IF ANYONE SEES A PAIR OF MISSING HANDS

But, how do we know its real? Is the portrait of Ginevra by Leonardo DaVinci real, an authentic work of the master?  The cost be square centimeter of paint of the portrait of Ginevra de Benci is the greatest in the history of collecting.”One more the most important reason, is that it is the first psychological portrait ever painted and one of the first the three-quarter or frontal view of the sitter. Leonardo’s tremendous innovation was developed in his four portraits of women where each woman express different mood: the earliest Ginevra withdrawn sadness or melancholy, the next Celicia Gallerani appealing wistfulness, the portrait of Lucrezia Crivoli withdrawn happiness, and the last the Mona Lisa mirthless amusement. Of these, the most original is the enigmatic melancholy of Ginevre de Benci.”

This would not be worth remarking were it not for the fact that its integrity has been sharply questioned in the past. These doubts have been, for the most part, dispelled though it took considerable effort. The naysayers and pessimists based their case on the disturbingly sketch history of the 550 year old painting and the fact that only nine are 99.99% sure to have been finished by him, with another eight close behind. The holders of the balance may democratically own a Davinci’s who level of purity can vary depending on the generosity of the bell curve.

Leonardo's study of hands, the windsor castle sketch, is thought to have been a preparatory sketch for his Ginevra portrait

There was an absence after it was painted, of almost two hundred years where it simply vanished from sight. Suddenly, it turned up in the hands of the princes of Liechtenstein sometime before 1733, the date when the red wax seal with the coat of arms of the then reigning prince was stamped on the back of the picture above the juniper symbol. There the painting remained until 1967 when the ruling prince sold it to the National Gallery in Washington.

So rare is a work of Leonardo’s youth that the portrait was not recognized as a Leonardo painting until 1866. As soon as one expert claimed it authenticity, other experts rose up, cried foul, disputed the attribution and suggested alternative explanations. That DaVinci painted some portrait of Ginevra remains beyond question. The question arose as to whether the Liechtenstein portrait Leonardo is known to have painted of the actual Ginevra de Benci? The dates are in agreement, but the art experts were cautious. The skeptics pointed out that leonardo, in three other portraits, depicted the hands of his sitters, while hands are not shown in the Ginevra portrait. The question received a plausible answer art sleuths after some astute detective work.

Verrocchio, Lady with Primroses done in 1478 may have provided the model for Leonardo's treatment of the hands now missing from Ginevra's portrait.

Examination of he painting shows that at some time a strip had been cut off the bottom of the picture. This alteration also cut off the base of the juniper insignia. Judging by the space needed to complete the wreath, about six inches of the painting had been sheared away, almost enough, or a close enough approximation to have been able to have accommodated a pair of hands. Also, there existed at Windsor Castle a Leonardo sketch of hands that would fit the Ginevra portrait precisely and may have been the preparatory drawing for the missing hands. Leonardo could have borrowed the positioning of the hands directly from a statue by Verrocchio.

In the final analysis, however, all the circumstantial evidence pales before an obvious artistic truth. At the time the portrait of Ginevra was painted, nobody except Leonardo had the talent to carry it off. Experts pointed to the living glow of the flesh in Ginevra’s portrait. Nobody before Leonardo had achieved such an effect. Again, there is the delicate modeling of the face, in which each minute variation of surface blends imperceptibly into the next. This was achieved by Leonardo through the fusing of light and shadow to produce soft, dissolving outlines; the ”sfumato” forever associated with Leonardo’s name.

Ginevra de Benci

”Furthermore, the portrait reveals Leonardo’s incomparable technical skill characteristically for Leonardo. There are passages such as the modeling of the lips, which Leonardo never surpassed in delicacy. The alabaster smoothness of the Ginevra’s face was a desired effect that Leonardo accomplished by smoothed the surface of the paint with his own hands. Such value transitions are miracles of technique, and Leonardo was the first painter to have the perfect control of his medium necessary to make light and shade merge imperceptibly.”

The artists around Leonardo placed their figures in the bright spotlight of an unchanging high noon. It was Leonardo who introduced into painting the atmosphere of twilight. Finally, in that portrait, the artist has succeeded in portraying not just a lovely face but a face that registers an animating presence of a soul. What DaVinci called the ”motions of the mind”. By capturing those ”motions” in his portrait of Ginevra, Leonardo not only left behind the stamp of his authorship, but yet another living, enigmatic presence to look at and wonder over.

The issue of new DaVinci memorabilia coming to market is not a new phenomenon, but part of the art business. A ”new discovered” portrait claimed to have been made by Davinici recently made the rounds, but not all the art sharks are biting at the bait concerning the pen, chalk, and ink on vellum:” It’s the flip side to the multimillion-dollar counterfeit. The art world is abuzz with the recent discovery that a portrait thought to be the drawing of an unknown 19th century German artist is now being attributed to the Italian master Leonardo da Vinci. And the way the revelation was made is straight out of a Sherlock Holmes novel: researchers traced the portrait to the artist using a 500-year-old fingerprint….It was bought two years ago by an anonymous Swiss collector at the Ganz Gallery in New York for about $19,000. Experts now put the possible value of the artwork at upwards of $150 million. …hen one of the experts, Montreal-based art-forensics specialist Peter Paul Biro, discovered the print of an index finger on the top left corner of the drawing using state-of-the-art multispectral infrared technology, according to a report in the Antiques Trade Gazette. Biro says the print was “highly comparable” to another fingerprint found on da Vinci’s St. Jerome painting in the Vatican.”

Privately owned painting called La Bella Principessa, thought to be a lost work by Leonardo da Vinci

The other other flip side, is there are even charlatan art forensic experts. Biro has already been accused of tinkering with the evidence in another case of mistaken identity. He falsely authenticated a Jackson Pollock on the basis of a similar fingerprint that was allegedly copied off a paint can from the artist’s studio.However, he was not criminally charged. ”Whether art scholars can come to an agreement on the subject remains to be seen. But Christie’s knows all too well that the other way to arrive at a verdict on the work’s provenance may be for the mysterious Swiss owner to put it back up for sale. You can bet it wouldn’t be listed as “19th century German” or sell for less than $20,000.” ( Jeff Israely )

Another, facet of the art market is the reattribution business, a close corollary of the ”look what I just found” technique . It certainly is a skeptics business, requiring a great deal of faith in an art expert or several to recognize beyond any reasonable doubt that the work shows ”the unmistakeable hand” of a master. In the case of Davinci, he was given credit for painting the angel in the lower left hand corner of Verrocchio’s ”Baptism of Christ” , based initially on Vassari’s writings and later  scrutiny of art historians over many years before being accepted as incontrovertible.

Verrocchio, Baptism of Christ, 1475-1478