The Last Leonardo

Kemp picked up the baton from Pedretti. He analysed the notebooks and paintings and evolved a coherent and impressively simple model – ‘a common core’, he called it – for Leonardo’s thinking and a narrative for how it developed. For Kemp, Leonardo’s creativity combined observation, intellect, invention (fantasia) and convention (decorum). Leonardo, said Kemp, set out with the purpose of understanding the mathematical and scientific principles that underlay the natural world, anticipating that there must be a common set of laws that applied to all phenomena:

Those authors who have written that Leonardo began by studying things as an artist but increasingly investigated things for their own sakes have missed the point entirely. What should be said is that he increasingly investigated each thing for each other’s sake, for the sake of the whole and for the sake of the inner unity, which he perceived both intuitively and consciously. In moving from church architecture to anatomy, from harmonic proportions to mechanics, he was not leaping erratically from one separate branch to another, like a frenzied squirrel, but climbing up different branches of the same tree.2

Then, at the end of his life, Kemp argued, Leonardo changed his tune. He became convinced that nature was too diverse and mysterious to be grasped, and this was reflected in his stunningly dynamic series of late drawings of floods and tempests.

In the almost four decades since Marvellous Works, Kemp has published a profusion of scholarly articles and catalogue essays about the intersection of science and art in the work of Leonardo and in the broader Renaissance culture. He has also been active in the less austere world of exhibitions and television documentaries, often involving the reconstruction of a working model based on one of Leonardo’s designs. He has plans for a contemporary dance performance, an orchestral recital and a CD of music related to Leonardo, while he works on a new scholarly edition of one of Leonardo’s scientific notebooks, the Leicester Codex, owned by Bill Gates. He is Mr Leonardo. The intellectual has become in part impresario, and scholarship has merged with showmanship, a trend that can be observed across the entire art historical and museological community in recent times.

Martin Kemp had long been an outspoken critic of the methodology of connoisseurship and attributions in art history. In a lecture in The Hague he said, ‘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).’13 He has warned that commercial incentives and professional networks often trump scholarly reserve: ‘In extreme cases, curators of exhibitions might fix catalogue entries in the service of loans; museum directors and boards might bend their own rules.’4 To his credit, Kemp has long refused to accept a fee, or even expenses, if he inspects a work of art (although some might point out that there are many other incentives, besides direct financial gain, to discover a long-lost work by the world’s most famous artist). ‘As soon as you get entangled with any financial interest or advantage, there is a taint, like a tobacco company paying an expert to say cigarettes are not dangerous,’ he told the New Yorker magazine.5

Like many other Leonardists, Martin Kemp has been receiving scores of emails for years, ‘sometimes more than one a week’,6 he says, from individuals who think they own an unrecognised Leonardo. Some of these works are by Leonardo’s pupils, others are incompetent copies, and many have nothing to do with the artist. Most of the time he rejects the invitations to view the works; sometimes he can see from the images he is sent that the work is not a Leonardo. He knows that attributions are a murky business, and he has kept his distance. He says that he does not attribute works of art – he researches them. Back in Marvellous Works he wrote that ‘The speculative attribution of unknown or relatively unknown works to major masters is a graveyard for historians’ reputations.’7

But, as often as Professor Kemp has warned of the dangers of attribution, he is as human as any other Leonardist. For all his caveats about connoisseurship, he still finds it useful to deploy the mysterious and instantaneous power of the eye of the art historian: ‘The actual physical presence of a work of art is always very different from even the best photographic images … The first moments are always edgy. If a certain zing does not occur, the encounter is going to be hard going.’ Sooner or later, all the great Leonardo experts have been lured into the vortexes of authentication. That may be because no mortal, whether scholar or not, can hold out forever against the allure of beauty, money and fame. Or it may be because, over a long and distinguished career, it is impossible to avoid every patch of academic quicksand.

