In 1997, Christie’s offered a painting for auction that the house believed to have been created in 19th century Germany. Under the provisional title Young girl in profile in Renaissance dressAccording to the Artnet Price Database, it was sold to New York gallery owner Kate Ganz for around $22,000.
Ten years later, art collector Peter Silverman and a friend entered Ganz’s gallery. Both men noticed the painting that Ganz was offering for sale.—Silverman, because he had attended the Christie’s auction, his friend, because the painting, with its delicate facial features and sfumato effect, was neither from the 19th century nor from Germany.
Convinced that there is more to Young girl in profile as it appeared, Silverman bought the painting and began showing it to art historians, many of whom said it reminded them of the work of none other than Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci.
The possibility excited Silverman. “A Da Vinci just appearing out of nowhere,” he later told CNN. “I was confused, kind of at a loss.”
Their suspicions seemed to be confirmed when scientists at the Paris-based Lumière Technology laboratory took multispectral images of the painting’s pigment layers in 2009 and found a fingerprint and handprint that matched those previously discovered on two other works by Leonardo.
“Leonardo used his hands generously and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints can be found on many of his works,” said Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art expert who Seattle Newspaper at that time and explained that the newly discovered print matched the one found on Saint Jerome (ca. 1482).
Wall text in the Met shows an enlargement of Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint Jerome with the artist’s fingerprint. Photo by Sarah Cascone.
The art historian Martin Kemp, a world-renowned Leonardo expert and early supporter of the Young girl in profilewhich he renamed The beautiful princesscelebrated the discovery by writing a 200-page book of the same title, in which Kemp argues that the woman in the painting, completed around 1496, is Bianca Sforza, the daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis.
Because The beautiful princess was painted on parchment, i.e. on parchment made of calfskin—the only known Leonardo who painted on this material—Kemp speculates that the artist made it as a cover for one of Sforza’s books rather than as a work of art in its own right, since parchment was primarily used for binding manuscripts at the time.
Not everyone in the art world accepted this new argument for the authorship of the painting. In 2011, a Leonardo retrospective organized by the National Gallery in London refused to The beautiful princess because the curators did not find the evidence convincing enough. At the same time, they Salvator Mundianother painting whose attribution to Leonardo remains hotly debated.
Leonardo da Vinci, Salvator Mundica. 1500. Courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd.
If the controversy surrounding The beautiful princessThe authenticity of the painting was not great enough, it became even greater when the famous British art forger Shaun Greenhalgh claimed authorship of the painting in 2015. In his memoirs The story of a forgerGreenhalgh claimed he painted the picture in 1978 while working in a supermarket.
The model, he wrote, “was a girl named Sally, who worked at the till. Despite her humble position, she was a domineering little thing and very self-important.” To make the forgery look old, he reportedly used a document from 1587 as a canvas, supported by the lid of a Victorian school desk.
Greenhalgh’s report did not convince everyone either. Kemp believes that the painting was created much earlier than 1587. In addition, further tests carried out in the course of Greenhalgh’s memoirs showed that the pigment of The beautiful princess is itself over 250 years old and therefore cannot possibly have been created in the 20th century.
Critics and commentators may never agree on who painted The beautiful princess. But they seem to at least agree that it wasn’t Greenhalgh.
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