgeries” in which disparate motifs are individually mimicked and fused into a synthetic whole. With the (now all but acknowledged) existence of a photograph of the Frick bust under the Detroit painting, another more credible explanation for the stylistic correspondences is to hand: a forger, painting over a photograph of the Frick sculpture, embellished his handiwork by mimicking (too-profusely – see below) Leonardo’s painterly treatment of curls in the Ginevra de’ Benci.

Caution might have been thought the more urgent given the great popularity of this portrait type at the turn of the twentieth century which triggered what Alison Wright (in her 2005 monograph The Pollaiuolo Brothers) describes as “a market for copies, fakes and over-ambitious attributions”. Dr Wright cites Hellmut Wohl’s monograph on Domenico Veneziano in which he “listed the myriad attributions under which surviving Florentine female profiles have passed…”, and gives thanks that “Wohl’s study absolves me from a repetition of this unrewarding task.”

Above, Fig. 5: Domenico Ghirlandaio’s 1488-1490 Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Below, Fig. 6: The obverse (here mirrored) of a bronze medal of c. 1486 attributed to Niccolo Fiorentino. This tiny portrait might suggest that the forger of the Detroit lady at Fig. 1 was not a hair-dresser. As evident at Figs. 4a and 4b, the sculptor clearly understood that the curls belonged to hair drawn from the temples and allowed to hang like spaniels’ ears. The forger, not appreciating the logic of this fashion, carried not-hanging but sprouting curls around and onto the nape of the neck – a fatal, hirsute solecism because in this portrait type the hair from the top and back of the head was drawn tightly together and braided before being assembled into a decorative, be-jewelled ‘sculptural’ arrangement, as both the Frick sculptor and the medallist below appreciated. Modern forgers – like restorers – rarely grasp Renaissance connections between the thing depicted and the thing made. They also suffer the handicap of having to depict portraits not from life but on impoverished, out-of-period assumptions. They betray wider and more profound deficiencies of aesthetic and cultural understanding when, as here, they fail to appreciate the symbolic role and plastic purity of the unnaturally long columnar neck on which is counter-pointed, Brancusi-like, the richly adorned head and coiffure. Hairy necks were not considered emblematic of spiritual purity and classical grace in young Renaissance ladies. As Ingres noted, “Never is a woman’s neck too long”.

ANTICIPATIONS OR RECAPITULATIONS?

Above, Fig. 7: A comparison of two drawings said to have been made in preparation for the National Gallery’s Entombment of Christ which is given to Michelangelo, as discussed left.

Below, Fig. 8: An accompanying comparison in the Art Review of a detail from the unfinished Entombment (left) which painting, despite being in two distinct hands, is now given to Michelangelo in 1500, and (right) a mirrored detail from Rosso Fiorentino’s The Betrothal of the Virgin of 1523.

Current claims that the attributed author of the “Michelangelo” had, at the age of twenty-five, somehow anticipated by a quarter of a century the design and forms of the later Mannerist artist are not credible.

REVIEW:

The Story of The New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci – La Bella Principessa – The Profile Portrait of a Milanese Woman
Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 2010
ISBN 978-1-444-70626-0

New Leonardo da Vinci Bella Principessa confirmed

Lumiere Technology Press Release

Above, Figs. 9 and 10: Top, the Kemp/Cotte book and, above, the eye of the so-called “La Bella Principessa”

The closer one looks, the more apparent it becomes that this eye was not drawn by Leonardo. The perspective is wrong for the formal type of this work. This strictly sideways-on portraiture enforced a uniformity of perspective over all parts and required an eye that looked straight ahead. Here, the eye has shifted from that straight-ahead gaze. It is not drawn in strict end-on elevation, but as if seen from a slightly higher and more frontal viewpoint, thereby showing the edge of the lower lid – much as in this author’s drawing at Fig. 30 in which, because the perspective was not strictly in profile, both of the ridges that border the philtrum (the vertical groove under the nose) are visible, and the lashes of the second eye have moved into view. The appropriate, sideways-on treatment of the visible eye is encountered in every other Renaissance profile portrait shown here. The eye of “La Bella” is a disqualifying aberration.