In March 2008, Kemp received an email with a jpeg file of a small drawing on parchment, 23 x 33cm. It was of a pretty young woman in profile, with piercing green-brown eyes and a delicate upturned nose. Her hair was swept back into an elaborate hairpiece, and there was a knotwork pattern on the sleeve of her garment, which was curiously plain and cheap. The picture had been bought at auction in 1998 for under $20,000 as a nineteenth-century work by a German artist, one of a circle which had been reviving and imitating Italian Renaissance painters.

Kemp thought it ‘zinged decisively’. He authenticated it as a Leonardo and named it La Bella Principessa, although there was no evidence that it was of a princess. Eventually he published a book about the painting, which he said depicted a bride, Bianca Sforza from the ruling family of Milan, for whom Leonardo worked, and that it came from a late-fifteenth-century bound vellum book in a Warsaw library which commemorated the wedding. He observed Leonardo’s hand in the left-handed cross-hatching, the glassy pupils and traces of fingerprints. ‘Leonardo has evoked the sitter’s living presence with an uncanny sense of vitality,’ he said.8 However, Leonardo had never done any other drawing on vellum; nor is there any document naming the sitter. The only scrap of supporting evidence Kemp could find for the choice of medium was a note Leonardo had once written asking a French court painter about this technique:

Get from Jean de Paris the method of dry colouring and the method of white salt, and how to make coated sheets; single and many doubles; and his box of colours.

Kemp observed that there were tiny holes in the side of the drawing which showed that it had once been bound into the Warsaw book. But the holes were in the wrong places, there weren’t enough of them, and the type of vellum was not the same as that in the book. In addition to that, the Bella Principessa was wearing a costume that was too dowdy for a wedding, and a strange slit in her sleeve was inexplicable.* To add to the case against, the drawing’s owner claimed to the Sunday Times that he had found the picture in a drawer at a friend’s house in Switzerland.9 The Italian art historian Mina Gregori agreed with Kemp about the attribution, but most other Renaissance art historians reacted with doubt, or worse, derision. Kemp and the painting’s private owner, Peter Silverman, wanted it to be exhibited in a major public institution, and allowed the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the painting in its labs, with a view to showing it, but the museum director reported back that he didn’t think the work was genuine.

Despite his isolation, Kemp stuck to his guns, and became, like many connoisseurs in such a position, increasingly vociferous in his opinion and increasingly defensive towards his critics. Such is the way of these things that Kemp ended up working with a collaborator who soon became controversial. He invited a Canadian forensic art expert called Peter Paul Biro to look at the picture. Biro had made a name for himself authenticating works of art by discovering the hidden fingerprints of artists on them, deploying a multi-spectral-imaging camera with impressive powers of magnification which he had designed himself. He claimed to have authenticated pictures by Turner, Picasso and Jackson Pollock with his fingerprint cameras. Kemp invited Biro to examine the Bella Principessa and Biro found a fingerprint on the picture which, he said, was ‘highly comparable’ to another on Leonardo’s St Jerome. But in 2010 an article in the New Yorker by David Grann alleged that Biro had found Pollock’s fingerprints on paintings supposedly by Pollock but which, experts said, contained acrylic paint that had not been previously documented in his drip paintings.10

Kemp blamed the failure of La Bella Principessa on its over-hasty exposure to the media by Silverman. ‘I call it premature ejaculation,’ he told The Art Newspaper. ‘There were things that came out before they were thought through. I would have much preferred to produce all the evidence when we had it, in one go.’11 Kemp said he had learned from the Bella Principessa debacle: ‘Above all, the public debut of a major item should be accompanied or preceded by the full historical and technical evidence being made available in the way scholars regard as proper.’12

And yet, when Robert Simon invited Martin Kemp to see the Salvator Mundi, the Oxford art historian seemingly forgot all his own advice.

