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It’s not often that you read about an art fraud of this magnitude – if it is true. We have only the word of an art historian who claims Michelangelo was the real artist who painted the famous Mona Lisa.

Being neither an artist nor an historian, I’ll admit I was never impressed by the old girl. When MacLeod and I paid 30 Euros to visit the Louvre in Paris, we went to see the works of famous painters and sculptors. And most of it was impressive.

The Mona Lisa, however, was far smaller than I realized – only 21” wide by 30” tall.

We make TV screens larger than that.

Framed in gold, it sits behind a bulletproof, see-through shield alone in a room.

What’s it worth? Guinness World Records lists the Mona Lisa as having the highest insurance value for a painting in history.

It was assessed at $100 million in 1962. Figuring inflation, the value would be more than $600 million in today’s dollars.

Roman art historian Gianfranco Salvatori was aware he was about to drop a bomb. After a long investigation, he said he could prove the true artist who painted the Mona Lisa was not Leonardo da Vinci but Michelangelo Buonarroti.

He believes the two famous artists agreed to what may be history’s greatest art fraud.

Salvatori makes his claim in a book soberly titled “Leonardo, no, Michelangelo, si.”

It is surprising that no one found this earlier in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, a handwritten confession by Leonardo.

In Florence, Leonardo and Michelangelo met at a bar and played cards. Both been drinking heavily. The loser was to carry out a wager to be decided by the winner.

Leonardo, 20 years older and perhaps wiser, won. His brilliant idea was to ask Michelangelo to paint a picture in his style that he could pass off as one of his own. Michelangelo was intrigued and agreed.

He spent a month teaching the younger artist his techniques, then had him paint his assistant, Gian Giacomo Caprotti disguised as a woman. The face we know as the Mona Lisa is a transvestite.

After the painting was finished, Michelangelo left Florence for Rome to sculpt Pope Julius II’s tomb. Leonardo went to the court of King Francis I, taking the picture with him, a trick he would play on the king.

While in France, he wrote his confession in a small book to reveal the fraud and gain recognition for Michelangelo’s talent. But when the king told him that the Mona Lisa was the most beautiful painting he had ever produced, Leonardo held his tongue.

In Rome, Michelangelo had forgotten the hoax and did not realize his painting, done for fun, would one day become so famous. He died without telling anyone.

Salvatori says his intuition made him realize what had happened. Thanks to a macrophotograph of the Mona Lisa, he found that the model’s eyelashes, partly hidden by varnish, concealed the following letters : MBDRMF, which he translated as “Michelangelo Buonarroti Di Roma Me Fecit” – Michelangelo in Rome made me.

In France he found Leonardo’s memoirs in which the artist explained everything.

For the Louvre, Michelangelo is as legendary as Leonardo — and now it has one of Michelangelo’s paintings.

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