
The newly discovered painting. Photo from dwworld.com.
But then the dealer who purchased the painting, Kate Ganz, suggested that perhaps it was based off of a Leonardo Da Vinci type of design. Since then, the painting’s value has been upped to $160 million.
According to dw world.com, art sleuths then had to determine it’s authenticity. “The painting was photographed using a multi-spectral camera developed by the Lumiere Technology company in Paris.
Then Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, examined the images of the drawing and identified a fingerprint near the top left of the art work which matched that of the index or middle-finger of Leonardo da Vinci. The Lumiere process enables the pigments mixtures and pigments of each pixel to be identified without having to damage the drawing by taking a physical sample.
Professor Kemp originally code-named the painting La Bella Milanese, and then later re-named it to La Bella Principessa after he identified her, by what he called a process of elimination, as Bianca Sforza, the daughter of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and his mistress Bernardina de Corradis.
The vellum of the painting was also subjected to a Carbon-14 analysis at the Institute for Particle Physics in Zurich which gave the painting a date in the range of 1452 to 1508.”
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