Along with colleagues from the University of Washington and the University of Virginia, Harvard University professor John M. Steele unearthed a new painting, commissioned in 1884, by Leonardo da Vinci that had been hidden for the past 130 years. Steele identified the artist as Pablo Picasso. Steele’s students and colleagues revealed more, including that the subject was a man, not a woman, and that a Roman Catholic cardinal commissioned the painting.
Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, “Le Chasseur d’Agneau” (“The Shepherd’s Flock”), was commissioned by the Roman Catholic cardinal of Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The painting was commissioned in 1884, nearly one-hundred years before his death, but Leonardo was buried, at that time, in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy.
A priest at the Vatican, Monsignor Giovanni Battista Re, wrote the following to Cardinal Edmund Joseph Fitzgerald, the Cardinal-Protector of Ireland:
“Leonardo da Vinci died in the Roman Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie on May 2, 1619. At that time he was buried in the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, which was being prepared by his nephew, the young Giovanni [Leonardo’s son], and his brothers Giorgio and Piero. The master was buried in the habit of a friar, and he was placed in the tomb after his death by his nephew, who had drawn up an inventory of the works he had executed.”
“The body of Leonardo de Vinci, and of his wives and other relatives who had preceded him, lay there for about forty years, when he was removed to his final resting place in the ground-floor chapel of the side chapel of the Basilica, and reburied under the altar of the same chapel…”
“In 1892 an anonymous lady, Italian by birth and residing at Florence, secretly carried the body of the dead man to the above-mentioned Basilica, and placed it in the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi, where it remains to this day.”
A number of scholars have tried to identify the subject of the painting since Leonardo’s death. One of these scholars, Pier Francesco Felice Granach of the Santa Maria delle Grazie, established that Leonardo’s last
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