by 
Story is from National Geographic.Com
By Tom O’Neill
Photograph by Gianluca Colla
Published February 2012
Bianca Sforza attracted few stares when introduced to the art world on January 30, 1998. She was just a pretty face in a frame to the crowd at a Christie’s auction in New York City. Nobody knew her name at the time, or the name of the artist who had made the portrait. The catalog listed the work—a colored chalk-and-ink drawing on vellum—as early 19th century and German, with borrowed Renaissance styling. A New York dealer, Kate Ganz, purchased the picture for $21,850.
The price hadn’t budged almost ten years later when a Canadian collector, Peter Silverman, saw Bianca’s profile in Ganz’s gallery and promptly bought it. The drawing might actually date from the Renaissance, he thought. Ganz herself had mentioned Leonardo da Vinci, that magical name, as an influence on the artist. Silverman came to wonder, What if this is the work of the great Leonardo himself?
That someone could walk into a gallery and buy a drawing that turns out to be a previously unknown Leonardo masterpiece, worth perhaps $100 million, seems pure urban myth. Discovery of a Leonardo is truly rare. At the time of Silverman’s purchase, it had been more than 75 years since the last authentication of one of the master’s paintings. There was no record that the creator of the “Mona Lisa” ever made a major work on vellum, no known copies, no preparatory drawings. If this image was an authentic Leonardo, where had it been hiding for 500 years?
Silverman emailed a digital image of Bianca to Martin Kemp. Emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University and a renowned Leonardo scholar, Kemp regularly receives images, sometimes two a week, from people he calls “Leonardo loonies,” convinced they have discovered a new work. “My reflex is to say, No!” Kemp told me. But the “uncanny vitality” in the young woman’s face made him want a closer look. He flew to Zurich, where Silverman kept the drawing in a vault. At 13 by 9¾ inches, it is roughly the size of a legal pad. “When I saw it,” Kemp said, “I experienced a kind of frisson, a feeling that this is not normal.” read more at NationalGeographic.Com
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Note from the editor & chief:
Leonardo da Vinci is ranked among the World’s greatest artists. An artist who’s talent and merit has been proven over the centuries. Very different then, say, an unnamed heavy-metal screamer who’s tauted as being a great singer in the current society, then “dis-proves” it by not being able to “sing” at all at a sports game.
“By changing accepted rules and creating one’s own rules, one can fool the people for awhile, but eventually posers will be revealed.” Who said that?
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