He never placed too much emphasis on that canvas or his signature, which is extremely similar to Pablo Picasso's. Thus, the work of art, discovered in a villa in Capri during the excavation of a cellar and "framed" in a coarse frame, has been on display in the living room of his Pompeii home for almost 60 years, with no one considering its true value. Which is currently worth 6 million euros but might quadruple if sold instead of being stored in a Milan vault. A fortune, in brief, for the family of that secondhand dealer, who were unaware, until the confirmation of a graphologist, that they had had one of Dora Maar's portraits at home since the early 1960s. Dora Maar was a French photographer, poet, and painter, and was not least the muse of Picasso between 1940 and 1950. The newspaper Il Giorno reported on the discovery. The truth would have emerged gradually, when the second-hand dealer's kid, while studying the elementary school textbook, recognized a likeness between the family artwork and a photograph of a Picasso piece. Decades of research into what could have been "a potential treasure" began with that suspicion. Consequently, appraisals on appraisals and economic "investments" on expert counsel commence: it may be a copy, "a crust," or one of the portraits of Dora Maar, the artist's long-time lover and muse.
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