A nude drawing that bears a striking resemblance to the Mona Lisa was done in Leonardo Da Vinci's studio and may be the work of the master himself, a French museum said on Monday.
Experts at the Louvre in Paris, where the world's biggest collection of Leonardo's work is held, have been examining a charcoal drawing known as the Monna Vanna that has long been attributed to the Renaissance painter's studio.
But the charcoal preparatory work for a painting of a semi-nude woman, held at the Conde Museum at Chantilly north of Paris, may now have to be reclassified.
"There is a very strong possibility that Leonardo did most of the drawing," Mathieu Deldicque, a curator at the Paris museum, told AFP.
Did Da Vinci draw the Monna Vanna himself? Photo: Michel Urtado/RMN-Grand Palais Domaine de Chantilly/AFP
"It is a work of very great quality done by a great artist," added Deldicque, who initiated an investigation over several months by historians and scientific specialists at the renowned C2RMF laboratory under the Louvre.
The large drawing has been held since 1862 in the huge collection of Renaissance art at the Conde Museum, once the home of one of France's oldest noble families.
"It is almost certainly a preparatory work for an oil painting," Deldicque said, with the hands and body almost identical to the Mona Lisa, Leonardo's inscrutable masterpiece which hangs in the Louvre.
Microscopic examinations have shown that it was drawn from the top left towards the bottom right, the curator said -- which points to a left-handed artist. Leonardo, who died in France in 1519, is the most famous left-handed painter in history.