A yellowed painting of the Last Supper was hiding in plain sight, so to speak, as it hung unnoticed on a church wall in Ledbury. England. The 12- by- 5-foot canvas came close to being discarded, but was saved and analyzed by experts. According to experts, the artwork was actually created in Titian’s workshop, as the Smithsonian details:
Staff at the St. Michael and All Angels Church initially asked art historian and conservator Ronald Moore to restore a 19th-century copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. But when Moore approached the painting, which hangs above the church’s altar, he found himself drawn to the less prominently displayed canvas.
“I could see it was a bit special, but I didn’t know how special,” the scholar tells the Telegraph. “It’s about ten feet off the ground, so you can’t see it unless you stand on a ladder.”
After studying the work for some 11,000 hours, writes Lianne Kolirin for CNN, Moore and researcher Patricia Kenny found a number of telling clues, including Titian’s signature, a virtuosic underdrawing of the artist himself and a 1775 letter penned by collector John Skippe that references his purchase of a Titian painting. One of Skippe’s descendants donated the Last Supper scene to the Ledbury church in 1909.
“It’s so big and nobody’s taken any notice of it for 110 years,” Moore says to the Telegraph. “Anything coming from Titian’s workshop is very important indeed.”
Image via the Smithsonian