La Bella Principessa

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. The book is known to have been rebound at the turn of the 18th and 19th century. 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". It was sold for $21,850 (including buyer's premium) 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. 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. 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. 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. The story of the research and attribution is told in Kemp's Living with Leonardo. ==Support for Leonardo attribution==

of Bianca Maria Sforza showing a similar hairstyle (National Gallery of Art) which has been suggested as being similar to one of Leonardo's. (Biblioteka Narodowa) in Warsaw 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, • Nicholas Turner, former curator at the British Museum and the J. Paul Getty Museum • Cristina Geddo, an expert on Milanese Leonardesques and Giampietrino, 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. 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, This is a printed book with hand-illuminated additions containing a long propagandistic poem in praise of the father of Ludovico Sforza, who was Leonardo's patron, recounting the career. The Warsaw copy, printed on vellum with added illumination, was given to Galeazzo Sanseverino, a military commander under Ludovico Sforza, on his marriage to Bianca Sforza in 1496. According to Kemp and Cotte, the association with the Sforziada suggests that the drawing is a portrait of Bianca Sforza, who was the daughter of Ludovico Sforza and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis. At the time of the portrait, she was around thirteen years old. Leonardo painted three other portraits associated with the family or court of Ludovico Sforza. The Polish scholar Bogdan Horodyski in 1954-1956 reached the conclusion that the Warsaw illumination refers to both the deceased dukes Galeazzo Maria and Gian Galeazzo and to the dynastic downfall after the usurpation of Ludovico il Moro. The reproduction of the unpublished heraldic figure attributed to Antonio Grifo, illuminated in the incunabulum "Comedia" by Dante (Cremonese, Venice 1491), now at Casa di Dante in Rome, shows the original coat of arms and insignia of the family of Galeazzo Sanseverino, and the comparison with those illuminated by Birago is not corresponding. Developing this hypothesis, Carla Glori suggests that Caterina Sforza, the daughter of Galeazzo Maria and half-sister of Gian Galeazzo, was the owner of the Warsaw Sforziad and that she gave it to the family of her deceased half-brother between 1496 and 1499. Horodyski's ideas have recently been revived by Katarzyna Krzyzagórska-Pisarek in her "La Bella Principessa. Arguments against the Attribution to Leonardo", Artibus et Historiae, XXXVI, 215, pp. 61– 89. Pisarek is a member of Artwatch UK, which has offered polemic denunciations of Kemp. ==Opposition to Leonardo attribution==

The New Yorker article discussed the troubling circumstances in which Kemp attributed this work to Leonardo. But apart from this, strong indications are going against the hypothesis of authenticity, and the attribution to Leonardo has been challenged by a number of scholars who showed interest. Among the reasons for doubting its authorship are the lack of provenance prior to the 20th century – unusual given Leonardo's renown dating from his own lifetime, as well as the fame of the purported subject's family Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of the Albertina, Vienna, said "No one is convinced it is a Leonardo," and David Ekserdjian, a scholar of 16th-century Italian drawings, wrote that he suspects the work is a "counterfeit". a group of German painters working in Rome during the early 19th century who revived the styles and subjects of the Italian Renaissance. In evidence, Kline points to a drawing on vellum by Schnorr, Half-nude Female, in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany, which he suggests depicts the same model, although older, as portrayed in La Bella Principessa. Comparative material-testing of the vellum supports of the Mannheim Schnorr and La Bella Principessa were anticipated to occur in the New York federal court lawsuit ''Marchig v. Christie's, brought in May 2010 by the original owner of La Bella Principessa'', who accused Christie's of breach of fiduciary duty, negligent misrepresentation and other claims. However, the court dismissed the suit on the ground that the claims were brought years too late (Statute of Limitations and Laches), and thus the merits of the suit were never addressed. The district court decision was upheld on appeal. Disagreements with the attribution to Leonardo were made before the discovery of the missing page in the Warsaw Sforziada book. No alternative attribution has been accepted by Kemp or his research group. Kline claims that no comparative scientific analysis has been made of the vellum supports in question: the Warsaw Sforziada book, the Mannheim Schnorr (an alternate attribution), and La Bella Principessa, although Kemp and Cotte have shown a close match between the vellum of the portrait and the book. Further analysis of the vellum could possibly provide the conclusive evidence that may support or disqualify Schnorr's authorship. In November 2015, notorious art forger Shaun Greenhalgh claimed that he created the work in 1978, at the age of 20; Greenhalgh said the woman's face is that of a supermarket check-out girl named Sally who worked in Bolton, outside Manchester. In his memoir ''A Forger's Tale'', written in prison, Greenhalgh claims as a 17 year old to have forged the drawing by obtaining an old piece of vellum from a reused 1587 land deed. Kemp said he found the claim hilarious and ridiculous. ==Popular culture==

The work of art was studied on the PBS program NOVA in 2012 in a program titled Mystery of a Masterpiece, from NOVA/National Geographic/PBS, which aired on January 25, 2012. ==Notes==