* The Polish art historian Katarzyna KrzyŻagórska-Pisarek wrote an analysis of the drawing: ‘There is no real evidence that La Bella Principessa shows Bianca Giovanna Sforza, or that the vellum leaf comes from the Warsaw Sforziad … The vellum of the Warsaw Sforziad is of different quality/texture (white and smooth) than the support of La Bella Principessa (yellow and rough, with follicles) and its size is different too (by 0.8 cm). The drawing was also made on the inferior, hairside of the vellum, unlike Birago’s illuminations [contained in the Warsaw volume] … the “archaic”, formal and highly finished style of La Bella Principessa combined with the complex mixed media technique are unusual for Leonardo, and there is no evidence that he ever drew a full female profile (face and body), especially in coloured chalks on vellum …’

CHAPTER 6

The Blue Clue

Mystery is the defining quality of Leonardo’s art. A seductive glance is thrown, we know not to whom. The Virgin and child take shelter with saints and angels in a twilight grotto, which has no address in the Bible. A smile, whose cause can only be imagined, begins to cross a woman’s face, if indeed it is a woman’s face, if indeed it is a smile. Around these strange incidents and encounters hover a few ambiguous facts open to a multitude of interpretations. Our understanding of Leonardo’s life and work rarely becomes more than a pool of theories, surrounded by a tangle of conjecture, suspended from a geometry of clues. Amidst this network of possibilities, the Salvator presents the most fundamental mystery of them all. In some respects, it appears to be the most compressed embodiment of the essence of Leonardo’s art; in other ways it is a stark anomaly. While other of Leonardo’s paintings ask questions like, Am I smiling? or What am I feeling? or even Who is winning?, the Salvator asks Am I a Leonardo?

Leonardo’s paintings have left a trail of documents behind them – contracts for commissions, legal filings from irate clients, eyewitness statements from admirers, oral histories recorded by the children of men who knew him, and even notes in the margins of books on completely different subjects. Such documents are a mine of information.

There are legal agreements for many of Leonardo’s commissions, each of which contains its own set of illuminating details about Leonardo’s profession and character. The one for his first major work, the Adoration of the Magi, offered him a piece of land as payment, which he couldn’t sell for three years, while he had to pay for all the paints and gold leaf himself. He was soon behind schedule, and the monks wrote to him telling him to hurry up. Within a year they had given up, writing off the small sum they had already advanced Leonardo so he could buy wheat and wine. Leonardo was a genius, but also temperamental and, by turns, a self-critical perfectionist: he worked slowly and left many works unfinished, much to the exasperation of his clients. A trail of lawsuits followed him wherever he went.

In 1500 another set of angry monks, this time Milanese, from the Confraternity of Immaculate Conception, refused to pay for the Virgin of the Rocks, now in the National Gallery in London, saying it hadn’t been finished. Leonardo countersued, arguing that the previously agreed fee was too low for the quality of work he was providing. The dispute lasted years. In 1506 a judge ruled in favour of the monks, arguing that there was not enough of Leonardo’s hand in the picture, and that he had to return to Florence and finish it. He went back reluctantly, but it is not known what additional work he carried out on the painting.

Another important client, the Council of Florence, was disappointed the same year, when the artist left for Milan leaving behind him the unfinished Battle of Anghiari, now lost. Leonardo had ‘taken a goodly sum of money and provided a small beginning of a great work, which he should have made’, complained the Gonfaloniere, one of the city’s leaders.

Where there are no surviving contracts, we often read of Leonardo’s paintings in the letters and memoirs of awestruck fans, who recorded for posterity the moment they met the great artist. Secretaries and agents of cardinals and countesses left entries in their diaries marvelling at the paintings and notebooks they had seen when they visited his studio, such as Antonio de Beatis who saw the St John, the Mona Lisa and the Virgin and Child with St Anne in Leonardo’s studio in 1517. Leonardo’s unusual working practices were often a talking point. The Italian author Matteo Bandello recorded watching him working on The Last Supper in 1497:

He would arrive early, climb up on to the scaffolding, and set to work. Sometimes he stayed there from dawn to sunset, never once laying down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, painting without pause. At other times he would go for two, three or four days without touching his brush, but spending several hours a day in front of the work, his arms folded, examining and criticising the figures to himself. I also saw him, driven by some sudden urge, at midday, when the sun was at its height, leaving the Corte Vecchia, where he was working on his marvellous clay horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie, without seeking shade, and clamber up on to the scaffolding, pick up a brush, put in one or two strokes, and then go away again.

