An artwork that a Spanish man was planning to sell for $1.4 million was an early 20th-century forgery worth around $5,000 at best, not a Leonardo da Vinci painting, police say. The sale of the fake painting was thwarted when customs officers at a French border post spotted that the export license had expired, the Guardian reports. They contacted police in Spain, who recovered the painting and sent it to experts in Madrid for analysis. Police said the man was arrested after experts concluded that "the work was a copy of the Milanese portraits painted around the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century."
The experts concluded that it was "probably painted, with fraudulent intent, at the beginning of the 20th century," police said. "An export licence isn't a guarantee of a work's authenticity," a police spokesperson tells the Guardian. "In this case, the licence was being used as a means of claiming the painting was original. Once it became apparent that the licence had expired, the painting was confiscated and an investigation was opened. As soon as the investigation determined that this was an alleged case of smuggling, the arrest was made."
The painting had been presented as a da Vinci portrait of Italian aristocrat and military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, painted when da Vinci was living in Milan in the late 15th century, Artnet reports. It's not clear whether da Vinci ever painted Trivulzio, Artnet notes, but he was commissioned to sculpt a large statue for his tomb. The project didn't get further than drawings and a clay model of the proposed equestrian statue. (More art fraud stories.)
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