Hi
Is the Martin Kemp /Pascale Cotte debate over Cotte’s Mona Lisa findings over?
The last I heard was that Martin Kemp had held Pascale Cottle’s findings ‘untenable’. Has the issue been resolved?
I look forward to your feedback.
He claims the earlier portrait lies hidden underneath the surface of Leonardo’s most celebrated artwork.
But the idea that there is that picture as it were hiding underneath the surface is untenable.
Martin Kemp has, if anything, been one of Cotte’s more positive supporters over this, in the sense that other art historians are mostly been even less convinced. Some of that is personal - Cotte was one of Kemp’s few supporters in the Bella Principessa controversy, to the extent of being the joint author of Kemp’s book on the subject.
As for the LAM scans of the Mona Lisa, Kemp has since set out his views at greater length in his Living with Leonardo (2018), pp. 231-3. The results are real enough; it is the interpretation that is complicated.
Other art historians haven’t so much dismissed Cotte’s findings as ignored them. Or, at least, reserved judgement. That’s not unreasonable. It is for Cotte to demonstrate what his methods can do. A particular problem is that there is so little in the way of published examples to which his findings on the Mona Lisa can be compared. As things stand, many of the claims made by him in his 2016 Lumière on the Mona Lisa seem decidedly optimistic. It is more the art history version of a Rorschach test.