Lady with a Falcon
From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were. Lot of the day on Oct 12.
Created with AI, after Leonardo da Vinci, public domain.
Lady with a Falcon is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1491). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.
History and rediscovery
Mentioned in a letter by Ludovico Sforza, the Lady with a Falcon was meant as a pair to the Lady with an Ermine. It was believed unfinished or never begun. In 2024 infrared reflectography of an anonymous panel in a Swiss collection revealed a left-handed underdrawing and a fingerprint in the paint layer. It became the second most expensive painting ever sold.
Sale
Within the fiction, the painting sold for $402,000,000 (2025). Tap the board above to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.
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See also
- Water Lilies, Night Effect, Claude Monet
- Self-Portrait, Laughing Out Loud, Rembrandt
- The Refused Kiss, Gustav Klimt
Notes
- Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
- Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.
