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Lips. The Hahn lady's lips are red with a dye from the "Kermes berry." Kermes is not a berry at all but a bug — a reddish, wingless female insect, relative to the cochineal of Mexico, that lays its eggs on oak leaves throughout southern Europe. The insects are killed in a vapor of hot vinegar, dried, and ground for pigment. It takes 10 to 12 lb. of kermes to produce as red a color as one pound of cochineal. The Louvre lady's lips are of cochineal, unknown in Europe before Cortes brought it back in 1523, unknown in Italy for 20 years more. Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519.
Hands. The Hahn picture is the same width as the Louvre painting, but 7½ inches shorter. In 1752, the first descriptive catalog of the royal picture gallery described a woman in red, by Leonardo, "holding a piece of lace in her hands." Measurements of this picture are the same as those of the present Louvre portrait which has no hands. The supposition is that when the Hahn portrait was transferred from wood to canvas in 1777,* the 7½ inches at the bottom containing the hands was cut off.
Rothschild Foundation. All these things tended to show that the Louvre portrait is not the original Leonardo, as Louvre authorities have long admitted. What Harry Hahn was looking for was some document indicating that his portrait had once belonged to the royal collection of Louis XVI. He found that this winter in the great art library of the Salomon Rothschild Foundation in Paris: a memoir written by an official Louvre expert in 1847 showing that La Belle Ferronnière, which had been one of the King's pictures at Versailles, was sold by Revolutionary Architect General Auguste de St. Hubert to General Louis Tourton in 1796.
At the time of the Hahn-Duveen trial, the Hahn portrait's ownership had already been traced back to the same General Tourton, banker for the Revolutionary Government.
*Though commonly called "The Armorer's Daughter," Ferronnière actually refers to the fillet worn around the lady's head. Since 1925 when the painting was exhaustively examined, Louvre authorities have never claimed that their Belle, was an original Leonardo. Wrote Curator Gaston Rouchés: "That does not make much difference when one does not take the commercial view. The important thing is that the picture is beautiful."
*In the 18th Century only two French experts, Jean Louis Hacquin and one Picault (both employed by Louis XVI), knew the secret of transferring a valuable painting from a rotted canvas or badly warped panel to a new backing, a very delicate operation in which all the original paint is left intact.