Leonardo da Vinci painting lost for centuries found in Swiss bank vault
The painting appears to be a completed, painted version of a pencil sketch drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in Mantua in the Lombardy region of northern Italy in 1499
But a 500-year-old mystery was apparently solved today after a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was discovered in a Swiss bank vault.
The painting, which depicts Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, was found in a private collection of 400 works kept in a Swiss bank by an Italian family who asked not to be identified.
It appears to be a completed, painted version of a pencil sketch drawn by Leonardo da Vinci in Mantua in the Lombardy region of northern Italy in 1499.
The sketch, the apparent inspiration for the newly found work, hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
For centuries it had been debated whether Leonardo had actually had the time or inclination to develop the sketch into a painted portrait.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10356401/Leonardo-da-Vinci-painting-lost-for-centuries-found-in-Swiss-bank-vault.html
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There's no doubt somebody painted it from that sketch. Somebody might have even finished it from an abandoned Leonardo panel or canvas.
And I do not doubt that it is quite old. (Though after 1499, of course.)
But FFS... Leonardo did not paint THAT. It's awful in all the ways a Leonardo painting is not awful. Tenuous/hesitant line, lack of sense of underlying forms, flat-out incompetent drapery effects... not Leonardo. This painter doesn't even understand the shape of the woman's nose that leonardo's drawing indicates... he is not "reading" the drawing correctly.
And that hair... Leonardo, the great observer of organic form doing essentially a repeated fabric pattern... a symbolof hair, rather than hair. No sense the neck is cylindrical (and thus no understanding of the "why" of the shadow, only the "where."
There's a trick to these things. Does the painter know things the drawing doesn't tell? The real artist knows more than the drawing tells. The copyist knows less. Wherever the drawing doesn't give a clear guide to everything the painting falls apart.
The plant frond in her hand and her crown are not deliniated in the drawing. If the painitng is not by Leonardo we would expect those specific elements to be notably worse then other elements. And they are. Simple, un-nuanced and amatuerish. (The headband lighly implied in the drawing is, by the way, correct in its lack of roundness. The bottom line of the crown is more curved to make the crown look rounder... again, a symbol of a crown, not a crown.)
I mentioned the hair before. Leonardo didn't mess much with the hair because that was not his concern in the drawing, which is mostly about a profile. The hair is thus just a mass. (Maybe even in a net, which was common back then.) So the copyist has no instructions for the hair, and the painted hair is insubstansial and weak. But where the drawing says exactly what to do, the painting gets better.
Which is not to say it has never been sold as a Leonardo and bought as a Leonardo and stored away by somebody thinking it was a Leonardo.
I don't doubt that it has been.
