Art expert finds likely new da Vinci
Thu Oct 15 03:56:02 EST 2009
Wed Oct 14 16:56:02 UTC 2009
TORONTO, Oct 14 AP - A new painting by Leonardo da Vinci may have been discovered thanks to a centuries-old fingerprint.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said on Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it is da Vinci.
Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought Profile of the Bella Principessa at New York's Ganz gallery on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $US19,000.
New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about 11 years after buying it at auction for a similar price.
One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $US150 million ($A165 million).
If experts are correct, it will be the first major Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.
Biro said the print of an index or middle finger was found on the painting and that it matched a fingerprint from Leonardo's St Jerome in the Vatican. Biro examined multi-spectral images of the painting taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris. The lab 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."
Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence also point to it being a Leonardo. Biro said there is strong consensus among art experts that it is.
"I would say it is priceless. There aren't that many Leonardos in existence," Biro said. He said he had heard that one London dealer felt it could be worth 100 million pounds ($A175 million).
Silverman said his Swiss friend saw it first and told him it did not look like a 19th-century painting. When Silverman looked at it at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, far-fetched as that seemed. He hurriedly bought it for his friend and then started researching it.
"Of course you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around'," Silverman told The Associated Press. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci."
Last year Silverman bumped into Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Museum. Turner said it was a Leonardo, a view shared by other art experts.
Silverman said thanks to the fingerprint image at the laboratory it was confirmed. "That was icing on the cake," he said.
He describes the Swiss collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold".
