by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night KPBS showed two programs dealing with works of
art allegedly created by Leonardo da Vinci: a NOVA episode called “Anatomy of a Masterpiece” and a Secrets
of the Dead episode about the so-called
“Isleworth” version of the Mona Lisa. “Anatomy of a Masterpiece” dealt with a
profile portrait of a young woman that first came to light at the Christie
auction house in New York in 1995, done with chalk on vellum (itself an unusual
technique because special binders had to be added to the chalk to get it to
stick to the vellum — “vellum” means a surface created from an animal skin
treated to be suitable for writing, drawing or painting on — which the
researchers suggested itself lent credibility to the idea that Leonardo created
this work because he was always experimenting with new techniques and in
particular with new combinations of bases, binders and pigments in his paints —
that’s what happens when you end up with an artist who’s also a scientific
genius) and originally attributed to an anonymous 19th century
German. Peter Silverman, a French collector (despite his Anglo-Jewish name),
tried to buy the work in 1995, was outbid but did acquire it in 2002 when a gallery owner put it up
for sale for $22,000. He conceived the idea that it might have been a
previously unknown work by Leonardo (who by the way was illegitimate and had no
legal last name; “da Vinci” was added later and simply indicated the town he
was from) and ran it through a battery of tests as well as critiques from art
historians, including Martin Kemp (a Renaissance expert who became more or less
convinced the work was by
Leonardo) and David Ekserdjian (even more convinced the painting isn’t a Leonardo). Silverman had the vellum tested with
radiocarbon-14 dating (since it was once part of a living animal that technique
can be used) and it came back within the right age range to be a medium for a
Renaissance artist. Then he got in touch with the gnome-like Pascal Kotte, who
has invented a multiplex camera that can not only take a picture of a painting
with uncommonly good resolution (to the point where details of the workmanship
invisible to the naked eye can be seen in the photos) but can also separate it,
prism-like, into its various color bands to see how the original artist blended
the pigments and what details were added in what colors. The hour-long show was
interesting, and not only made a convincing (if not iron-clad) case for the
work being an authentic Leonardo but traced who the subject was (Bianca Maria
Sforza, illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Milan when Leonardo was living and
working there) and offered an explanation for why the work never appeared in
any catalogues of art by Leonardo (or anyone else): it was supposedly intended
as an illustration for a vellum-paper ceremonial book on the occasion of
Bianca’s wedding and there are cut marks and indentations that arguably
indicate where it was bound in the original book and thereby, at least so the
case goes, prove its authenticity. So far the work has acquired enough of a
reputation that Silverman turned down an offer of $80 million for it, and as I
noted above the case for it as a Leonardo is persuasive but not definitive;
judging from what I saw of it on the show, it simply doesn’t look all that
interesting as an artwork, and frankly if Leonardo did do it, it was probably something he tossed off in
his spare time as a way of making a few scudi and keeping in the good graces of
a powerful and well-heeled patron like the Duke of Milan.
In some ways the Secrets
of the Dead program was more interesting in
that it was at least dealing with a work — the Mona Lisa — long identified with
Leonardo, and it tapped into one of the most intriguing art mysteries of all
time, one mentioned by art historian Lawrence Jeppson in his book The
Fabulous Frauds: in 1911 the real (or at
least the acknowledged) Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre, ostensibly by a
maintenance man named Vincenzo Peruggia who said, when he was caught two years
later, that he was motivated by the desire to return this fabled art treasure
to Leonardo’s (and Peruggia’s) native Italy instead of allowing it to remain in
the supposedly hostile climate of France. According to Jeppson — in a part of
the story that did not make it
into the TV show — the painting was really stolen by a gang of art forgers who
had specialized in doing copies of famous masterpieces, selling them under the
table to private collectors and claiming that they had stolen the originals and
those were what they were
offering for sale. While for lesser-known artworks they could get away merely
with saying they’d stolen the
originals, for something as well known as the Mona Lisa they realized they
would actually have to steal it — so they did so, in the meantime creating six
copies of the famous painting (made on wood panels they cut from an authentic
Renaissance bed — Leonardo painted the Mona Lisa now in the Louvre not on
canvas but on wood, and one of the odd parts of this show is that though
Leonardo wrote a treatise on painting on canvas in one of his books all his known full-dress paintings are on wood) and
selling them sub rosa to
collectors, each of whom thought he was getting the stolen original. Jeppson
told this story and also mentioned the other Mona Lisas that are known to
exist, including at least one in a major museum (the Prado in Madrid), and
suggested that Leonardo painted two versions personally, while his art students
did a third one under his direction (which would, of course, be
indistinguishable forensically from an authentic Leonardo). Some of the experts
from the “Mystery of a Masterpiece” show, including Martin Kemp and Pascal
Kotte, were interviewed on this show as well, which told the story of at least
one other Mona Lisa, which turned up in 1905 and was purchased by British art dealer
Henry Blaker from a man who said he picked it up while on a grand tour of
Italy.
This differs from the Louvre version in that Lisa del Giocondo’s image
looks considerably younger and the background is not only different but
unfinished. It is also painted on canvas instead of wood, and lacks the “lead
white” backing Leonardo always used when he painted on wood — a white primer
whose lead base makes it impossible for Pascal Kotte or anyone else to use
X-rays to penetrate the painting and divide it into layers for analysis. The
producers of the program make a good case that the Isleworth version is the one
Leonardo actually created on commission from Lisa’s husband, Florentine
merchant Francesco del Giocondo, but he never considered it finished and therefore
never handed it over to Francesco or got paid for it — and the Louvre version
he created later, in his last years living in the Loire Valley in France (which
was a new one on me; being unfamiliar with Leonardo’s biography I had had no
idea he had ever been out of
Italy, let alone that he had died on foreign soil!), when he was experimenting
with an elaborate system of layering oil paints on top of each other and
creating works like his final painting, a portrait of John the Baptist (for
which Leonardo’s long-term protégé and boyfriend was apparently the model), in
the same style as the Louvre Mona Lisa. These two programs taken together were
fascinating, not only in the issues they raise about the “authenticity” of a
work and the difficulty of attributing old paintings based on the modern
assumption that the artist of record applies every atom of paint personally
(Leonardo, like Rembrandt, had a whole studio full of talented artists working
for him, and he often would be responsible for the overall design of a portrait
but leave it to his assistants to fill in the background details) but also for
the fetish that surrounds certain artists, Leonardo being particularly
legendary because he was a polymath who made major contributions to the science
of his time as well as the art (indeed, the show quotes one entry in a Leonardo
notebook to the effect that he was bored by painting and did it mainly to earn
the money so he could do the scientific experiments that really excited him),
and the whole idea of “value” that decrees that a work of art is worth $22,000
when its provenance is unknown and soars to $120 million simply because it can
plausibly be assigned to a “name” artist and given a compelling backstory.
