Page 18 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • February 8, 2012 completely overlapping the short life of Bianca Sforza. Searching for a likeness of the lost Bianca, Silverman learned that a rare book, a handwritten history of the Sforza family, had been preserved in Warsaw. The book contained no portrait of Bianca, but it had something even more startling: the frontispiece of the book, which predictably would have been a portrait from the Sforza family, had been taken out. Notably, the three biggest stitches in the binding of the book were an exact match for three small holes on one edge of the portrait. Some critics remained skeptical that an unknown painting by da Vinci could have been knocked off for $20,000 and dismissed as a Victorian allusion to the Renaissance. The art world as a whole did not agree. The last offer Silverman reportedly had for the portrait was $80 million. He turned it down pending more tests. Fake Custer survivors were a dime a dozen between the 1870s and the 1920s, and there may have been as many as 200 imposters. However, when I discovered a reprint of a 1938 letter online from a widow asking for help in authenticating her late husband’s military service, I was struck by the fact that she insisted that he had been in C Company and that his horse had been a roan, two facts he defended against all attempts to make his case more plausible with a horse of a different color. I decided to find out everything I could about Frank Finkel – a name well known to Custer buffs as the most plausible of the 80 to 200 fake Custer survivors, a man with a whole file at the Oshkosh Public Museum. The Oshkosh curator thought Finkel was fake, but supplied me with a collection of newspaper clippings. Significantly, Finkel clung to the story that he had been in C Company and that his horse had been a roan. I knew that Custer, in 1868, had color-coded all the horses in his regiment, and C Company was assigned sorrels, reddishbrown horses with light-colored manes. A roan is a sorrel with white points or a white glaze of hair. In 1876, a dead sorrel had been discovered 80 miles from the battlefield, and officers and soldiers who saw the horse believed that one man might have survived. C Company, which broke up on one flank of the Indian encirclement, was the most plausible source of fugitives. Several had been found miles from the battlefield. I sent out some letters and shortly had descriptions of Frank Finkel and August Finckle, second sergeant of C Company, and found that Frank and August were both slightly over six feet tall with dark hair and pale eyes. That made them two inches over the height limit for the cavalry. When I saw they had the same handwriting, you could have knocked me over with an eagle feather. Third case: Othneil Marsh, a paleontologist affiliated with Yale, made a name for himself by discovering some of the first dinosaur fossils in the American West, and delighted Thomas Henry Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” when he produced fossils of archaeopterix, a “toothed bird” that Huxley saw as a confirmation of the fact that birds had evolved from reptiles. This was an avian “missing link,” Huxley said, that confirmed the then-controversial theory of natural selection beyond a doubt, and he thanked Marsh from the bottom of his heart. The trouble is that archeopterix was not a toothed bird. It was a toothed reptile, and toothed reptiles are nothing out of the ordinary. Last year, Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and some of his colleagues presented a paper that included the analysis of dinosaur-age reptiles discovered in China in recent times. A number of American scientists who grew up believing archeopterix was a real missing link have been forced to recant, not their belief in evolution, but their previous acceptance of archaeopterix as evidence for natural selection. The crow-sized archaeopterix is now classified as a dinosaur, and not as a bird. What is the message here? The scientists, trained to base their conclusions only on evidence, had to admit that the missing link was now missing for good. They did not discard evolution. They simply admitted that one piece of the puzzle was a bad fit. Artists who ridiculed the idea of an undiscovered da Vinci have some turf to defend, but they may continue to do so. Fingerprints said to have been da Vinci’s found on the painting were dismissed by a Swiss crime lab as so vague as to be inconsequential, and a Victorian forger could have used 500-year-old vellum to paint a portrait of an upperclass girl. However, the match-up between the binding in the 500-year-old Sforza biography and the vellum on the portrait is a bit of a reach for the skeptics. As for Frank Finkel, the idea that a prosperous, shy, shrewd and semi-literate old farmer would have done enough research before 1920 to describe an accurate version a battle that wasn’t subjected to archaeology until the 1980s is a real stretch. Finkel seemed embarrassed to be a Custer survivor – in effect, a deserter – and he never tried to make a dime off his notoriety. But people who are married to their ideas about a no-survivor battle at Custer’s Last Stand, the non-existence of unknown da Vinci paintings, or the absolutely clear case for natural selection despite the absence of several missing links will not be disturbed by evidence to the contrary That is why no “proof” is possible. What does a Renaissance princess have to do with a 19th century cavalryman and a long-extinct flying creature? All three cases offer an instructive look at the difference between evidence and proof – and the difference is what the observer may have at stake. A few years ago, a Paris-based art dealer named Peter Silverman was drawn to a painting of a beautiful young girl in elegant Renaissance clothing. He passed up a chance to buy what everyone thought was a Victorian painting in Renaissance style for $18,000 and then regretted his lost