It’s an unlikely outcome, but the Renaissance master is one of several names suggested by art experts keen to pre-empt today’s announcement by the NGV of a major discovery among its 16th-century paintings. But The Australian believes the work in question is Portrait of a Youth, painted in about 1520 and purchased by the gallery in 1965 through European art contacts. Its circa 1520 provenance suggests it could be Francois I of France, a young Henry VIII, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (later Charles I of Spain), or one of the Medici, D’Este or Borgia families. For the past two years, staff conservator Carl Villis has been researching Portrait of a Youth in Italy and in the gallery’s conservation laboratory. One year after the NGV was embarrassed by the de-attribution of its late 19th-century work Head of a Man from Vincent Van Gogh to an unknown Dutch painter, the gallery may have a new masterpiece.

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