LEONARDO's BELLA PRINCIPESSA

LEONARDO's BELLA PRINCIPESSA

What a stunning profile portrait of a young woman exquisitely carried out in white, black, and red
chalks on vellum (veal skin)!  She has been called the beautiful princess, "La Bella Principessa," by the Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp, and so aptly named. In 2009 Kemp, together with Pascal Cottes from the French Lumiere Technology Company, which specializes in infra-red analysis, discovered that this portrait is not only an authentic work by Leonardo da Vinci, but that it had originally been a page in a manuscript from the 15th century. That manuscript, now in the Warsaw National Library in Poland, helped identify the sitter, and added to our knowledge about the chalk drawing. Published by Kemp in a 2015 Monza exhibition catalogue, (La Bella Principessa, 2015, Scripta Maneant, Bologna), the drawing now takes its place among Leonardo's treasured works.
        The date when it was cut out of the manuscript is unclear, but now the portrait belongs to a private owner. Questions we can answer now:
A)HOW DID SCHOLARS DETERMINE IT WAS BY LEONARDO?
B)WHAT IS ITS DATE? and
C) WHO IS THE YOUNG GIRL DEPICTED?

A) HOW DID SCHOLARS DETERMINE IT WAS BY LEONARDO?
In earlier blogs we have explained how experts can distinguish a drawing by Michelangelo from a drawing by Leonardo. Five clues would suggest that this drawing called La Bella Principessa is by Leonardo:
1) The cross-hatchings, the lines used for shading, are by a left-handed artist, and they move from upper left to lower right or lower right to upper left; they have very little space between them and yet
appear to be almost parallel, so fine is the skill and so confident the eye of the artist who drew them. The left-handed cross-hatchings are very visible next to the outline of the girls' forehead and nose and they set off the face from the background.

I draw here in yellow a few of those lines so the viewer will know where to look:

You can feel Leonardo's hand moving over the vellum on this manuscript page.
2) The second clue that this portrait is by Leonardo is in the experimental quality of the media.
We know from Leonardo's notebooks that in 1494 he wrote a note to himself to check with

Jean Perréal, a French artist familiar with the technique of "trois crayons," three-wax coloring, when Perreal was in Milan with King Charles VIII in 1494. Leonardo wanted to know how to attach various chalk colors to animal skin. It was just this sort of chalk-binding technique which he used in making the black, white, and red chalk colors stay on the page of this manuscript portrait. His willingness to experiment is evident in the new technique he learned from Perreal, and the combination of chalks and vellum is unusual in his works.

3) The hairstyle of the sitter is traceable to the Milanese Sforza court in 1495, when Beatrice d'Este
has her formal portrait painted with her husband, Ludovico il Moro, in which she wraps her hair in the "coazzone," this type of pigtail. The double portrait altarpiece done by the Maestro della Pala Sforzesca  (probably the artist Boltraffio), suggests that the Leonardo work must date after that
altarpiece and before 1497, when Beatrice dies. The fact that Leonardo is in Milano from 1482 to 1499 means that the hairstyle of the sitter falls within the time period he is working at the Sforza court. The date of the manuscript itself also falls within the time period he is in Milan.
 

4) The fourth thing which gives away the artist is the lifelike quality with which he imbues the portrait. "La Bella Principessa" leaps off the page as Leonardo's self-portrait does, partly because the blue eye seems alive, the skin vibrant and flush.

 
And the play of her mouth and shading around the chin, as well as the shadow cast on the back of her neck make her appear the young woman who once stood alive in front of the artist and seems
alive still for the viewer. Kemp and Cottes also point out that the artist made slight changes in line
near the forehead, chin, and back of the neck, exact places where Leonardo adjusted lines in other portrait drawings.

She is painted in profile at a young age, in her teens, with her hair at the top of her head made into formal shape with square-net cap kept on with thin ribbon band,
 
and the long hair tied down the back with ribbon bandage in the entwined braiding called the coazzone.

