A painting by Pablo Picasso found by an antique dealer Luigi Lo Rosso has turned out to be genuine, Italian experts have said.
After stumbling across the painting in 1962, Luigi Lo Rosso took the rolled-up canvas with him to Pompeii, where it hung in a cheap frame on his living room wall for the next few decades.
The painting depicts a portrait of the French artist Dora Maar, who was Picasso’s lover and muse, and bears the famous artist’s distinctive signature in the upper left corner.
However, Lo Rosso did not know whose painting he had found. It wasn’t until some time later that his son Andrea became interested, eventually the family turned to art experts and a detective.
After several years of complex investigations, Cinzia Altieri, a graphologist and member of the scientific committee of the Arcadia Foundation, which evaluates, restores and attributes works of art, confirmed that the signature on the painting, now estimated at €6m (£5m), was Picasso’s. Altieri told the Guardian:
“After all the other examinations of the painting were done, I was given job of studying the signature. I worked on it for months, comparing it with some of his original works. There is no doubt that the signature is his. There was no evidence suggesting that it was false.”
Picasso was a frequent visitor to the southern Italian island of Capri, and the painting, strikingly similar to The Female Breast (Dora Maar), is thought to have been created between 1930 and 1936.
Lo Rosso has now died, but his son Andrea, now 60, has continued his search for the artist who created the painting. He said:
“My father was from Capri and would collect junk to sell for next to nothing. He found the painting before I was even born and didn’t have a clue who Picasso was. He wasn’t a very cultured person. While reading about Picasso’s works in the encyclopedia I would look up at the painting and compare it to his signature. I kept telling my father it was similar, but he didn’t understand. But as I grew up, I kept wondering.”
Andrea Lo Rosso said there were times when the family considered getting rid of the painting. Lo Rosso added:
“My mother didn’t want to keep it – she kept saying it was horrible.”
He contacted the Picasso Foundation in Málaga several times, but he says they showed no interest in looking into his claims, believing them to be false. The foundation has the final say on the authenticity of the painting, which is now kept in a safe deposit box in Milan.
Picasso, who died in 1973, created more than 14,000 works and the foundation receives hundreds of messages a day from people claiming to own the original.
The painting Female Breasts (Dora Maar) was painted in 1938 and stolen from a Saudi sheikh’s yacht in 1999 before being found 20 years later.