The lower lid of “La Bella” is far too thick and far too planar in its construction (i. e. it is almost Cubist in its severity). Worse, there is no sense of the eye’s anatomical function and physical properties. Leonardo, a supreme anatomist, appreciated that the eye is an orb set in a protective socket bounded by the brow, the nose and the cheekbone. It is further protected by retractable flesh in the form of the upper and lower lids. When drawn back to expose the iris and pupil, the lid coverings bulge softly and form little pouches, even in the very young. Because the eyeball is relatively hard, its softer, fleshy protective covering takes its forms from that ball – which is to say, it takes on a double curvature and never the crystalline forms seen on “La Bella Principessa”.

This drawing possesses no such anatomical grasp. Ergo, it cannot have been drawn by Leonardo. From the far too-thick and planar edge of the lower eyelid, the flesh drops away abruptly like cliff but then fizzles into a fudged ambiguity. No attempt is made to articulate the demarcation found in Leonardo’s faces between the flesh of the cheek and that of the lower lid (see Figs. 12, 13 and 14). The author of “La Bella Principessa” was not alert to Leonardo’s treatment of those differences.

Above, Figs. 11a and 11b: Left, a diagram traced over a reproduction of the eye to indicate the excessively, straight-edged, angular and planar method of depiction. Right, the resulting diagram.

Above, Figs. 12, 13 and 14: Three pairs of eyes painted by Leonardo. Respectively, from the top, these are those of:
The Lady with an Ermine of 1489-90;
The Belle Ferronniere of 1493-4;
and, The Mona Lisa of 1502 onwards.

If “La bella Principessa” were to be accepted as a Leonardo of 1496 it would mean our believing that Leonardo first depicted eyes in the manner seen in the first two of the above paintings and that he then abandoned his developing manner during a brief Cubist period, before reverting a few years later to his earlier artistic evolution, so as to produce the even softer, more “evanescent”, more curvilinear eyes of the Mona Lisa. Seen gainst the manifest stylistic progression in the treatment of Leonardo’s eyes in the above three paintings, the manner encountered in “La Bella” is neither part of that progression nor compatible with its – or any other Leonardo – eyes.

Above, top, Fig. 15: The (true) right eye of The Lady with an Ermine

Above, Fig. 16: The eye of “La Bella Principessa”

In the Kemp/Cotte book, Pascal Cotte writes that “Leonardo understood the anatomy and inner workings of the human eye” and, that “Despite differences in media, for instance, the elements of the eye are constructed with a distinct and identical logic” in both of these eyes.

Cotte is a brilliant (and charming) man whose invention of the multi-spectral camera has revolutionised the capacities of photography and earned him a place in its history. Unfortunately, there are two problems here. First, methodologically, the comparison is loaded in “La Bella’s” favour. That is, of the three painted works we illustrate above, it is compared with the earliest one, which was made six or seven years before the supposed date of “La Bella” and is the most ‘linear’ of the three in its treatment of forms.

Second, even on this comparison, the crucial tell-tale differences are stark and counter-productive. Cotte shows in his detailed, point by point comparisons that his own eye is not sufficiently attuned to detect and indentify crucial pictorial differences in ostensibly similar images.

We would expect that a forger would attempt to mimic features in extant Leonardos, but what always betrays such efforts is the extent to which they fall short of completely successful mimickry and thereby introduce fatal differences.
Cotte claims and diagrammatically pinpoints six of what he takes to be “identical” features. In his first example, “The outer corner of the eyelid (1)”, he does not notice that while in the Leonardo the point at which the lower eyelid runs under the upper is not delineated and pinpointed but is only implicit in the softly melded tones. In the “La Bella” by contrast, this lower lid is articulated by three individually distinct and sharp straight lines. There is one for the edge of the upper eyelid; one for the outer edge of the lower eyelid; and, a third line that drops as a perpendicular so as to establish a sharp and entirely un-Leonardesque facet at the side of the lower eye. This treatment is a travestying simplification of form.

Cotte’s second point draws attention to the fact that in both images the inner edge of the lower eyelid meets the lower edge of the iris. This is certainly the case, but Cotte does not notice that in the Leonardo that edge is shown to curve because of the form of the eyeball, and not to run in a straight line, as in “La Bella”.