The green dress she wears is open in a triangle slit on the sleeve that reveals the reddish undergarment, and the embroidery around the sleeve opening is another formal design with rings intertwined and knots in a pattern:

Which brings us to the fifth clue that this is a portrait by Leonardo.
5)Some of the entwined embroidery looks like entwined diamond rings, and the embroidery at the top
of the triangular slit has balls embedded.
This type of embroidery with entwined filaments is referred to in the period as "VINCI," or "KNOTS." As Leonardo was from Vinci, this particular in the portrait may be his way of signing the work without using his name. The knotted embroidery, or " NODI VINCIANI," would reveal the artist's identity to those familiar with the embroidery technique. (See Elizabeth Gnignera's essay in
Kemp's 2015 volume, particularly the page opposite Figure 6.)
The balls embedded in the knots refer also to the coat-of arms of the husband of this girl, to be discussed later.

B) WHAT IS ITS DATE? 
The manuscript from which the portrait had been lifted has been found by Kemp to be an expensive decorated incunabulum (a printed book before 1500)  that details the history of the life of the Sforza family in Milan, four copies of which exist and can be dated around 1491-96.  Kemp has been able to show that the three punch-hole marks in the left edge of the vellum portrait of the girl match three of the punch-hole marks of a missing page of the manuscript in Warsaw in the National Library.

This copy of the Sforziada (what they call this Sforza history) was found in Poland, but the history is
written down in Italian with some Latin mottos placed on the most elaborately decorated page of all, the frontispiece seen in the photo above and below as the page which follows our portrait.

 
This page on which the history begins has many clues about the date of the portrait which precedes it. For one thing, the decorations have various symbols of the Sforza family as well as the profile portrait of Francesco Sforza, the founder of the family dynasty:
Francesco Sforza, Victorious Duke of Milano, IV, Pater Patriae (Father of his City-State) it reads here, the N being the beginning consonant of the history.

Above Francesco's head is a white dog with unclasped dog collar held by a hand, normally a symbol

associated with Gian Galeazzo Sforza and with Ludovico il Moro:

the hands holding a flour cloth, a sifter, a Sforza icon, set above three entwined diamond rings, which repeat the diamond ring pattern on the portrait and are wedding symbols:

the shields with the letters and superscript for the name GALEAZZO

(shields being GALEAS in Latin): GZ

a coat of arms with waves and boats, new to Ludovico il Moro, next to a scene in which Ludovico is portrayed as a black putto, sitting above and being paid homage to by seven other putti, two of whom are female and two rabbits, dark and white, all of these figures meant to be caricatures of the five boys and one girl in the Sanseverino family, together with the dark-skinned blond girl at the back, who is Ludovico's daughter:

Above the Moor child runs a Latin banner that reads, "EXEMPLAR INCLITUS IMITAMINI." (If you follow my mentor (Francesco Sforza) you will imitate me.)
The Latin inscription below the Moor child, "Delegi Vos Vi Fructuarii Sitis et Fructusur Maneat," roughly means, "Go forth and multiply, be fruitful," Ludovico's instructions to his daughter and husband. On the left the husband and daughter, linked by arms, reply in a Latin inscription,"Redemisti nos memento quod sumus tui DNE." (We will obey your instructions because
you are our Lord.)

The artist's signature, Giovanni Pietro Birago, is wrapped around a fountain

on the right, also in Latin, "P(re)sb(yte)r Io(hannes)Petru(s)  Biragus Fe(cit.) (The Presbyter, Giovanni Pietro Birago, made me.)

 Two wild men holding another shield on which we see repeated the hands and flour, with the Latin inscription: TAL A TU QUAL A MI     (As I have done to you, so you will do to me)

and finally a distinct coat-of-arms next to dangling diamond rings, that is not of the Sforza family,
but rather of the SANSEVERINO family, red stripes and a formalized red letter on yellow ground.

