[image[Leonardo da Vinci is in the news again, and there are some good things among the old and modern masters at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
In 2013 a painting of Isabella d'Este, Marchesa of Mantua and a patroness of Leonardo, turned up in a Swiss bank vault. It's long been known Leonardo made a chalk portrait of her on paper which is now in the Louvre. It seems it was one of two.
One remained in Mantua but was given away by Isabella's husband. Leonardo took the other with him as he went on to Florence. It was pricked at the edges for transfer to a panel or canvas and it seems Leonardo promised to make a finished portrait for her.
She used intermediaries to remind Leonardo of this promise and some correspondence survives regarding it in a sequence beginning in 1501.
It has been supposed the painting if completed was long, long, lost - Vasari doesn't mention it - or that perhaps Leonardo never painted Isabella's portrait. But the work in the Swiss vault is clearly related to the drawing and it is supposed to be by Leonardo. Is it?
It was described as such by the BBC on February 11 this year when the Swiss police seized the painting during an investigation into tax and insurance fraud. They had first heard about it when they were informed a lawyer was trying to arrange its sale for 88 million ($NZ181.75 million) without proper export licences in 2013.
It was being sold on behalf of an Italian family who did not wish to be identified. The police did not then discover its whereabouts. But a new effort on behalf of the Italian Government over the tax and insurance matters turned it up.
The attribution to Leonardo was made after fluorescent light tests but there will be further investigations when the painting is in Italy.
It is not on the list of works agreed to be by Leonardo or at least attributed to him you can find on Wikipedia. That is doubtless because the Leonardo specialists have had no opportunity to examine it but they have now.
It will be interesting to see what they make of it. If any authority supports the attribution it will be another in a remarkably long list since the beginning of this century.
This at least has the benefit of support from the drawing and contemporary records. Maybe Isabella got her commission. But it seems odd it's been apparently unheard of since it was painted.
Closer to home, ''Beloved'', the Dunedin Public Art Gallery's continuing exhibition of works from its own collection, is in a new iteration. It was good to see Carlo Maratta's (1625-1715) Saint Joseph and the Infant Christ c.1687 near the entrance.
It is a circular oil on canvas and unusual in showing Christ with his mortal father. Apparently a friend of the artist's called Giuseppe - Joseph in English - had had a son and this inspired the painting.
There is an etching by Maratta in the British Museum showing the same subject but the painting had been out of sight for a long time when it was bequeathed to the gallery in 1948 by Sir Lindo Ferguson.
Tissot's Waiting for the Train (Willesden Junction) c.1873 is on show, as are the gallery's Turner, Claude, Monet and many more.
The juxtaposition of Cornelius Johnson's (1593-1664?) Portrait of an Unknown Woman with Frances Hodgkins' (1869-1947) The Farmer's Daughter (Portrait of Annie Coggan) 1929 30 struck me as a little odd. Although they are both bust portraits of women, they are very unlike in treatment.
It's different in the latest iteration of the ongoing Frances Hodgkins exhibition ''Frances Hodgkins and her European Contemporaries''.
For example Paul Signac's (1863-1935) Port de Saint Tropez, a c.1892 watercolour over pencil, is next to Hodgkins' Tunny Boats Concarneau, a c.1911 watercolour and here there are real parallels, although Signac was more advanced 20 years earlier.
Similarly, Silvestro Lega's (1826-1925) 1872 oil painting Woman Sitting by a Window Sewing has real affinities with Frances Hodgkins' Old Woman Caudebec, a 1901 watercolour and gouache.
Each has a seated woman leaning forward sewing, seen in profile with a window beyond. The treatment is very different and Hodgkins was an infant when Lega made his painting, but the comparison is convincing.
Another deft parallel is drawn by placing Hodgkins' 1923 gouache on cardboard Woman and Child next to Vanessa Bell's (1879 1961) 1957 Virgin and Child colour lithograph. They have similar elements, a woman and a child but differ compositionally. The point of comparison is the similarly rounded figures.
There's a Braque (1882-1963) colour lithograph next to Hodgkins' 1924 oil Painting Red Cockerel which also works very well. The subjects are comparable and they treat their dead birds the same way.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
