Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it’s actually a da Vinci. The unsigned chalk, ink and pencil drawing, known as “La Bella Principessa,” was matched to Leonardo via a technique more suited to a crime lab than an art studio — a fingerprint and palm print found on the 13½-inch-by-10-inch work. The discovery of the fingerprint has them convinced the work was by Leonardo, whose myth and mystery has already put him in such best-sellers as “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Lost Symbol. Alessandro Vezzosi, director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in the artist’s hometown of Vinci, Italy, said Wednesday that he was “very happy” to hear about the fingerprint analysis, saying it confirmed his own conclusion that the portrait can be attributed to Leonardo with “reasonable certainty.

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