La Bella Principessa (English: "The Beautiful Princess"), also known as Portrait of Bianca Sforza, Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress and Portrait of a Young Fiancée, is a portrait in coloured chalks and ink, on vellum, of a young lady in fashionable costume and hairstyle of a Milanese of the 1490s. Some scholars have attributed it to Leonardo da Vinci but the attribution and the work's authenticity have been disputed. Supporters of the theory that it was by Leonardo have proposed that Bianca Giovanna Sforza, illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza is the woman depicted in the drawing.
Some of those who disagree with the attribution to Leonardo believe the portrait is by an early 19th-century German artist imitating the style of the Italian Renaissance, although radiocarbon dating tests show a much earlier date for the vellum. It has also been denounced as a forgery. The white lead has been dated to be at least 225 years old. The work sold for just under $22,000 at auction in 1998, and was bought by its current owner Peter Silverman in 2007. He has championed the attribution to Leonardo, supported by the analysis of academics Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte.
The drawing was shown as a Leonardo in an exhibition in Sweden in 2010 and was estimated by various newspaper reports to be worth more than $160 million. The Bella Principessa remains locked in a vault in a secret Swiss location.
According to Kemp and Cotte, the sheet was cut from a Milanese vellum book, La Sforziada, in Warsaw, which celebrates the marriage in 1496 of Galeazzo Sanseverino with Bianca, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo's employer. It has subsequently been exhibited in Urbino, Monza and Nanjing; and a facsimile edition of the portrait and the book in Warsaw has been published.Scripta Maneant
Description The portrait is a mixed media drawing in pen and brown ink with red, black and white chalk, on vellum, which has been laid down on an oak board.
There are signs of restoration with thin paint applied with a brush. Three stitch holes in the left-hand margin of the vellum, indicate that the leaf was once in a bound volume.
It represents a girl in her early teens, depicted in profile, the usual way in which Italian artists of the 15th century portraited women. The girl's dress and hairstyle indicate that she was a member of the Court of Milan during the 1490s. If it truly is a Renaissance work, it would have been executed in the 1490s according to Kemp and Cotte. If the subject is Bianca Sforza it would date from 1496, the year of her marriage and her death.
Reflecting the subject of an Italian woman of high nobility, Kemp named the portrait La Bella Principessa, although acknowledging that Sforza ladies were not princesses.
Provenance If the drawing is originally a Leonardo illustration for the present-day Warsaw copy of the Sforziad, its history is the same as that of the book until the drawing was cut out from the volume.See Katarzyna Wozniak, The Warsaw Sforziad http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/leonardo/#MM The book is known to have been rebound at the turn of the 18th and 19th century.Katarzyna Wozniak, The Warsaw Sforziad http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/leonardo/#MMKatarzyna Woźniak, La Bella Principessa and the Warsaw Sforziad. Circumstances of Rebinding and Excision of the Portrait http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hosted/leonardo/#MM
The modern provenance of the drawing is known only from 1955 and is documented only from 1998. According to a lawsuit brought by Jeanne Marchig against Christie's after the drawing's re-attribution to Leonardo, the drawing belonged to her husband Giannino Marchig, an art restorer, when they married in 1955. Jeanne Marchig became the owner of the drawing in 1983, following her husband's death.
The work was included in a sale at Christie's in New York on January 30, 1998, catalogued as Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress, and described as "German School, early 19th Century". The seller was Jeanne Marchig. It was sold for $21,850 (including buyer's premium) to a New York art dealer who sold it on for a similar amount in 2007.
In 2007, art dealer Peter Silverman, purchased the portrait from a gallery on East 73rd Street, owned by Kate Ganz. Peter Silverman believed that the portrait was possibly from an older period, potentially dating back to the Renaissance period, and sought the opinions of experts who have since attributed it to Leonardo da Vinci. In 2010 one of those experts, Martin Kemp, made it the subject of his book co-authored with Pascal Cotte, La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. This is now revised in Kemp and Cotte's La Bella Principessa di Leonardo da Vinci. Ritratto di Bianca Sforza, Florence, 2012.
The drawing was shown as a Leonardo in a 2010 exhibition called And there was Light in Eriksberg, Gothenburg, in Sweden, and was estimated by various newspaper reports to be worth more than $160 million. Silverman promoted the Leonardo connection in his 2012 book Leonardo's Lost Princess: One Man's Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo da Vinci and has declined an offer for the portrait of $80 million.
The fingerprint dispute Pascal Cotte of Lumière Technology in Paris performed a multi-spectral digital scan of the work.Citation error. See inline comment how to fix. The high resolution images were used by Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art examiner who studied a fingerprint on the vellum which he said was "highly comparable" to a fingerprint on Leonardo's unfinished St. Jerome in the Wilderness.Citation error. See inline comment how to fix. Citation error. See inline comment how to fix. In 2010 David Grann published an article about the drawing in The New Yorker, which implied that Biro had been involved with forged paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock.
