Mystery Of A Masterpiece on NOVA/PBS

Is this the portrait of Bianca Sforza and was it sketched by Leonardo Da Vinci?

Although these pursuits can be seen as distractions from his painting, they were much too inventive and visionary to be brushed off as distractions. In fact, his scientific pursuits lead him to develop a rather scientific style of painting as he explored not only new techniques for painting but also anatomy, as he drew dissected bodies, the science of optics, which lead him to under stand the some of the basics of light. All of this scientific study allowed him to combine both his analytic and his artistic skills to create artwork that was both beautiful and well observed.

The television show spotlighted a collector who had purchased a small painting for $20,000 through a dealer. As he became convinced that it was much older than the 19yh century claim that Christie’s had made, he sought out experts to help him validate his conviction that it was a Da Vinci. Carbon dating, which measured the amount of the carbon-14 isotope radiating from the vellum, dated the cloth to the time of the Renaissance. One artist demonstrated how forgers removed paint from authentically aged canvas to repaint it in the style of a famous artist. In his demonstration, he managed to create a fake Monet with forty hours invested in the fakery. Another artist demonstrated the difficulty that an artist would have doing a ground chalk sketch on vellum. By the angle of the sketching, it was also established that the artist was left handed, a drawing pattern that I can personally identify with.

The end of the show manged, by pure luck, to show how the original painting had been removed from a 15th century book. The book was a history of the Sforza family, the ruling power brokers in Milan in the late 1400s. The Sforzas were known to be major patrons of Da Vinci. At that time, he was caught up in the eternal city wars that plagued northern Italy and designed weaponry for Ludovico Sforza. At about that time that Da Vinci was living in Milan, Ludovico had a young niece who married but died recently afterwards. It was guessed that the book was a wedding present with her sketch placed prominently in the front of the book and it would have been convenient for Leonardo to sketch her prior to the wedding.

If you get a chance to see the show, please do so. It is a fascinating window into how science can currently validate artwork and to what lengths people will go to fake artwork. It is an important lesson to know of you collect the work of old masters.

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2 Comments

• Robert Pittam says:

  February 17, 2012 at 9:31 am

  Beautiful drawing, but one thing mystifies me – how could a chalk drawing survive as a book page? Far too delicate to be handled, surely?

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