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work.” I hadn’t expected that reaction! He explained that he had missed the 1998 sale in New York but had been contacted in the autumn of 2007 by a London dealer. “He showed me a good color transparency and asked my opinion. He was working on behalf of a colleague who had an interested purchaser.”
    “I have been trying to determine if it is the work of one of Leonardo’s disciples,” I said, gesturing to the Boltraffio portrait.
    “No, it is not a student’s work,” Turner said with conviction.
    “Oh,” I said, deflated. “But how do you know?”
    “Well,” he said carefully, “apart from the work’s very high quality, what immediately struck me––even from the transparency––was the extensive left-handed parallel hatching. See here.” He pointed, and I strained to see what he meant on the small transparency. “It is most conspicuous in the background, behind the girl’s profile.” He looked up from the photo and smiled at me. “As you know, the most famous left-handed Renaissance artist was Leonardo da Vinci,” he said. “And none of his students were left-handed.”
    I suddenly remembered Mina and Catherine’s remarks, which hadn’t fully struck me at the time. However, the left-handed shading was a critical point. Experts agree that whereas it is possible to copy some aspects of a Master’s style, it is not possible to duplicate left-handedness. Although the three greatest artists of the Italian Renaissance—Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael—were all left-handed (a remarkable fact!), extensive research has failed to locate a single left-handed Leonardo follower.
    “What are you saying?” I was stunned.
    “I am not a Leonardo specialist,” Turner said, “but I think you can’t rule out the possibility of Leonardo’s authorship.” He smiled wryly. “That’s what I told my London colleague when I first saw it, but he did not believe me, and he never pursued it. More the pity.” He suggested that I show it to as many Leonardo specialists as possible and also undertake a thorough technical examination.
    That night, I went home to our apartment, which overlooks that most Parisian of monuments, the Eiffel Tower. I poured two glasses of wine, and handing Kathy one, I said, “I ran into Nicholas Turner at the Louvre today. It turns out that someone sent him a transparency of the portrait without our knowing it.”
    “What did he think?” Kathy asked.
    I paused, relishing the moment. Then, taking the glass from Kathy’s hand—for fear she’d drop it—I said, “He thinks it may be by Leonardo himself.”

    Some months after our meeting in the Louvre, I invited Turner to see the portrait for himself. He was enthralled. “It fully lives up to my expectations,” he said enthusiastically, adding that he was struck by its great beauty and refinement. He promised to give me an official report soon.
    Mina was visiting Paris at that time. I asked her to look at the portrait again, telling her, “Mina, people are saying it could be a Leonardo. Please sit and study it carefully and give me your honest opinion.”
    She sat down at a table and took the portrait in her hands. Her examination followed the traditional approach of the connoisseur. She believed that the best way to approach the study of a new work was to set aside technology in favor of the trained eye. Technology could come later. This was her favorite part of the process, when she could empty her mind and immerse herself fully in a work, which might turn out to be by the hand of a major artist.
    Mina would subsequently describe her method in a published article. 2 She wrote, “My examination was exclusively visual, and was carried out by carefully scrutinizing the work’s surface, following the traditional approach of the connoisseur—an approach that is today too readily disregarded, especially by universities, or at best not adequately appreciated by them. For centuries connoisseurship has enabled an expert to