All of these symbols reveal that the person given the book by Ludovico must be GALEAZZO SANSEVERINO, a condottiere and the head of Ludovico's armies, and the man to whom he gives his illegitimate daughter, whom he legitimizes in 1489, in marriage. GALEAZZO's name is abbreviated into the GZ on the shields.  Galeazzo's father's coat-of-arms, lent to him from the Naples branch of the ARAGON family explains why the Spanish colors of red and gold are present in the decoration:
As is pointed out by M.L. Evans in his fascinating article, "New Light on the 'Sforziada' Frontispieces of Giovan Pietro Birago," British Library Journal XIII, 1987, pp. 232-47, Roberto SANSEVERINO, a great condottiere and the father of Galeazzo Sanseverino, shows the same coat-of-arms in the fronstispiece of a 1483 book on warfare commissioned by him, De Rei Militari by Valturio:

and, as is not pointed out by Evans, these same coat-of-arms show up on Roberto Sanseverino's tomb in Trento in the lower righthand corner:

 

The balls in another coat-of-arms on his tomb reappear in the decoration on the "principessa's" dress:

as well as the eagle juxtaposed with the "Phoenix," the two birds above the coat-of arms on the page: 

 

We know that Ludovico il Moro commissioned from the book illuminator, Giovanni Pietro Birago,

two other copies of the Sforziada, one for himself and one for his nephew, Gian Galeazzo Sforza; for

those a profile portrait of the man was put on the frontispiece page.

Ludovico il Moro (dark-hair) and Gian Galeazzo (blond):

But for the manuscript now in Warsaw, no profile portrait of Galeazzo Sanseverino was painted in but rather his coat-of-arms and a portrait of his new wife, BIANCA, was given pride of place in a portrait profile on the page preceding the page with wedding rings. Ludovico controls the message on the fronstispiece as well as in the portrait. Bianca is his illegitimate daughter whom he has legitimized in 1489, but he marries her to GALEAZZO SANSEVERINO, his favorite warrior, in 1496, two years after the real heir, Gian Galeazzo Sforza, Ludovico's nephew, has died in mysterious circumstances. The date of the wedding of GALEAZZO TO BIANCA gives us the date of the manuscript and the date of the portrait by Leonardo, 1496.

Bianca's position is reinforced as one of Ludovico's descendants, Galeazzo Sanseverino's position is reinforced by his marital connection to Ludovico's family. Why is Ludovico giving a history of the Sforza family (to which Sanseverino was distantly related) for the occasion of his wedding to his daughter, if Ludovico has legitimate male heirs, Massimiliano and Francesco, by his marriage to Beatrice d'Este? 

The manuscript is certainly an apt wedding gift to invite the condottiere into his family line, and

to shore up the Sforza legitimacy for power after the legitimate heir of Galeazzo Maria, Gian Galeazzo, grandson of Francesco Sforza, has been done away with. Is it that Ludovico does not

trust the youth of his sons, whose ages would have been 3 and 1 years old in 1496? Is it that he

is thinking about the transfer of power to someone he trusts and whose worth he has tested? He

has Leonardo paint the portrait of his daughter,

C)  Bianca SFORZA, his daughter by his mistress, Bernardina de Corradis, as a way of undercutting Beatrice's power as his wife and undercutting the power of the wife of the legitimate heir, Isabella d'Aragon and her children, the rightful heirs. He wants a smooth transfer of power if anything should happen to him or Beatrice. The death of Gian Galeazzo has reminded him of his own mortality and his young children cannot take the reins of power yet.

He has been the de facto ruler of Milan while Gian Galeazzo was young; when Gian Galeazzo dies in 1494, Ludovico becomes the actual ruler until his exile in 1499. Ludovico understands the principle of regency, the duty of the care for the actual heir; he is signalling in this manuscript his desire for Galeazzo SANSEVERINO to take over his role as guardian if anything happens to him. Sanseverino cannot inherit the Sforza name, but he inherits some of the Sforza symbols on the page, and by marrying into the Sforza family, he cements his link with Ludovico.

BIANCA's portrait enlarged and set into the manuscript of the Sforziada, keeps other pretenders to the throne at bay and enhances Ludovico's idea of his own dynasty line. 