Proof of Leonardo’s authorship of paintings can come from the most obscure and unpredictable sources. The identity of the Mona Lisa and the date when Leonardo started painting it were both subject to dispute until 2005, when a German scholar came across a note in the margin of a Renaissance volume of letters by the Roman orator Cicero. The marginalia came from Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine civil servant who worked for Machiavelli. A line from Cicero, about how the fabled Roman painter Apelles left parts of his paintings unfinished, reminded Vespucci of Leonardo. Cicero commented, ‘Apelles perfected the head and bust of his Venus with the most elaborate art, but left the rest of her body roughly rendered …’ Vespucci jotted next to the text:

… This is how Leonardo da Vinci does all his paintings, for example the head of Lisa del Giocondo and of Anne, the mother of the Virgin. We will see what he is going to do in the hall of the Great Council, for which he has just reached an agreement with the Gonfaloniere. October 1503

From such a recent, chance discovery, art historians could confirm that Leonardo was painting a version of the Mona Lisa by 1503, earlier than many had previously thought, and that her identity was definitely the Florentine noblewoman Lisa del Giocondo.

Leonardo’s works were the subject of public spectacle as well as private reflection. By 1500 he was a celebrity, whose every move was watched and gossiped about. It was a major event when a new Leonardo was finished and unveiled to the general public, akin to the opening weekend of a blockbuster film today. Vasari wrote that when a new cartoon of St Anne was put on display in Florence for two days in 1501 (incidentally the first show of a single drawing in the history of Western art), ‘it attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he had created’.

There are only two Leonardos that were undocumented in his lifetime: the Portrait of a Musician in the Ambrosiana in Milan, which art historians tend to think is by Leonardo’s assistant Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and the St Jerome, whose authenticity has never been questioned and for which certain probable references can be found. Both of these paintings were made relatively early in Leonardo’s career. There is no Leonardo painting executed after 1496 which is not remarked in contemporary sources – except, perhaps, one now.

No records from the artist’s lifetime, or for a further hundred years after it, mention Leonardo painting a Salvator Mundi. This is all the more surprising because of the significance of the subject matter. The Christ which Leonardo painted in his Last Supper is the subject of a long anecdote in Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. He relates how Leonardo went to see his client, the Duke of Milan, and provided a progress report on The Last Supper, explaining that he had still not yet painted Christ’s head because ‘he was unwilling to seek a model on earth and unable to presume that his imagination could conceive of the beauty and celestial grace required of divinity incarnate’.

If the greatest artist of his times was painting the greatest subject in Christian art, a Salvator Mundi, one would expect to find it recorded in a note in a monk’s chronicle or a secretary’s letters, at the very least. The absence of such documentation is the first great mystery of the Salvator Mundi. It compels art historians to rely on their ‘superpower’, ‘the eye’, alone. The name of the artist and the date of execution of this painting can only be determined by analysis of the style, technique and motifs of the work, but the result of such a process will always lack the certainty of proof.

Leonardo never dated any of his paintings, but on stylistic and technical grounds, the Salvator Mundi can be placed in the second half of his career, beginning after 1500 and ending with his death in 1519. The preparatory drawings must have been made in the early years of the sixteenth century because they are executed in Leonardo’s softer red chalk style. They are usually dated 1502–10. The painting itself has the intense sfumato shading of the second phase of Leonardo’s work, beginning in the sixteenth century. The walnut wood used for the panel points to a date after 1506, when Leonardo returned to Milan. Walnut was a relatively unusual choice in Renaissance Florence, but was widely used by Milanese painters. It is difficult to be more precise, because Leonardo worked on many of his pictures for a long time, painting them slowly, sometimes on and off over a decade or more, occasionally returning to them after an intermission, often never finishing them. The scientific means of dating a panel painting by analysing the rings in the wood, dendrochronology, cannot be used with walnut, because the rings are too widely spaced to give more than the vaguest indication of epoch.

