Da Vinci Painting Discovered

Kate Langenburg/A&E Groove

A smallish chalk, ink, and pen drawing has been quite the topic of conversation in the art world lately. Back in January, the painting was sold at an art auction at Christie’s in New York. It was titled “a Young Girl in Profile in Renaissance Dress.” It’s value was labeled at anywhere between $12,000 and $16,000.

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.”