Biro consequently sued the writer and the publisher of The New Yorker, Advance Media, for defamation in 2011. The judge in the case, J. Paul Oetken, ruled that the article contained eight instances that were capable of a defamatory meaning. He eventually dismissed the case on a technicality arguing that Biro was a limited purpose public figure. An appeals court supported the initial judgment.
The fingerprint evidence is not cited in the revised Italian edition of the book by Kemp and Cotte or in any of Kemp's subsequent publications.Ital ed. and exhib The story of the research and attribution is told in Kemp's Living with Leonardo.Martin Kemp, Living with Leonardo. Fifty Years of Sanity and Insanity in the Art World and Beyond, London: Thames and Hudson, 2018David Grann, ‘The Mark of a Masterpiece’, The New Yorker, July 12, 2010. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/12/the-mark-of-a-masterpiece
Support for Leonardo attribution
The first study of the drawing was published by Cristina Geddo. Geddo attributes this work to Leonardo based not only on stylistic considerations, extremely high quality and left-handed hatching, but also on the evidence of the combination of black, white and red chalks (the trois crayons technique). Leonardo was the first artist in Italy to use pastels, a drawing technique he had learned from the French artist Jean Perréal, whom he met in Milan in 1494 and/or 1499. Leonardo acknowledges his debt to Perréal in the Codex Atlanticus. Geddo also points out that the "coazzone" of the sitter's hairstyle was fashionable during the same period. Strong support for the attribution has come from Elizabetta Gnignera, the costume historian, in her book La Bella Svelata, which studies a wide range of comparative costumes and hair styles.
Expert opinions A number of Leonardo experts and art historians have concurred with the attribution to Leonardo, including: Martin Kemp, Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford, Carlo Pedretti, late professor emeritus of art history and Armand Hammer Chair in Leonardo Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles Nicholas Turner, former curator at the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci in Vinci, ItalyAlessandro Vezzosi, Nuptial Portrait of a Young Woman Cristina Geddo, an expert on Milanese Leonardesques and Giampietrino, Mina Gregori, professor emerita at the University of Florence.Esterow, Milton. "The Real Thing?", in ARTnews
Analysis In 2010, after a two-year study of the picture, Kemp published his findings and conclusions in a book, La Bella Principessa: The Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. Kemp describes the work as "a portrait of a young lady on the cusp of maturity [which] shows her with the fashionable costume and hairstyle of a Milanese court lady in the 1490s". By process of elimination involving the inner group of young Sforza women, Kemp suggested that she is probably Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate (but later legitimized) daughter of Ludovico Sforza ("Il Moro"), duke of Milan. In 1496, when Bianca was no more than 14, she married Galeazzo Sanseverino, captain of the duke's Milanese forces and a patron of Leonardo. Bianca was dead within months of her marriage, having suffered from a stomach complaint (possibly an ectopic pregnancy). Kemp pointed out that Milanese ladies were often the dedicatees of volumes of poetry on vellum, and that such a portrait of a "beloved lady" would have made a suitable title page or main illustration for a set of verses produced on the occasion of her marriage or death.
The physical and scientific evidence from multispectral analysis and study of the painting, as described by Kemp in the first edition of his book with Cotte, may be summarized as follows: The technique of the portrait is black, red and white chalks (trois crayons, a French medium), with pen and ink. The drawing and hatching was carried out entirely by a left-handed artist, as Leonardo is known to have been, although restorations are by a right-hander. There are significant pentimenti. The portrait is characterized by particularly subtle details, such as the relief of the ear hinted at below the hair, and the amber of the sitter's iris. There are strong stylistic parallels with the Windsor silverpoint drawing of A Woman in Profile, which, like other head studies by Leonardo, features comparable delicate pentimenti to the profile. The members of the Sforza family were always portrayed in profile, whereas Ludovico's mistresses were not. The proportions of the head and face reflect the rules that Leonardo articulated in his notebooks. The interlace or knotwork ornament in the costume and caul corresponds to patterns that Leonardo explored in other works and in the logo designs for his Academy. The portrait was executed on vellum—used by him in his illustrations for Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione (1498). We know from his writings that he was interested in the French technique of dry colouring on parchment (vellum). He specifically noted that he should ask the French artist, Jean Perréal, who was in Milan in 1494 and perhaps on other occasions, about the method of colouring in dry chalks. The format of the vellum support is that of a rectangle, a format used for several of his portraits. The vellum sheet was cut from a codex, probably a volume of poetry of the kind presented to mark major events in the Sforza women's lives. The vellum includes a palmprint in the chalk pigment on the neck of the sitter, which is characteristic of Leonardo's technique. The green of the sitter's costume was obtained with a simple diffusion of black chalk applied on top of the yellowish tone of the vellum support. (Kemp has subsequently expressed reservations about this evidence.) The nuances of the flesh tints were also achieved by exploiting the tone of the vellum and allowing it to show through the transparent media.