This is a Leonardo da Vinci? The gullible experts have been duped again | Jonathan Jones

This flat, dead and dull painting is a Leonardo original, according to many in the art world. A convicted forger says it’s his. I say it’s neither

“Truly celestial was Leonardo da Vinci,” said the 16th-century art writer Giorgio Vasari. That verdict has stood for centuries. No one has ever doubted Leonardo’s genius, and in our own time his fame is greater than ever. We should probably therefore have some sympathy for experts so besotted with his name, fame and magic that they foolishly declared an obvious fake to be the real thing.

La Bella Principessa is a profile portrait of a young woman in late 15th-century dress with her copper hair flattened down at the sides and worked behind into an elaborately bound ponytail. Her skin is pink, her gaze cool – or bored. Martin Kemp, one of the world’s most renowned Leonardo authorities and emeritus professor of the History of Art at Oxford, hailed it as a rediscovered marvel in his 2010 book La Bella Principessa: the Story of the New Masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci. Museums and other experts have backed Kemp’s claim.

Continue reading...