The Mystery Da Vinci was transmitted on Channel 5 at a few nights back. I featured in it - unfortunately, as it turned out.
Produced by Richard Bellfield and directed by Lisa Harney for Fulcrum TV, the project began well enough. It centred upon a proposal to research and examine a small panel painting of the infants Christ and St John kissing in front of a rocky backdrop. Leonardo is known to have invented a Holy Babies composition. There's a small sketch of the subject at Windsor by Leonardo himself.
I had seen the painting some years ago and it seemed, at best, to be one of the small devotional works painted by the people in the workshop on the basis of the master's designs. The idea that it should be subject to a battery of scientific tests was attractive, since the production of these "Leonardo & co" paintings is not well understood.
All went OK at first. Nicholas Eastaugh, an acknowledged expert, was in charge of the testing, and the picture came out pretty well. It seemed to be of the right date, and the tough treatment it had undergone in the past explained some of the dodgier aspects of its appearance. And a fingerprint on the surface seemed to align with one on a drawing for the Last Supper at Venice, drawn mainly by a pupil but corrected by Leonardo.
Getting a picture that close to Leonardo seemed to be a good story for the programme. But not enough of a story, apparently. To sell the programme in the USA some Code-like heresy was needed.
The makers searched around desperately - a search that they tried to keep from me. At last they found an Italian who was prepared to align Leonardo with Gnostic heresies, in which John the Baptist, not Jesus, is the prime divine. There is no evidence in the thousands of pages of Leonardo notes that he was involved in either this heresy or such heresies in general. He had no taste for such things.
However, in the interests of "balance", this assumed a central role in the programme. A responsible programme-maker should sift the wheat from chaff. But chaff = ratings.
Symptomatic of this was the last filming session. At the very end of a long day's filming, the new evidence was sprung on me, with no chance to examine it properly. In the next room, the owner of the picture was, unknown to myself and Eastaugh, watching on closed circuit TV.
I later insisted on recording a definitive statement on my position - though I don't know if it was ever transmitted. My TV has stopped working. Perhaps just as well.
