You might call it a new version of 'The Da Vinci Code', the discovery of a previously unknown masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci hiding in plain site. The key to the discovery, a fingerprint. Our story from NBC's Tom Aspell.
Leonardo de Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa, and the Last Supper, is widely considered to have been an ultimate Renaissance man. A great artist, the musician, and a scientist, whose curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention.
Now the art world says a non-descript drawing thought to have been from the 19th century can be attributed to the great master. Thanks to a five-hundred-year-old fingerprint.
The evidence was exposed by a multi-spectral infrared camera in a forensic laboratory in France.
'I think his print is here.'
Pascal Cotte compared it with a fingerprint known to belong to Da Vinci found on his portriat of St. Jerome hanging in the Vatican.
“From the scientific point of view, you need a minimum of 8-dot of comparison, and in this case, we have 10.”
The world's leading expert on Leonardo da Vinci is professor Martin Kemp, of Oxford University.
"I'm 100% convinced."
Carbon dating has established the ink chalk and animal skin pressed onto an oak board used in the portrait to be from the late 15th century.
The shading techniques are similar to those Da Vinci used in other pictures, and it was drawn by a left-handed artist as Da Vinci was known to be.
“Probably none of the bits of evidence in themselves are absolutely decisive, but everything begins to fit together like a well-made piece of furniture.”
The subject of the portrait, now called La Bella Principessa, the beautiful princess, is thought to be a daughter of the duke of Milan. Da Vinci painted other members of his family in the 1490s.
Catalogued as a work of a un-known German artist, it's sold 2 years ago for 20,000 dollars to an art dealer buying on behalf of a wealthy anonymous patron living in Switzerland. The dealer had a hunch it might be an unknown Da Vinci, and sent it to France for forensic tests. It could be worth at least 150 million dollars.
Tom Aspell, NBC news, London.
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