Long lost Leonardo da Vinci painting rediscovered

Would Leonardo da Vinci have painted Jesus with sleepy eyes, a shadowy mustache, one hand raised in a blessing and the other holding a symbolic globe of the world? More to the point, did he?

A group of art historians and investors think so and will be showing the painting at London's National Gallery starting Nov. 9 according to ARTnews magazine. Lost for centuries, the painting was discovered at a country estate sale in New York state several years ago and purchased for an undisclosed price. It was filthy and parts had been painted over in an effort to conceal centuries of neglect and damage. After a painstaking cleaning, the picture was examined by several Leonardo experts who declared it to be the real thing.

Like most such rediscoveries, however, the attribution to Leonardo is doubted by other experts. Art historians have known about the picture for years, but the last time it was sold, in 1958, it was attributed to one of Leonardo's star pupils, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio rather than to the master himself. It went for 45 pounds then, or about $100.

It's current owners are rumored to want $200 million for the picture. If it really was painted by Leonardo (1452 - 1519), $200 million would be a fair price or even a bargain, given that the Italian master is one of the most influential and revered Renaissance artists. He is most admired for the subtlty of his subject's expressions and gestures, and the delicacy of the many layers of transparent paint he used to create his smoky backgrounds and sly smiles. He completed very few paintings, all of which are in prestigious collections including the Louvre Museum in Paris (Mona Lisa); the National Gallery, Washington, D.C; the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia and the Uffizi Gallery in Florance, Italy.

A scientist, engineer, inventor and musician as well as painter and draftsman, Leonardo was above all an experimenter who constantly tried new techniques that weren't always successful. Consequently much of his work was unfinished or has deteriorated over time, most famously his "Last Supper," mural in Milan which is now a scaly ruin because he painted it with oil pigment rather than fresco which can endure for centuries. Much of his fame derives from notebooks in which he recorded his sketches and observations about everything from women's hair to bird wings, human dissections to helicopter prototypes.