Presentation of scholars who were or are involved in the research on La Bella Principessa.
Martin Kemp was appointed as the Professor of the History of Art Department in 1995. As the leading Leonardo da Vinci scholar, Kemp’s work has stressed the work of the artist as a modeller and empirical investigator of the world. Professor Kemp has been Emeritus Professor of the History of Art since 2008.
Professor Kemp arrived with the brief to further develop the history of art at Oxford, and to construct an organisation appropriate to the University’s international status, and its rich collections of art and other visual material. As part of this development, the Centre for Visual Studies was opened in 1999, based in 59 George Street. The mission of the centre was to understand visual cultures through the study of artefacts across a wide scale of periods.
Pascal Cotte of Lumiere Technology is an engineer optician and the inventor ofthe first multi-spectral high definition camera. He uses a projection lighting system with the 240 megapixel camera to analyse each pigment’s and create digital versions which show the true colours of original artworks. Cotte, 56, is the founder and President of various companies specialising indigital imaging since 1980 and has designed and developed numerous R&Dsystems in the field of electronic imaging.In 2004, he performed multi-spectral scans of the famous “Mona Lisa” in theLouvre Museum and in 2007 the other famous painting of Leonardo “The Ladywith an Ermine”. In 2005 to 2009, his company multi-spectrally scanned Rubens, Gericault, Delacroix, Rembrandt, Chagall, Fragonard, Picasso, Manet, David,Renoir, Van Gogh and over 1500 fine art works from private and public collections. More recently, Cotte used the technology to demonstrate that LaBella Principessa , which was believed to be an early 19th century painting, is actually a lost Da Vinci artwork. Cotte also contributed to the success of theEuropean project Crisatel to create a new standard of digitisation of global pictural documents. In 2011 he performed multi-spectral scans of the famous “LaBelle Ferronnière” in the Louvre Museum before the restoration.
D. R. Edward Wright is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of South Florida in Tampa He was born in 1938 and raised near Boston Mass. He received a B. A. in English from Williams College in 1960, and a PhD in art history from Princeton, where he studied under Erwin Panofsky (1976). He did archival research in Florence, 1970-73, with fellowships from Villa I Tatti and C.R.I.A. He has published in the Warburg Courtauld journal and «The Burlington Magazine», as well as various collections of conference papers. He resides in Tampa and continues research on Renaissance garden iconography, Pratolino and Bomarzo demystified.
Studied History of Art (MA) and History of Theatre and Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (PL), and History of Art and Image Science at the Humboldt University of Berlin (DE).
Since 2011 works as RESEARCHER with Martin KEMP, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Oxford University. Her main research focus is provenance of La Bella Principessa, the newly discovered female portrait attributed to Leonardo da Vinci – before and after excision from „La Sforziada” (1490) by Giovanni Simonetta.
GUEST in the Department of Design and Technology of Parsons The New School for Design in New York. SCHOLARSHIP HOLDER of the Humboldt University of Berlin, Goethe Institute (2008 and 2013). NOMINATED to THE INTERNATIONAL YOUNG VISUAL ARTS ENTREPRENEUR AWARD OF THE YEAR 2008 (British Council). Private SCHOLARSHIPS of Maestro Michael NYMAN to pursue research on Leonardo (2013, 2016).
CURATOR specializing in contemporary art and Art &Science. Among others: Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Cracow (PL), Center for Contemporary Art Łaźnia in Gdansk (PL), WRO Art Center in Wroclaw (PL), Martin-Gropius-Bau and Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (DE). In 2010 INVITATIONS from The Museum of Modern Art (International Program), Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and Art/Sci Center and Lab, UCLA, Los Angeles.
Member of international ADVISORY BOARDS of Noema (IT), website dedicated to culture, new technologies interrelations and influences, and IJACDT International Journal of Art, Culture and Design Technologies (US). ART CONSULTANT and FIXER (LOCAL PRODUCER) for National Geographic, PBS NOVA, and ZDF Studio Berlin.
The latest publications on the website of The Leonardo da Vinci Society (Birkbeck College, London). SPEAKER at conferences, including The Renaissance Society of America (NYC) and Authentication of Paintings Conference (Hague, 2014).
Artistic and scientific collaborative project on the subject of music by Leonardo da Vinci involving contemporary composers (in statu nascendi).
Other interests: Linguistics.
English CPE Cambridge Certificate of Proficiency in English (2005)
German KDS Kleines Deutsches Sprachdiplom (2005) (Proficiency)
French DELF Diplôme d’Études en Langue Française (2004)
Italian CELI Certificato di Conoscenza della Lingua Italiana (2005)
Spanish DELE Diploma B2 Intermedio (examination November 2010)