In his third point, “The fold of the upper eyelid”, Cotte does not notice that in the Leonardo eye that particular fold again follows the form of the eye’s orb (is in fact dictated by it) and that it drops as the upper lid ceases to be visible. In contrast, in “La Bella”, at the point where the upper lid ceases to be visible, the line of demacation does not curve downwards but takes off upwards in a short sharp and straight little graphic flourish that, once again, is quite detached from the forms and the constructional logic of the eye. And so on, and so forth. Perhaps the most serious omission, is that it is not noticed that in “La Bella” the iris is drawn with an emphatic bounding line that imparts flatness and makes it resemble a metal washer, rather than the translucent, reflective and doubly curved surface that it comprises – and which Leonardo so brilliantly captured in his depictions of eyes.

Above, Fig. 17: A drawn portrait (mirrored and of low resolution) by the painter/restorer Giannino Marchig.

We see here Marchig’s fondness for female profiles and his insecurity when placing eyes. Just as in “La Bella Principessa”, this eye has a small, “piggy” aspect – which trait subverts his more generally confident graphic treatment. We also see in Marchig’s own drawing that hatching need not all run in the same direction. Nicholas Turner, one of the first scholar/supporters of “La Bella”, took its “extensive left-handed parallel hatching (most conspicuous in the background behind the girl’s profile)…” to be second only to the drawing’s quality as proof of “Leonardo’s authorship (however extraordinary such a conclusion might seem on the face of it)”. The phrase “on the face of it” resonates.

Above, Fig. 18: A Leonardo ink study for a head of Leda.

This image at Windsor is, as the Poussinist, David Packwood, observed on his Art History Today website, a “wonderful drawing…a meditation on the movements and rhythms of nature captured in the elaborate coiffure of the woman. When Leonardo drew hair he studied in line and mass the dynamics of water and the wind.”
The drawing’s animation is indeed truly remarkable. Much of the exhilarating graphic dynamism stems from the speed and confidence of drawing and from the great directional variety of hatching (i.e. showing both “left” and “right-handed” hatching) which is used not only to shade but also to indicate the directional curvature of a form’s surfaces (as in the neck). Such graphic vivacity contrasts greatly the consistently uniform, officiously “left-handed” directional hatching of “La Bella Principessa”. Even though left-handed draughtsmen (like this author) naturally favour a top-left to bottom-right stroke, their drawing hands rotate easily at the wrist so as to give different directions to hatched strokes, as required. Repositioning the arm by moving the elbow outwards, makes yet other directions of hatching realisable. Further, hatching can be given virtually any direction for left or right-handed draughtsmen by the simple expedient of rotating the sheet. Disney cartoon artists used to (may still do) draw on sheets fixed to inset circular surfaces on drawing boards that rotated freely enabling any part of an image to be made swiftly and boldly with an optimal stroke.

Above, Figs. 19 and 20: Top, a detail of “La Bella Principessa”. Above, a corresponding detail of Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Profile of a Woman (oil on panel), Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan. (Note, respectively, the anatomically incorrect and correct placements of the eyes.)

The similarities of profile treatment in these two works tell against “La Bella” the precision of whose profile reads as an assembled succession of autonomously conceived shapes – a kind of ‘identikit’ composite. These discrete portions do not flow together in a manner that conjures a vivid sense of an individual personality, as found in the Pollaiuolo and other portraits shown here. Rather, they resemble graphic inventions, not observed anatomical features. In the Pollaiuolo profile the outer contour does not seem “an abstracted thing in itself” but a by-product of the forms of the head; a record of the succession of points at which the forms turn away from the viewer’s gaze. Note how lucid and plastically expressive is Pollaiuolo’s delicate shading around the eye, as compared with that of “La Bella” where the author had been unable to resolve the form of the brow and the position of the eyebrow. While it can easily be imagined how “La Bella’s” author might have taken Pollaiuolo’s portrayal as a template for a profile variation, it is stylistically inconceivable that Pollaiuolo might have used a “La Bella-like” image to the same end. It might seem remiss of Martin Kemp not to have introduced this particular Pollaiuolo work – arguably the finest and the most beautifully resolved example of the type – into his discussions of “La Bella”.

