Thaddée Prate, director of old master pictures at the Tajan auction house in Paris has uncovered a long lost drawing by the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. The discovery was made last summer and it has taken months of painstaking research and the authentication by three experts including one of the curators at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Tajan values the work at 15 million euros, or about $15.8 million.
The drawing, of the martyred St. Sebastian, measures about 7½ inches by 5 inches now housed in an Italian Renaissance gold frame on an old wooden easel the work is only the second drawing by the master to be authenticated since 2000.
Thaddée Prate, director of old master pictures at the Tajan auction house recalled being “in a bit of a rush” when a retired doctor visited Tajan with 14 unframed drawings that had been collected by his bibliophile father. (The owner’s name and residence somewhere in “central France” remain a closely guarded secret, at his request.) Mr. Prate spotted a vigorous pen-and-ink study of St. Sebastian tied to a tree, inscribed on the mount “Michelange” (Michelangelo). “I had a sense that it was an interesting 16th-century drawing that required more work,” said the elegantly suited Mr. Prate, speaking in the boardroom of Tajan’s premises, near the Paris Opera.
Mr. Prate, 55, asked for a second opinion from Patrick de Bayser, an independent dealer, and adviser in old master drawings, who examined the St. Sebastian in Paris. Mr. de Bayser asked, “Have you seen the drawing is by a left-handed artist?” (Leonardo was left-handed.) He also discovered two smaller scientific drawings on the back of the sheet. These diagrammatic studies of candlelight were accompanied by notes written in a minute, Italian Renaissance right-to-left hand.
The reverse of the drawing of St. Sebastian contains two scientific drawings and writing in Leonardo’s hand. “Tajan reached out to New York for a third, definitive view from Carmen C. Bambach, a curator of Italian and Spanish drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “My eyes jumped out of their sockets,” Dr. Bambach said in a telephone interview, remembering her first sight of the drawing in Paris with Mr. de Bayser on the last day of March. “It exactly complemented the Hamburg St. Sebastian,” she added, referring to how that pen-and-ink study of the saint tied to a tree also included inscribed optical studies on the reverse side, and to how the handwriting of the inscription was consistent in both double-sided drawings. “The attribution is quite incontestable,” Dr. Bambach said, even though the drawing has no pre-20th-century ownership history. “What we have here is an open-and-shut case. It’s an exciting discovery.” In Dr. Bambach’s view, the newly discovered drawing is the most highly developed and attractive of the three known studies associated with what may have been a lost painting of St. Sebastian. Unlike its monochromatic Hamburg companion, the Paris St. Sebastian is drawn in two shades of ink, features several alterations to the pose and has a mountainous landscape in the background”. The New York Times quoted.
The work is likely to carry an export ban and hopes are that it will be bought by a French museum. Sotheby’s in London recently offered a slighter sheet from around 1506 to 1508 that had black chalk and pen studies of Hercules and whirlpools. It failed to sell against a low estimate of 400,000 pounds, or what was then about $600,000 but sold later for about $550,000. The drawing (also attributed by Dr. Bambach) is now jointly owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York collector Leon Black and his wife, Debra Ressler.