FLORENCE, ITALY – A lost painting attributable to Leonardo da Vinci seized in Switzerland is a portrait of Mantua Marchesa Isabella d’Este, one of the leading patrons of the Italian Renaissance, art police said Tuesday February 10, 2015.
The 61cm-by-46.5cm work was in the vault of a Lugano-based trust, they said. The painting has been ascribed to Leonardo on the basis of fluorescent analysis dating it to the first decades of the 16th century, they said.
Further tests will now be carried out to clinch the attribution. Isabella, called “magnanimous” by the poet Ariosto, sponsored painters including Titian, Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Leonardo.
The find comes amid efforts to uncover another lost Leonardo masterpiece, the Battle of Anghiari fresco, behind a false wall in Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. As well as being a patron of the arts, Isabella was a leader of fashion, whose innovative style of dressing was copied by women throughout Italy and at the French court.