$147 Million Da Vinci Work Found, Says Antiques Trade Gazette - Bloomberg.com

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- A drawing sold at auction for $19,000 in the late 1990s is now thought to be a work by Leonardo da Vinci worth as much as 100 million pounds ($147 million), said the London-based Antiques Trade Gazette.The chalk, pen and ink drawing, made on vellum (animal skin) shows an aristocratic young girl in profile. It was catalogued as “German, early 19th century” at a Christie’s International sale in New York in January 1998. The portrait was bought by New York dealer Kate Ganz, who sold it on as a work that “may have been made by a German artist studying in Italy, based on paintings by Leonardo da Vinci” to the Canadian-born, Europe-based connoisseur Peter Silverman in 2007, the weekly newspaper said on its Web site.Subsequent examination with a “multispectral” camera by the Montreal-based forensic art expert, Peter Paul Biro, has revealed a fingerprint near the top left of the drawing that corresponds to a print discovered on Leonardo’s painting “St Jerome” in the Vatican, Rome. The latter is an early work from a time when Leonardo is not known to have employed assistants. Infrared analysis by Biro has revealed that the drawing was made by a left-handed artist, as Leonardo was known to have been, said the newspaper.The attribution to Leonardo has been endorsed by Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Oxford University. Professor Kemp has suggested the sitter is Bianca Sforza, daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (1452-1508), and dates the drawing to about 1496 when the sitter was aged 13 or 14.“The portrait constitutes a valuable addition to Leonardo’s oeuvre,” Professor Claudio Strinati, Head of the City of Rome Museums, told the paper.If a genuine Leonardo, the portrait has been valued at 100 million pounds by London dealer Simon Dickinson, the newspaper said.