La Bella Milanese - A Question of Attribution

The discovery of a major work, the first in over 100 years, by Leonardo da Vinci was presented last week at the Woodstock Literary Festival near Oxford. I had the good fortune to be one of the few lucky enough to have a ticket to hear Martin Kemp, the Oxford art historian and world's leading authority on Leonardo talk about this remarkable discovery.

Leonardo da Vinci has long been one of my heroes but his work really came alive for me when I stood just inches away from his drawings at an exhibition of his work at The Hayward Gallery in London, 20 years ago, in 1989. Martin Kemp recalled in that catalogue the many different techniques and media that Leonardo adopted during his long and fruitful career. But that did not include coloured chalk on vellum, the medium for this new, previously unknown work.

Thought until now to be a 19th century German work in the renaissance style, Martin Kemp presented the basis of his historical and scientific analysis to support his view that this portrait of a young Milanese woman is, in fact, a work of Leonardo. His findings are shortly to be published in a book, "La Bella Milanese", which I look forward to reading. The exhaustive researches which lead him to question and revise its attribution, should make for a fascinating read.

I have paid my own homage to Leonardo in my chalk pastel painting, "One Summer's Day", in which I attempted to capture the transient beauty of my own Bella Milanese as if on a worn and fading fresco. I don't make any claim to Leonardo's mastery of technique, composition or imagination but I continue to be inspired, 500 years after his death, by his vision and ambition.