Fabled Leonardo da Vinci painting discovered in Swiss vault after 500years.

A pencil sketch of Isabella d’Este, one of the most influential women of the Italian Renaissance, hangs in the Louvre. The sketch was drawn by the famous polymath Leonardo da Vinci as a prelude to a commission for a finished painting.

Art historians have long been in disagreement over whether a finished version of this sketch was ever created. Now, after five centuries, da Vinci’s fabled masterpiece has been found – unearthed in a Swiss bank vault earlier this year.

 

The piece was begun in 1499, four years before da Vinci began work on the Mona Lisa.