Sonnet XII by Bellioncioni

Poem written on the occasion of the wedding of Galeazzo and Bianca (trans. mine):

S’egli è ver quel proverbio che si dice         If it’s true what the proverb says    
Da’ teneri anni si conosce e vede                 that from tender years one can predict and see
Uno elevato ingegno, oggi si crede              an elevated genius, today we believe
Che Bianca sarà al mondo una fenice.         That Bianca will be a phoenix in the world.
Come buon frutto vien dalla radice,             As good fruit comes from the root,
Dall’ingegno del padre è fatta erede;           from the ingenuity of the father she is the heir.
Et il Cielo un tal sposo gli concede,             And Heaven has conceded her such a husband
Che l’un per l’altro sarà ben felice.              That each of them will be truly happy.
Vera elezion, conveniente e bella,                True election, smooth and beautiful
Fatta dal mio parente Ludovico,                   Made by my relative Ludovico
Che nulla cosa a questa coppia manca.         So that this couple will lack nothing.
Galeazzo mancava a questa stella,                Galeazzo was missing this star
A Galeazzo, di virtute amico,                        Galeazzo, friend of virtue, of all things in the world,
Mancava al mondo solamente Bianca           Was only missing Bianca.

Le Rime di Bernardo Bellincioni, v. 149, Issue 51, ed. Alberto Bacchi della Lega. 


Bianca is 13-14 in 1496; she is married in June and dead by October, four months later. Sadly for all,

Bianca dies 4 months after the portrait is painted, probably of an ectopic pregnancy.

Luckily Leonardo da Vinci is asked to make her wedding portrait for the marriage; without his
consummate artistry, we would have little idea of the beauty of this young girl. With his attentive
fingers in red, black, and yellow chalk, he has conjured up a Bianca who will live forever, a true Phoenix, as she is in the sonnet.

Kemp says the manuscript's route from the Milanese court to Poland is not known. It is possible to imagine that the book is brought from Milan to Warsaw by one of the princesses of the Sforza court in Milan, when she marries into the royal house of Poland. One such princess existed and her name was Bona Sforza, the last remaining daughter of Gian Galeazzo Sforza and Isabella of Aragon. Bona is made Queen of Poland in 1518 and moves to Warsaw to be with her new husband, King Sigismund I. Does she take the book with her? It certainly would explain how it ended up in Poland. And she was an accomplished woman, educated by her mother, Isabella of Aragon, to be a head of state herself.
By the time she marries Sigismund, she is living with her mother in exile in Bari, where her mother has moved after being given a castle in 1501. But as we have said, Bona's father was Gian Galeazzo Sforza, the legitimate ruler of Milano, who had died in 1494, perhaps was poisoned, and Bona would have known that the original owner of the Warsaw volume was a major pretender to the power of the Milanese court and as such, a threat to her mother's children, herself included.
But things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and Milan as a center of power is nearly finished by 1499. Ludovico is imprisoned in France under house arrest by the French king, Leonardo escapes to Venice, Galeazzo Sanseverino is taken by the French, then released to work for them as a condottiere.
Did Isabella of Aragon, left in Milan until she moves to Bari in 1501, take some books of the court library with her for safekeeping? Especially the history of the Sforza which could have reinforced the legitimacy of her children in the Sforza line? If so, it would explain how Bianca's portrait ended up in Poland, carried there by the daughter of Isabella, Bona. Bona would have been two when Bianca married, 2 when she died. But perhaps she wanted to remember La Bella Principessa and the beautiful court life she was part of in Milano two decades before her own marriage. Some traces of that connection are present in the decorative hair-piece worn by Bona in her official wedding portrait:

Bona Sforza in 1517
Bona Sforza in 1517,
from a Krakow book of 1521, Decius, I.L. De vestutatibus
Polonorum Liber I. De Jagellonum familium Liber II. De Sigismundi regis temporibus Liber III.

Are not the net cap in diamond shapes and the "nodo vinciano" holding the top of the netting in place

in Bona's headpiece reminiscent of those same designs in the portrait Leonardo made of BIANCA SFORZA in 1496?

The links are "NODI VINCIANI," the VINCI knots.