Alison Wright’s account of the Pollaiuolo Profiles examines the extent to which they were physically accurate records or products of idealised conventions. For example, she questions whether or not the suprising number of “prominent overbites” encountered in Florentine female subjects of the 1460s and 1470s reflected familial relationships or (as she favours) were incorporated because the trait “must have been considered attractive”. However, her excellent sequence of plates of profiles by the brothers shows that this was not a uniformly “applied” feature – and, certainly, much of the portraits’ force stems from their plausible, vivid and attractively human presence. By comparison, “La Bella’s” features seem pedantically laboured.

Above, Fig. 21: Portrait of Bianca Maria Sforza, c. 1493, by Ambrogio de Predis, The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

We believe that this work (and, specifically, its costume) may have provided a key part of the forger’s ‘armature’ for “La Bella Principessa”. In many respects, “La Bella” can be seen as a skimped or condensed variant of features found in this (and other) authentic works. Certainly, Martin Kemp acknowledges “La Bella’s” close similarities with this portrait of Bianca Maria Sforza. He holds that “La Bella” is a wedding portrait of another and younger member of the Sforza faimily, Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, who was the uncle of Bianca Maria. The daughter Bianca was married in 1496 at 13 or 14 years of age. Bianca Maria’s portrait is thought to have been made around the time of her wedding in 1493 when she was 21 years old. In the catalogue to the (London) National Gallery’s 2011-12 Leonardo exhibition, Arturo Galansino said of Bianca Maria’s portrait that the artist’s focus on the sumptuous clothes testified to the luxury of “the most opulent court in Italy”. How credible can it be, therefore, that the strikingly impoverished, jewellery-free attire of Bianca had been comissioned in celebration of the wedding of the Duke’s own daughter to a powerful ally? Kemp hedges against this implausibility with a further suggestion that the portrait might, instead, have been a memorial record made after her death – which followed very shortly after her wedding: “It may be that the restraint of her costume and the lack of jewellery indicates that the portrait was destined for a memorial rather than a matrimonial volume”.

Kemp’s twin-hypotheses rest on many begged questions: “If the Leonardo drawing [i.e. “La Bella”] is Bianca, it is likely to date from 1495-6″. Aside from the weakening “if”, and “is likely”, “La bella’s” problems force Kemp into circumnavigation: “In style, it seems at first sight to belong with his earlier works rather than to the period of the Last Supper.” The recurrence of such phrases as “on the face of it” and “at first sight” is not reassuring and the net effect is that a drawing is being presented as an entirely autograph Leonardo that might have been executed from life as a wedding celebration, or, was made from some other image or memory as a funerary memorial; and that, which ever might have been the case, it was executed in an either early or late Leonardo manner. But which?” Was it a wedding celebration in a late manner – or a memorial in an early manner? Again, how plausible is it to suggest that after executing the revolutionary (and non-profile) portraits of the Lady with an Ermine (1489-90) and The Belle Ferronniere (1493-4), Leonardo, when asked to celebrate a wedding (or mark a death) would have resorted to such an archaic formula? Such art historical problems are dwarfed by the purely visual ones.

Above, Figs. 22a and 22b: Tracings taken from the Portrait of Bianca Maria Sforza by Ambrogio da Predis (left), and “La Bella Principessa”, the claimed Leonardo portrait of Bianca Sforza (right). With both tracings pencil shading has been added to indicate the respective treatments of the arm.

