Mr. Prate, 55, asked for a second opinion from Patrick de Bayser, an independent dealer and adviser in old master drawings, who examined the St. Sebastian in Paris. Mr. de Bayser asked, “Have you seen the drawing is by a left-handed artist?” (Leonardo was left-handed.) He also discovered two smaller scientific drawings on the back of the sheet. These diagrammatic studies of candlelight were accompanied by notes written in a minute, Italian Renaissance right-to-left hand.
The two men looked at each other. “I said, ‘You can’t believe this is by Leonardo?’” Mr. Prate recalls. “But that would have been so incredible.”
Tajan reached out to New York for a third, definitive view from Carmen C. Bambach, a curator of Italian and Spanish drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dr. Bambach was an organizer of the Met’s 2003 exhibition “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman,” the first in America to take a comprehensive chronological overview of the artist’s works on paper. That show included two studies, from museums in Hamburg, Germany, and Bayonne, France, that related to the “eight St. Sebastians” listed by Leonardo in his “Codex Atlanticus” sketch and notebooks, preserved in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan.
“My eyes jumped out of their sockets,” Dr. Bambach said in a telephone interview, remembering her first sight of the drawing in Paris with Mr. de Bayser on the last day of March. “It exactly complemented the Hamburg St. Sebastian,” she added, referring to how that pen-and-ink study of the saint tied to a tree also included inscribed optical studies on the reverse side, and to how the handwriting of the inscription was consistent in both double-sided drawings.
“The attribution is quite incontestable,” Dr. Bambach said, even though the drawing has no pre-20th-century ownership history. “What we have here is an open-and-shut case. It’s an exciting discovery.”
In Dr. Bambach’s view, the newly discovered drawing is the most highly developed and attractive of the three known studies associated with what may have been a lost painting of St. Sebastian. Unlike its monochromatic Hamburg companion, the Paris St. Sebastian is drawn in two shades of ink, features several alterations to the pose and has a mountainous landscape in the background.
“My heart will always pound when I think about that drawing,” Dr. Bambach said. “It has so many changes of ideas, so much energy in the way he explores the figure. It has a furious spontaneity.”
“It’s like glancing over his shoulder,” she said of Leonardo.
Dr. Bambach estimates the drawing’s date at 1482 to 1485, during the early phase of Leonardo’s period in Milan, when he painted his first version of “The Virgin of the Rocks,” now in the Louvre.
(The Met said it had no agreement with the auction house to buy or to show the artwork.)
According to Dr. Bambach, the drawing — which she hopes will be bought by a French museum — represents the first “Leonardo, full stop” discovery (as she put it) in this medium since 2000, when Sotheby’s in London offered a slighter sheet from around 1506 to 1508 that had black chalk and pen studies of Hercules and whirlpools. It failed to sell against a low estimate of 400,000 pounds, or what was then about $600,000, but sold later for about $550,000. The drawing (also attributed by Dr. Bambach) is now jointly owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York collector Leon Black and his wife, Debra Ressler.
As for a much-debated mixed-media profile portrait of a young woman, known as “La Bella Principessa,” which eight years ago was valued by the London dealer Simon Dickinson at as much as $150 million, Dr. Bambach commented, “It does not look like a Leonardo.”
A painter, sculptor, architect, scientist and inventor of seemingly limitless ambition (if not finished execution), Leonardo (1452-1519) most formidably embodies the notion of universal genius. This reputation has been translated into formidable financial value for the few of his works that have come up for sale. In 1994, Bill Gates paid $30.8 million at Christie’s for the “Codex Hammer” notebook, containing 300 drawings and scientific writings. More controversially, in 2013 the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Leonardo’s painting “Christ as Salvator Mundi,” circa 1499, for $127.5 million from the Swiss businessman and dealer Yves Bouvier, who had recently bought it for $80 million from a consortium of dealers. The current high for a Leonardo drawing sold at auction is $11.5 million, at Christie’s in 2001, for a silverpoint study of a horse and rider.
In September, Mr. Prate and Nicolas de Moustier, director general of the auction house, drove to an undisclosed part of France to deliver the good news to their client.
“I hope you’re not shocked?” Mr. Prate recalls asking.
“I’m very pleased,” the owner calmly replied. “But I have other interests in life other than money.”
Curators from the Louvre inspected the Tajan drawing in October, without, as usual, being drawn into any official pronouncement. France has the option of declaring the work a “national treasure” to stop its export. The government would then have 30 months to offer a “fair international market value” for the drawing, according to rules protecting French heritage.
Alternatively, it can issue the work a passport, allowing its sale globally, which Rodica Seward, Tajan’s owner, hopes will happen.
“This reinforces Tajan’s reputation as a high-end boutique auction house,” Ms. Seward, a Romanian-born United States citizen, said in her boardroom here, seated behind a desk that she designed. Trained as an architect before becoming a banker for 20 years, she bought Tajan in 2003.
“My friends thought I was mad,” Ms. Seward said.
But they might not have thought her so mad if they had had the chance to walk with her and Mr. Prate through Tajan’s first-floor private viewing room, where the long-lost St. Sebastian stood in its Renaissance gold frame.
“If only it could speak,” said an awed Mr. Prate.
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