The Flight of the Bird

Leonardo da Vinci during his lifetime was renowned as the very embodiment of the Renaissance ideal, the "universal man," at once a brilliant painter, muralist, draftsman, engineer and architect. But he was almost as well known for his inability to see his projects through. "Alas," cried Pope Leo X, "Leonardo will never finish anything. He thinks of the end even before he has begun." As a result, while some 6,000 pages of his notes and casual sketches survive, there are only 15 known Leonardo paintings--and some experts place the number as low as nine. All but one of his paintings hang in European museums.

Last week that one was in the U.S. Washington's National Gallery of Art announced that it had acquired Leonardo's 15 1/8-in. by 14 1/2-in. oil portrait of Ginevra dei Benci, a 15th century nobleman's wife. The seller was Prince Franz Josef II, head of tiny (61 sq. mi.) Liechtenstein, tucked snugly between Austria and Switzerland. Price: an estimated $5,000,000, more than twice the previous record of $2,300,000, paid in 1961 for Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. And while the National Gallery refused to identify the private donors who had put up the sum, it was an open secret that the principal ones were the gallery's president, Multimillionaire Paul Mellon, son of the gallery's builder, and his sister Ailsa Mellon Bruce.

Simon's Skepticism. Ever since the 1940s, when two-thirds of his family estates in Czechoslovakia were expropriated, Liechtenstein's publicity-shy ruler has been discreetly selling off his $150 million art inheritance, consisting of more than 1,500 paintings. Some 30 to 40 Rembrandts, Rubenses and other old masters have disappeared from the vaults of the royal castle at Vaduz only to reappear, with a minimum of publicity, on museum walls from Ottawa to London. Unquestionably the most valuable painting in the Prince's collection was the Leonardo Ginevra.

In November 1965, the Prince regretfully turned down an even higher offer from California Art Collector Norton Simon, because Simon refused to buy unless he could take the painting outside the country for a thorough pre-purchase examination. Simon's skepticism was understandable. A strip at the bottom of the painting has been obviously repaired. And while the 16th century biographer Vasari mentions that Leonardo did such a painting, there is no record of what became of it or whether it is the same picture that became the property of Franz Josef's ancestors in 1712.

Maxwell Smart. Evidence that the lady is Ginevra is a scroll-like design, incorporating a juniper tree, that appears on the back of the painting, plus a juniper tree behind her head (ginevra means juniper in Italian dialect). Proof that it is by Leonardo lies in the handiwork itself. When the National Gallery began serious negotiations with the Prince, shortly after the deal with Simon had fallen through, Director John Walker sent Mario Modestini, a New York restorer, to examine the painting. "He went over it, literally, with a microscope for 2 1/2 hours," reported the gallery's secretary-treasurer, Ernest Feidler, last week. What Modestini saw resolved the National Gallery's last doubts.

The contract was signed on Feb. 7. Transporting the painting to the U.S. involved security precautions and scientific hugger-mugger worthy of Maxwell Smart. Code name for the painting was "the Bird." To transport Ginevra, a $52.95 American Tourister three-suiter was lined with Styrofoam that would cushion any bumps or jolts. But before the Bird could be nested, there were the problems of humidity and temperature to solve; in the Prince's vaults, where Ginevra had been kept, the temperature is 44DEG, humidity 55%. If the wood-panel oil heated or dried too quickly, the paint surface might crack. To protect against this, the suitcase was turned into what Feidler calls "a traveling thermos bottle"; the painting was wrapped in sheets of polyethylene and sealed airtight to keep it fresh, much like a sandwich in Saran wrap. Tests had shown that the suitcase temperature would rise at most 1 1/4DEG per hour.

Repellent & Alluring. At 1 p.m. Zurich time, Modestini, Feidler and their 490-year-old companion boarded Swissair Flight 100. Ginevra occupied a $417 window seat. Beneath the suitcase tab was a dial, similar to those used on meat thermometers, indicating the temperature deep within the Styrofoam. "We checked her temperature every hour," says Feidler, who found it rising slowly but no faster than anticipated. "I would be less than truthful if I didn't say that I had apprehensions." A five-hour delay in landing was caused by an East Coast snowstorm. At New York, customs officials, alerted by Washington, passed the suitcase without opening it. A private plane flew it to the capital; there it was taken to the National Gallery, unwrapped, found to be at precisely 68DEG, and placed in a vault to "decompress" to the gallery's normal 70DEG temperature and 45% humidity.

When the painting goes on display at the gallery on March 17, it may cause some controversy, for Ginevra dei Benci is no Mona Lisa. Leonardo painted her some 29 years earlier, when he had only recently completed his apprenticeship in the Florentine studio of Andrea del Verrocchio. The technique, while accomplished, is stiffer than that of his later works. Yet Ginevra, a curly-haired blonde with narrow, almost Mongolian eyes, a stern, pale mouth and alabaster skin, is clearly one of Leonardo's ladies. Like La Gioconda, she is ambivalent, as cold as she is beautiful, and as repellent as she is alluring.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.