This costume of “La Bella” is not just bereft of sumptuous adornments, it is quite implausible as costume. It is clearly not drawn from life – the costume conceals rather than discloses. Its gross simplification smacks of a forger ‘faking it’ and looking for short-cuts that might evoke an impression of the requisite period and class. The overly-emphasized, shield-like one-piece unit of sleeve and shoulder-covering does not follow the form of a young subject – as in the manner seen, for example, in Fig. 21 above and in Figs. 6, 5, 24a and 25a. This section of drapery carries insufficient shading to indicate the position and the width of the arm. This obfuscation is in marked contrast with the lucid treatments seen in the Ambrogio above at Fig. 21; the Domenico Ghirlandaio at Fig. 5; and the Raphael (former Mino da Fiesole) at Fig. 26. The single triangular split through which an undergarment (chemise) is glimpsed on the sleeve of La Bella is the most perfunctory, non-form-disclosing, artistically lazy minimum that might allude to what was clearly an artfully contrived restrained eroticism in the highest fashions of the period and place. The portrait of Bianca Maria (Fig. 21) is said by Kemp to have been painted, probably, around the time of her betrothal in 1493 to the Holy Roman Emporer Maximilian I, when she was twenty-one years old. With the drawing of Bianca (aka “La Bella”) being said by Kemp to have been made on her marriage in 1496 when she was thirteen or fourteen years old, is it conceivable that a girl of that age would have had so matronly a figure? Compare “La Bella” with the portrait (now given to Raphael) at Figs 23a and 26.

Above, Figs, 23a, 23b, 24a and 24b: The Pollaiuolo and Raphael works, left; “La Bella Principessa”, right.

Above, Fig. 25: A portrait of Beatrice d’Este tentatively attributed by Martin Kemp to Ambrogio da Predis. In discussing this portrait and its opulent costume and jewellery, Kemp suggests a third possible reason for the restraint of finery in “La bella”:

“When set beside the pearl- and gem-festooned creations worn by Bianca Maria and Beatrice, the hair of ‘La Bella’ is finely and formally dressed, but relatively modest in its materials. Surprisingly, she has no jewellery. And her dress, with its simple triangular aperture, has none of the knotted ties that adorn the costumes of the two other Sforza ladies. Leonardo has consciously simplified the costume and accoutrements, compared to the other court portraits, possibly because the context was one in which less ostentation was fitting.”

Thus, we have three explanations for two possible contexts in which Leonardo is claimed to have opted (of his own volition?) to strip a very grand young lady of the customary accoutrements of her most elevated and powerful family. At this point it might be wondered what, if anything, would count for Kemp as evidence against his proposed attribution. Is it really conceivable that Leonardo might had (uniquely) been permitted to act on a notion that ostentation was un-fitting in an image made to celebrate an extremely grand wedding?

Above, Fig. 26: Raphael (but formerly Mino da Fiesole and “sixteenth century Florentine”), A Young Woman in Profile, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

In the 2001-2002 “Virtue and Beauty” catalogue, David Alan Brown says of this (cropped) study of c. 1504 made with chalks and partly reinforced with ink, that it reflects the transforming study Raphael had made of Leonardo. Did the young Raphael really have to show Leonardo, as “La Bella” would suggest, how the lines of drapery might assist a depicted realisation of the forms and posture of a young girl, so as not to conceal them in armadillo-like encasements of implausible costume? Note, in this respect, how beautifully the top edge of the bodice serves to launch the journey across the forms of the upper body, from the breast, over the shoulder, and down and around to the shoulder blade – in precisely the form-describing convention that was seen in the tiny bronze relief (at Fig. 5) a full decade before the claimed date of “La Bella Principessa”.

Above Fig. 27: A detail of a painting (Portrait of a Woman, in the Bibliotecca Ambrosiana, Milan) that is said by Martin Kemp to be by an unknown artist, possibly Lorenzo Costa, and possibly to be a portrait of Anna Sforza.

Although Kemp holds that the above portrait “bears a close relationship to ‘La Bella'” and concedes that the subtlety of the profile is greater than that normally found in Leonardo’s followers, he moves it away from Leonardo’s orbit with his suggestion that, although authorship is a puzzle, “it might have been made by an accomplished artist working outside Milan (e.g. Lorenzo Costa)”. On the strength of his own “might have been”, Kemp then feels assured that “this would explain why it it does not fit convincingly into the work of Leonardo or his contemporaries”. But why should it not? He concedes that its knotted ribbons are beautifully characterised. He counter-implies that the hairnet (“caul”) is inferior to that in La Bella when the knots in the Milan picture (above) are supremely well realised, being individually perfect with each and every one showing how two pairs of two strands of material produce a knot that is larger than the individual bands of material – unlike the inconsistently sized knots of “La Bella” below at Fig. 28a. In any event, more generally, this work has been attributed to Ambrogio da Predis – and sometimes to that artist with Leonardo’s own participation.