Whatever the day was when the first brushstrokes were applied to the Salvator Mundi, Leonardo had by then become one of the most celebrated living artists of the Italian Renaissance, alongside Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, Raphael, Michelangelo, Giovanni Bellini, Andrea Mantegna and a dozen others. He had progressed from artistic child prodigy to gifted studio assistant, then a master painter with his own practice in Florence, and later official court artist, the grandest position a Renaissance artist could rise to in Milan, where he also worked as a sculptor, engineer, set designer and architect. But his career had also had challenging periods when work and money were in short supply.

Born in 1452 in Vinci, a village on the outskirts of Florence, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a notary, Ser Piero, and a local farmer’s daughter, Caterina di Meo Lippi. His early life was both privileged and disadvantaged. Ser Piero was well-to-do, with a number of properties including a farm in Vinci. By the time Leonardo was in his late teens his father also had offices in the Bargello in Florence, where he offered his legal services to clients from important monasteries and Florentine businesses. But having been born out of wedlock, Leonardo seems not to have received the classical education that a family of Piero’s standing would normally have given their son. He grew up not having learned Latin or Greek, and occasionally referred to that lack in his notebooks. He called himself an ‘unlettered man’, and once signed himself ‘Leonardo da Vinci, disciple of sperentia’, which means both experience and experiment, Renaissance Italian for the ‘school of life’. For the introduction of his planned treatise on painting, which he never published himself, he drafted this opening paragraph:

I am fully aware that my not being a man of letters may cause certain presumptuous people to think that they may with reason blame me, alleging that I am a man without learning. Foolish folk! … They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labours, but by those of others … They will say that because I have no book learning I cannot properly express what I desire to describe – but they do not know that my subjects require experience rather than the word of others.

Leonardo had the Renaissance version of a chip on his shoulder. He turned this weakness into a strength by approaching his subjects without preconceptions or precepts, making the blank page the starting point for enquiry and creativity.

Fifty kilometres east of Vinci lay the ochre and red assemblage of roofs, domes, towers and crenellations of Florence, where the Renaissance was under construction. The dome of Florence cathedral, designed by Brunelleschi, built without scaffolding out of four million bricks, still the largest masonry dome in the world, was nearing completion; Leonardo was to be involved in its finishing touch, a gleaming bronze ball placed atop the lantern in 1472. Luca della Robbia was filling lunettes and decorating sarcophagi with his ceramic reliefs of pretty Madonnas and characterful saints, smoothly glazed in bright green, blue, white and yellow. In the evenings the low sunlight caught Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise, a door with ten scenes from the Old Testament, cast in bronze but looking like burnished gold, completed in 1424 and given its popular name by an admiring Michelangelo. It was a beacon to the future of art, with its energetic crowd scenes full of billowing robes and flailing limbs, set within the arches and atria of monumental classical backdrops.

The basic laws of perspective, the representation of three-dimensional space on two dimensions, mostly forgotten since Antiquity, had been revived in frescos decorating chapels by artists Masolino and Masaccio, and in diagrams and text by the architect and humanist Leon Battista Alberti. All these developments were so remarkable that, a century later, they prompted the first ever art history book, Vasari’s Lives of the most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, to give it its full title. This account of Italian art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century distinguished between three phases in Renaissance art – early, middle and high – categories which are still widely accepted today. Vasari placed Leonardo at the start of ‘the third manner which we will agree to call the modern’.* Today this period is known as the High Renaissance.