Is the Drawing by Leonardo?

Richard Dorment of the Telegraph has an interesting article on the questioned Leonardo drawing, La Bella Principessa. Dorment mentions information contained in  Professor Martin Kemp book which supports the idea the drawing is by Leonardo. The drawing is on vellum, which has been carbon dated between 1440-1650, there is a palm and partial finger print which supposedly compare favorably to prints found on  Leonardo’s unfinished painting in the Vatican of St Jerome.

If it is a Leonardo, some suggest the value could be $150 million.  But there are doubters as well, with no other Leonardo drawings done on vellum and many experts think the drawing is an outright fake manufactured in the 20th century.

It is an interesting read, and considers authentication thourgh both connoisuership, elements of Leonardo, forensics and techonolgy.  A good read for appraisers, no question.

Dorment states

opponents point out that of the 4,000 or so surviving drawings by Leonardo, not a single one is on vellum. But vellum is a material a copyist might well use – because sizeable sheets of monastic vellum of the correct age are easy to come by, whereas blank sheets of paper made during Leonardo’s lifetime are not. Nor does the observation that a left-handed artist drew the portrait convince the sceptics. According to Pietro C Marani, Italy’s most distinguished Leonardo scholar, who oversaw the restoration of The Last Supper : “The fact that one is looking at a drawing by a left-handed artist does not carry any weight: there exist copies of drawings by Leonardo made by imitators which present this particular characteristic – by, Francesco Melzi, for example, as Kenneth Clark and others have already written.” Likewise, a copyist could easily arrive at the sitter’s costume by studying any Milanese 15th-century portrait. Even the drawing’s obvious antiquity has drawn fire from one museum director, who asked not to be named. He believes the drawing is not even 19th century, and thinks it is “a screaming 20th-century fake”, made up out of a “compilation of obviously Leonardesque elements that is not even close to Leonardo himself”. For this well-known connoisseur of Italian painting and sculpture, the damage and repairs are suspicious, for, although apparent to the naked eye, they are not so extensive that they make the picture unappealing or unsaleable – as it would be, for example, if the repairs disfigured the face.
Although 90 of the book’s 190 pages are given over to the complex (and to the layman, barely intelligible) analysis of X-rays, scans, infra-red emission images and so forth, Kemp says that the fingerprints provide “no conclusive evidence either way” . So why bother? An obviously genuine drawing rarely requires such extended scientific analysis – much more important for assessing its status is connoisseurship, which entails detailed comparisons with universally accepted drawings by the same artist. But to make his argument, Kemp reproduces only six of a possible 600 ravishing drawings (not counting notebook jottings) by Leonardo. And the drawings chosen for comparison are uniformly weak. This reader was left feeling that Kemp is dealing from a stacked deck.

To read the full article, click HERE.