Below, Figs. 28a 28b: Left, a detail of La Bella Principessa. Right, a detail of Antonio del Pollaiuolo’s Profile of a Woman.

Above, Figs. 29, 30 and 31: Top, a detail of Portrait of a Woman (- as discussed at Fig. 27).

Centre, an ink drawn illustration of 1991 by Michael Daley, published in The Independent in celebration of a newly cultivated rose.

Above, a detail of “La Bella Principessa”.

A NOTE ON THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF AN INK DRAWING

Above, Fig. 32: The former (attributed) van Dyck drawing that was upgraded to Rubens and accepted as his preliminary ink sketch for Rubens’ (lost) original Samson and Delilah painting. It was sold at Christie’s on July 10th for a world record Rubens drawing price of £3,218,500 despite many problems which include:

1) It is too poor to be by Rubens. Note Delilah’s right arm; note the barber’s legs, which are splayed as if in jumping a hurdle; note the barber’s left arm where the artist could not decide whether it was to be bare or partially enclosed within a piece of drapery which has no counterpart on the right arm and no connection with any drapery on the torso.

2) It would suggest that Rubens designed the picture to be enclosed within a specific format, the right-hand edge of which would crop Samson’s toes in a manner that is not encountered in the original Rubens painting where, as previously shown, Samson’s foot was painted whole and set well away from the edge of the painting.

3) It emerged without provenance in 1926 with another un-provenanced “Veronese” drawing that has subsequently fallen. The Samson and Delilah drawing emerged shortly before the appearance of the studio work with the cropped foot that is now held by the National Gallery to be the long-lost original Rubens – even though it lacks that painting’s original (and twice-recorded) complete foot.

4) None of the presently claimed suite of three Samson and Delilah works (the ink sketch, the oil sketch and the finished painting) emerged before the 20th century and none did so as a Rubens. All three were upgraded without any provenance. The ink sketch and the finished painting have lost or concealed backs. The back of the oil sketch is visible but it shows that the panel was made of a (soft) wood found in no Rubens panel. The drawing, as mentioned, has been glued onto a second sheet of paper which covers all but a small corner of the ink sketch’s verso. It is, therefore, impossible to learn what might or might not have been on what is presently presented as the back of the ink sketch – but which might originally have been the verso of some other work altogether. It is not possible to see if anything might have been present on the backing sheet because its visible surface has been abraded and its reverse is concealed.

5) The most disturbing feature is the ruled box that bounds and constricts the drawing. It might be thought to be a later box made by a framer prior to mounting, and, therefore, not part of the original drawing. Determining whether or not this was the case is impossible because the sheet of paper was trimmed immediately outside the edges of the ruled box, leaving no way to determine whether the drawing once extended beyond its present confines. Examination of the edges of the sheet produces incongruous and conflicting evidence. In parts, the ruled box appears to have been integral to the drawing itself and must, therefore, have been made before the drawing was laid onto the present second backing sheet. At the same time, parts of the ruled box would seem to have been drawn after the sheet was laid down because some of the ruled lines run over losses on the upper sheet and onto the backing sheet (see Fig. 34 below). Other breaks in the sheet have resulted in misaligned ruling (see below). This is perplexing and concerning: the forger Eric Hebborn has disclosed that pasting a drawing onto a second sheet can be a forger’s ruse to prevent any examination of a verso by holding the sheet up to the light (or by placing it on a light box).

Above, Fig. 33: In this detail of the bottom right-hand corner of the drawing, the vertical edge of the ruled box can be seen to pass over Samson’s foot and then over tears in the sheet of paper (and onto the exposed surface of the backing sheet). This would seem to suggest that the drawing had first been cut down through Samson’s foot and then pasted onto a backing sheet before the ruled border was made.

Above, Fig. 34: In this detail of the left-hand edge, a tear to the left and slightly above Delilah’s elbow disrupts lines within the drawing but the rule on the left passes over the tears and onto the backing sheet. In other words, the chronology was as follows: 1) the drawing was made; 2) the sheet was injured; 3) the torn sheet was pasted down onto a second sheet; 4) the left hand rule was drawn, passing over both the original sheet and the sheet to which it was attached.