opportunity. A few years later, he saw the same painting offered for $20,000, and bought it. On closer analysis, Silverman realized that the “Victorian” painting just might be an unknown portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. A few critics found this preposterous. So much attention had been paid to da Vinci’s career that finding an unknown painting in the 21st century seemed incredible. Silverman rounded up his troops. Da Vinci was famous for the skill he showed in depicting human anatomy, and this painting was anatomically profound, so much so that the experts could almost sense the subject’s muscle and bone structure. The blue-green eyes were accurate down to the individual eyelashes, and the hair was painted one hair at a time in areas where it was most visible. The hair was also arranged in a style familiar to Renaissance experts as prevalent in Milan in the second half of the 15th century, when da Vinci was working in that city. Who was the beautiful girl in the painting? Silverman called the young teen La Bella Principessa, the beautiful princess. The Roman architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, a contemporary of Augustus Caesar, was concerned with ideal classical facial and figure proportions, so much so that he set down the proportions established by the Greeks of the Hellenic Age for the ideal face. The girl in the portrait has such a face, and da Vinci was a great student of Vitruvius. The girl was obviously from an upper-class family based on her appearance and clothing. She bore a resemblance to the Lady with the Ermine, an older woman in a confirmed painting by da Vinci. The Lady with the Ermine was believed to be a mistress of Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. The girl, Silverman conjectured, must be Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate but acknowledged and beloved daughter of Sforza. The duke had married Bianca off to one of his military commanders, a respectable if comparatively undistinguished union, when she was 13 or 14. Tragically, Bianca was too young for healthy child-bearing and is believed to have died due to the complications of childbirth while she was still a teenager. There are no other portraits of her, but she resembles other members of the Sforza family. Forensic science locked in. The planting was on vellum, pressed and treated leather, and radio-carbon dating showed that the vellum dated from the years between 1465 and 1520 – almost exactly da Vinci’s active lifespan as an artist, and When does evidence become proof? Our hat’s off to the teacher s at High Mountain Road School in Franklin Lakes for their Food Drive. We also thank Maryann Cioffari of Midland Park for collecting 12 bags of food for us at her birthday party. Our Hollywood Bash will be a memory by the time this article goes to press, but we are still busy. We are thinking about some creative ways to hold some fun fundraisers for the spring. If you would like to help us, please call (201) 612-8118, and ask for Laura. We thank everyone who helped us with this year’s “bash.” Meet Brett: Brett was seven-years old when his caseworker, Ilene, first met him. Although he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, he was soon declared cancerfree, which left him dealing with severe health issues that stemmed from the radiation, including a stroke and tissue damage. He was also physically incapacitated from the treatment. Due to these complications, he was on a ventilator to help him breathe, and a feeding tube, rendering him unable to speak or even move much. At the same time, Brett’s dad was also diagnosed with cancer. Tragically, Brett couldn’t hang on any longer, and he passed away just after his eighth birthday from an undetected infection. Meanwhile, dad was going through treatment after treatment as he tried to deal with the loss of his son. Mom and dad tried very hard to hold everything together financially, but they ended up having to file for bankruptcy. Shortly thereafter, Brett’s dad passed away, too. The Emmanuel Cancer Foundation has been there for this family throughout these unthinkable tragedies, and Ilene continues to provide emotional support to Brett’s mom. Brett is also survived by an adoring younger sister, Kelly. Through the regional center, the family has been receiving grocery deliveries in order to help mom with some of her day-to-day needs and to relieve some of the family’s financial obligations. ECF also helped mom pay some bills when she didn’t know where she would get the money to keep the heat from being cut off. While Brett was fighting his cancer, Mom said the one thing she would love to get for the family would be a TIVO system, including the lifetime fee, so they could tape things for the children and Brett could watch his favorite shows when he would return from the hospital. We would still like to provide this to Kelly and her mom to honor Brett’s memory. Please let us know if you can help. We rely on our local community to help support our families. Many of them do not have the financial or emotional support to help them get through a major illness like cancer. We do not charge anything for our services. We rely on you! ECF, which was named for a little boy named Emmanuel who lost his battle with cancer nearly 30 years ago, uses monetary contributions to cover the costs associated with providing free services to any New Jersey child who has cancer. Approximately 70 cents from every dollar goes toward direct care for our families. If your company has a charitable giving program, please let us know. ECF distributes about 140 bags of food to our families each month. You can help us fill our pantry. When you go grocery shopping and something non-perishable is on sale, please pick up some extra items and drop them off at ECF. Sugar, flour, salt, cooking oil, detergent, pancake mix/syrup, and rice are always needed. You can help in a variety of ways. Consider turning (continued on page 20)