Mona Lisa has something new to smile about.
A portrait of a young woman thought to be created by a 19th century German artist and sold two years ago for about US$19,000 is now being attributed by art experts to Leonardo da Vinci and valued at more than US$150 million.
The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as La Bella Principessa, was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio — a fingerprint and palm print found on the 34cm-by-25cm work.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said the print of an index or middle finger matched a fingerprint found on Leonardo’s St Jerome in the Vatican.
Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence — including carbon dating — had art experts believing as early as last year that they had found another work by the creator of the Mona Lisa.
The discovery of the fingerprint has them convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery already put him at the center of such best-sellers as The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol.
Biro examined multi-spectral images of the drawing taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris, which used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.
“Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works,” Biro said. “I was able to make use of multi-spectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint.”
Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in the artist’s hometown of Vinci, Italy, said on Wednesday he was “very happy” to hear about the fingerprint analysis, saying it confirmed his own conclusion that the portrait can be attributed to Leonardo with “reasonable certainty.”
“For me, it’s extraordinary there is confirmation” through the fingerprint, although “it’s not like I had any doubt,” he said in a telephone interview.
Even before the fingerprint discovery, Vezzosi said several experts agreed with his conclusion, which was based on “historical, artistic, stylistic [and] aesthetic” considerations.
Based on its style, the portrait has been dated to 1485-1490, placing it at a time when Leonardo (1452-1519) was living in Milan.
Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought La Bella Principessa — or The Beautiful Princess — at the gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about US$19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about nine years after buying it at auction for a similar price.
One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than US$150 million.
If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.
Ganz still doesn’t believe it is a Leonardo.
“Nothing that I have seen or read in the past two years has changed my mind. I do not believe that this drawing is by Leonardo da Vinci,” Ganz said on Wednesday.
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