Leonardo's Lost Princess

Leonardo's Lost Princess by Peter Silverman Page A

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Authors: Peter Silverman
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people may confess to a sneaking regard for rogues, I do not happen to belong to the fraternity—let them save their sneaking regard for the dealers. Moreover, if Christie’s, Colnaghi’s, Sotheby’s and other important merchants who have handled my work really think that I am a crook, why do they not press charges?
    The answer which comes first to mind is of course that they do not want to rock the boat, and no doubt this is true, for as London art dealer and specialist in nineteenth-century paintings David Gould said about the Keating affair: “There’s an awful lot more that hasn’t come out and won’t come out. You don’t want to rock the market. Faith in the market is a very delicate thing.” 6
    Turner’s disappointing experience trying to bring forgeries to the attention of his museum’s directors would support Hebborn’s suspicion that it was not always in the market’s best interest to know the truth. In my experience, however, there is more than an excess of caution when it comes to attributions. I have never known a connoisseur who would tolerate error for the sake of the market. When I began to consider the possibility that I was holding a Leonardo, I knew that only the most rigorous examination would do. Indeed, one would have to be a fool not to be wary of a Leonardo attribution. There’s bound to be controversy. The last time a serious claim was made, it took nearly a century to sort it out.

    In the early years of the twentieth century, Kansas City, Missouri, was the last place one might expect to find a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, especially since there was not another Leonardo to be found in the entire United States. Yet that was the claim being made.
    In 1920, Harry Hahn, a car salesman, married a Frenchwoman named Andrée Lardoux, whose godmother gave the couple a very special wedding gift: a picture that had been authenticated as a Leonardo by Georges Sortais, a French expert who specialized in the Italian Renaissance. The picture happened to be nearly identical to a work of Leonardo’s housed in the Louvre, called La Belle Ferronnière. That portrait was believed to be of Lucrezia Crivelli, a mistress of Ludovico il Moro Sforza’s in the 1490s. ( Ferronnière , which means “ironmonger,” refers to the fact that the subject of the portrait wears a thin gold chain with a gemstone across her forehead.)
    The young couple didn’t have much interest in art but did appreciate the economic advantage of owning a Leonardo. The Hahns contacted J. Conrad Hug, a local art dealer, who arranged to sell the painting to the Kansas City Art Institute for $250,000, a princely sum at the time, especially since the new museum normally had an annual procurement budget of $60,000 to $80,000. One can only imagine how important a Leonardo might have been to the museum.
    Sir Joseph Duveen, thought by many to be the greatest art dealer in the world, had never seen the Hahns’ painting or even a photo of it, but when he learned of the sale he immediately declared it a copy. “The painting in Kansas City is a measly copy of which there have been hundreds made of this and other subjects by Leonardo da Vinci and offered to the world as genuine,” he said. “Leonardo never made replicas of his works, and the real original La Belle Ferronnière is in the Louvre.” 7
    Persuaded by Duveen’s certainty, the museum canceled the purchase, and the Hahns were left holding a portrait whose value was suddenly in question. They were horrified that their dreams had been so casually dashed by a man they had never met and who had never “met” their Leonardo. Andrée Hahn sued Duveen for $500,000.
    In his responses to the lawsuit, Duveen listed eleven elite European and American experts who agreed with him, and he continued his assault on the Hahns’ portrait, writing, “The head does not show the consummate skill of the human structure that is fundamental and inherent in the works of Leonardo. The head is attached to

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