Above, Fig. 35: In this detail from the drawing’s bottom edge, the ruled border is seen to be broken in several places as if the sheet had been injured prior to or during pasting. No attempt has been made ink over these broken and mis-aligned sections of border. It is possible that these injuries were made in accord with Hebborn’s instructions on the “ageing” of paper: “…Finish this process by rubbing the edge between your thumb and forefinger. This is the time it might be accidentally torn but no more than is necessary to match it with the other edges. You can take a nick out of the two corners with your thumbnail or round them off with the edge of a razor…”

The intended or accidental net result of the treatments and presentation of this drawing is an implicit suggestion that its author had intended the foot to be cropped in exactly the manner found in what is now the National Gallery’s painting. At the time this drawing upgraded to Rubens, a studio copy was about to come onto the market as a Honthorst fifty years after it had been de-accessioned (as a copy) from the Liechtenstein Collection. This painting was swiftly upgraded from Honthorst to Rubens by Ludwig Burchard on the authority of the present ink drawing which Burchard himself had only recently upgraded from van Dyck to Rubens. While the painting had been a “disappeared copy” for half a century, the drawing had no history at all on its emergence.

Thus, Burchard who is now known to have misattributed over sixty works to Rubens, upgraded in close succession both of the works with cropped toes, even though he knew that both of the contemporary copies made after Rubens’ original and long-lost Samson and Delilah painting had shown that Samson’s toes had not been cropped. Institutional attempts by three museums to maintain the credibility of Burchard’s twin Samson and Delilah attributions against challenges have generated poor and self-contradictory scholarship.

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January 7, 2015 | Categories: blog | Comments Off on Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship ~ Part II: Paper (sometimes photographic) Fakes and the Demise of the Educated Eye

“Art’s Toxic Assets” ~ Announcing a new ArtWatch UK website

20 September 2014

We have opened our website on a new address:

http://artwatch.org.uk

The new site has two additional features. First, a dedicated, one-click NEWS & NOTICES box to carry short, topical items. (Our first announcement is of the sixth annual James Beck memorial lecture which is to be given on 6 November in New York.) Second, a PREVIOUS ARTICLES feature. This provides a rapid means of locating (visually, as well as by titles and by dates) any and all previous posts in easy one-click succession. All articles previously published on this site are now available on the new site and carry down-loadable printer-friendly pdfs.

We launch the new site with an examination of problematic attributions in the museum world and on the wider art markets (“Art’s Toxic Assets and a Crisis of Connoisseurship”). We challenge the attributions of four works – three Rubens’s and a Caravaggio – all of which are professionally supported and are now housed in public museums. We argue that such misattributions are products of unsound and insufficiently-examined modern practices of connoisseurship and art critical methodology. Further, we show how shortcomings of visual appraisal evident in the mis-attributions of individual works are also widely encountered in professional failures to recognise and acknowledge restoration-induced injuries in pictures. Holding that these failures of artistic appraisal are present in both art restoration and art attribution and considering them to be two sides of the same debilitating coin, we warn that their frequency and their magnitude now threaten the credibility of the wider art market itself (as might be seen, for example, in the collapse of the Knoedler Gallery), and that they do so in much the same way that the successive and unchecked incorporation of “toxic assets” within investment dealings ultimately led to the recent collapses of confidence in major financial institutions and markets.

To read the article and to visit the new site, please click on:

http://artwatch.org.uk

Michael Daley

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

Printer-friendly PDF version of this article

Above, Fig. 1: “From Duccio to Raphael ~ Connoisseurship in Crisis”, Florence, Italy, 2006, the last book of the late Professor James Beck of Columbia University and the founder (in 1992) of ArtWatch International.

Above, Fig. 2: The Massacre of the Innocents, which sold at Sotheby’s in 2002 as a Rubens for £49.5m even though it contained pigments said never to have been used by the artist, and an allusion to an antique sculpture (the Borghese Warrior) that had yet to be excavated. Furthermore, the earliest plausible date for the manufacture of the panel on which it was painted had been found during technical examinations by a leading international authority on oak panels to have been five years too recent for the attributed date of this work.

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September 20, 2014 | Categories: blog | Leave A Comment »