Art history boner time!

Let’s begin this with a disclaimer: yes, you are going to judge me for how I just spent my Sunday night. Now that that’s out of the way.

The painting above is believed to potentially be a lost artwork of Leonardo da Vinci’s, and is called La Bella Principessa by leading da Vinci scholar Martin Kemp. Current evidence suggests that this depicts Bianca Sforza, the illegitimate daughter of Ludovico Sforza, and is a frontispiece ripped from the beginning of a copy of the Sforziad. The artwork could be worth close to $100 million - and came to light in 1998 when it was sold at an auction for just under $22k. It was resold to collector Peter Silverman in 2007 for roughly the same, and it was his idea that it’s an Italian Renaissance piece, rather than the 19th century German artwork it was listed as.

The debate’s been going around for awhile but my art history professor just recently directed my attention to a documentary on Nova that premiered late last month, Mystery of a Masterpiece. It’s a little sensational but if you’re in to this stuff and you’ve got an hour to spare, check it out. It details all the forensic tests that went in to researching the artwork and it’s pretty awesome. I’m now going through La Bella Principessa and the Warsaw Sforziad, a compilation of research by Martin Kemp and Pascal Cotte - Cotte is responsible for the imaging technology they used for their forensic work.

What I’m having a tricky time finding is well-summarized evidence to the contrary, so if anyone has actually been following this over the years and knows some material I can check out, let a girl know!