We are still on the trail of the person in the title image. Was she an Italian Princess, or was she a cashier from Bolton? If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then perhaps you’ll want to go back and read this story about how we started on this quest. I will provide a very short summary.
A Very Short Summary
The drawing above, called La Bella Principessa, went to auction for the first time in 1998. It was purchased for a little more than twenty-thousand dollars. After that purchase, experts began to investigate whether it was created by Leonardo da Vinci. The world’s foremost da Vinci scholar ran a thorough battery of tests and determined that it was, in fact, a drawing by da Vinci.
He wrote a very compelling book about it in 2010.
Subsequently, art forger Shaun Greenhalgh claimed that he created the drawing way back in 1978, and the lady pictured was actually “Sally,” a cashier at the Bolton Co-op. Having no other way to determine who was right, we decided to find Sally. We ran an advertisement in The Bolton News offering a reward of £500 for information leading to the discovery of this young woman. This is what that looked like:
Since the First Story
There have been some developments since we published the initial installment on April 8, 2019. First, we have had two “takers” respond to the advertisement. One said his father worked at the Bolton Co-op around that time. The other had his own method for locating the young lady.
He has contacted the archivist for the Co-op at which “Sally” supposedly worked, looking for a list. If one of those lists from around 1978 contains Shaun Greenhalgh’s name, then it probably also contains the name of your Italian Princess. If she ever existed.
As yet, they have not come up with a name, much less proof that the woman was the “sitter” for the drawing. We hope to hear back from them soon. If they are unsuccessful, then our next step is to retain a private investigator.
Compare La Bella Principessa with The Lady with Ermine
My Sister and I both believe that the sitter for La Bella Principessa and The Lady with Ermine (an acknowledged authentic work by Leonardo da Vinci) look similar. Could they be the same woman? Let’s look at the pictures side by side:
Do you see a resemblance? Could the girl on the left be a younger version of the lady on the right? Maybe she lost the baby fat and bought an ugly cat? To test that theory—at least to the best of my ability—I compared the two faces using Amazon’s Rekognition software. Here are the results:
As you can see, the facial recognition software determined that there was no match. I do not consider this to be dispositive, as I have used facial recognition software before, tested it extensively, and came up with this false negative result:
It seems that tilting the head a couple of degrees and a few years of aging can throw off the software. The software is useful, as long as you keep that in mind.
Professor Martin Kemp
We have sent three letters to Shaun Greenhalgh. That was necessary because he could provide some clue as to the whereabouts of “Sally” from the Bolton Co-op. Mr. Greenhalgh has ignored our attempts to contact him.
The next step was to contact Professor Martin Kemp. He’s the gentleman who authenticated the drawing as an original da Vinci and wrote the book called La Bella Principessa.
Professor Kemp was much more forthcoming, even though my questions for him must have seemed rather antagonistic. I am glad he took them in the spirit of academia, which seeks truth through questioning. In any event, here are my queries followed by the Professor’s answers:
1. What do you make of Greenhalgh's claims?
Hilarious nonsense. Parachuted into the book at the last minute to gain attention. See my Living with Leonardo.
2. What is your best evidence that he is not to be believed?
The killer evidence is the dating of the white lead by gamma-ray spectroscopy to over 225 years old. This is beyond argument.
3. Have you examined the vellum to see if it was the "hair" side that was used?
He used the rougher side so that the unusual medium of ink and chalk would take.
4. Did any of your testing determine if modern graphite was present on the drawing?
No modern graphite. Ink and black chalk.
I’ve read La Bella Principessa and found the Professor’s arguments to be very convincing. I’m also aware of a concept known as “due diligence.” There is no doubt in my mind that Professor Kemp went well beyond the requirements of professional due diligence in his work authenticating the drawing.
As we saw in the initial installment of this series, though, Shaun Greenhalgh has fooled the British Museum, the fanciest auction houses, and many other Art experts and connoisseurs, including this next fellow.
Waldemar Januszczak
Mr. Januszczak is to Art criticism and documentary filmmaking what Michelangelo was to painting and sculpting. You’ll find thirty-three films about Art at his Wikipedia page, and ten books that he either authored or contributed to at his Goodreads page. He has been the Art Critic for the Guardian and The Sunday Times.
If you looked closely at his Goodreads page, you would see that he contributed to Shaun Greenhalgh’s book, A Forger’s Tale. So, of course I wanted to quiz him about “Sally” from the Bolton Co-op. Thus far, I’ve only managed to contact him via Twitter. This was our exchange:
I sent him a follow-up tweet asking where he might have written about that attempt. He did not respond. I think it should pop up in a google search, but I haven’t found it. Only this.
And so we push on.