The first painting by Renaissance master Piero della Francesca has turned up in a private collection in Chile.
The oil on wood, a splendid Madonna and Child, went missing some 50 years ago shortly after it was authenticated by distinguished Italian art historian Roberto Longhi in 1946.
The discovery was made when organisers of a major Piero show in Arezzo started scouring the world to put on the most impressive selection of the master's work they could find.
Organisers say the work, while being part of Piero's juvenilia, already showed "significant" signs of his ground-breaking use of perspective.
In the show opening in the Tuscan city on March 31, the painting will be flanked by a Portrait of a Prelate by Antoniazzo Romano, a painter now believed to have had a major influence on Piero during his formative years.
The Piero show brings together his masterpieces for the first time ever.
Arezzo is a fitting venue because it contains the Tuscan maestro's crowning achievement, the Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle.
"It will be a festival of art," said Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli, promising to boost trips down a central Italian 'Piero Trail' that is much more widely known in Italy than abroad.
A recently discovered treatise on Archimedes, annotated by the artist with geometrical jottings in the margins, is among the other jewels on show in Arezzo's Museo Statale di Arte Medievale e Moderna from March 31 to July 22.
