But the background’s all wrong. It’s stark and black and Leonardo’s touch evaporates in the murk. To offer depth and perspective to his work, he regularly painted landscapes and windowed interiors behind his subjects. But “Lady with an Ermine,” says Warsaw art restorer Magdalena Bachleda-Bankowska, is “a bit like a poster-a beautiful painting on a lifeless black background.”
Not that Leonardo is to blame. Since the early 1950s, Polish art historians have known (and kept fairly quiet) that the back-ground was not his doing. It was, they figured then, the crude handiwork of an 18th-century Italian restorer who slapped it on before the work was purchased by Polish Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski around 1800. In those days, restorers routinely used highly damaging substances-water, lye, onions, even urine. Surely the black had been applied to disguise a botched restoration. “It distorted the painting completely,” declares Jan Blyskosz, chief curator of the state art collection in Cracow’s Wawel Castle. “It was barbaric.”
Last week, The New York Times chastised Poland for shipping the painting to the States. It is “the sort of delicate painting,” wrote art critic Michael Kimmelman,"… that enlightened museums are loath to lend … When important works of art are sent flying around the world for less than compelling reasons, questions about responsibility arise."
But what could be more compelling than to uncover the mystery of “Lady with an Ermine”? Polish art historians have been stymied by a lack of sophisticated technology. All they’ve known for sure is that “this was a much more beautiful painting before,” says Bachleda-Bankowska. Now, however, the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow has authorized the National Gallery to conduct “nonintrusive” tests. The FBI has even been brought in to search for Leonardo’s fingerprints.
In the back rooms of the National Gallery’s conservation department, David Bull has done X-radiography and infrared reflectography of the painting, as well as a series of microscopic photographs at 50 times magnification. His deductions thus far: that, while it is not yet conclusive, there was probably a blue-gray background suffused with interior light, and no landscape or windows. The black background was actually painted sometime after “Lady” arrived in Poland, and it was probably applied to hide a crack in the black walnut on which the portrait was painted. Perhaps, Bull says, the person who repainted the work may have tried to match the color, but used an inferior paint that has darkened over time.
Can the Gallerani portrait withstand a new restoration? Many Polish art historians are jittery about the risks, but Bull says it’s technically possible. And certainly it has proven its resilience before. The Czartoryski family stashed the painting in Paris during successive 19th-century uprisings and wars in Poland, and the Nazis snatched it during World War II. Now, at least some of its most fervent admirers are hoping it can blossom anew, restored as much as possible to its original glory. “Sooner or later, it must come to this,” says Blyskosz. No one is arguing that the painting currently on display is anything but brilliant, only that it was once even more stunning–and could be so again.
