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Sale of Rare Leonardo Drawing Triggers Legal Battle in France

An employee of the French auction house Tajan displays ‘The Martyred Saint Sebastian’, identified as being drawn by Leonardo da Vinci during a media presentation in Paris, France, 10 January 2017. Photo by Christian Hartmann/Reuters
An employee of the French auction house Tajan displays ‘The Martyred Saint Sebastian’, identified as being drawn by Leonardo da Vinci during a media presentation in Paris, France, 10 January 2017. Photo by Christian Hartmann/Reuters
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Sale of Rare Leonardo Drawing Triggers Legal Battle in France

An employee of the French auction house Tajan displays ‘The Martyred Saint Sebastian’, identified as being drawn by Leonardo da Vinci during a media presentation in Paris, France, 10 January 2017. Photo by Christian Hartmann/Reuters
An employee of the French auction house Tajan displays ‘The Martyred Saint Sebastian’, identified as being drawn by Leonardo da Vinci during a media presentation in Paris, France, 10 January 2017. Photo by Christian Hartmann/Reuters

A small pen-and-ink drawing attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which lay buried unrecognised in a box for decades, is at the centre of a battle between its owner and France's culture ministry that will play out in a Paris court on Wednesday, the Agence France-Presse said.

The court will begin hearing if the drawing of a martyred Saint Sebastian lashed to a tree is allowed to leave France for eventual purchase by a foreign buyer.

The piece was among several drawings and engravings that Jean B., the owner, who is in his 80s and has asked not to be fully named, received as a gift from his father for passing his medical school exams in 1959.

Being more of a rock enthusiast than an art lover at the time, the young doctor put it aside and promptly forget about it for over half a century.

Stumbling across the box of drawings again during a move in 2016 he decided to give them to the Tajan auction house to have them valued.

The head of Tajan's Old Masters department, Thaddee Prate, quickly identified the hand of a master, without specifying who, and valued it at between 20,000 and 30,000 euros ($17,000-$25,000).

If Jean B. thought he was lucky then, he was about to become far more fortunate. 

Another expert, Patrick de Bayser, concluded that the two-sided drawing -- the other side is inscribed with scientific studies of candle light  -- was by none other than Leonardo, an opinion backed by a third specialist, Carmen Bambach of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"The attribution of the St. Sebastian drawing to Leonardo is absolutely solid," she told The New York Times, noting that it was complementary to other drawings of Saint Sebastian by the artist.

- A 'national treasure' -

In an instant, the work's estimated value rocketed, reaching between 8 and 12 million euros ($6.75 million-$10 million).

But it's not every day that a new Leonardo turns up and the French government soon stepped in, designating the drawing a "national treasure" and giving itself 30 months to acquire it on behalf of the Louvre museum in Paris, home of the Mona Lisa.

An offer from the state duly followed -- 10 million euros -- but with a new valuation estimating the drawing at 15 million euros, Jean B. refused and the culture ministry threw in the towel.

But the affair did not end there. 

Jean B. promptly applied for an export permit to be able to sell the drawing to a foreign buyer but the culture ministry refused, claiming that the drawing may in fact have been stolen.

On Wednesday, the retired doctor will ask a Paris court to order Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot and a senior official in charge of art collections to allow the drawing to leave France.

- After the Salvator Mundi –

Jean B.'s lawyer Olivier Baratelli termed the government's handling of the painting's discovery as  "catastrophic".

"A culture ministry worthy of its name would have ensured the French state acquire such a drawing," he argued.

Meanwhile Jean B. has also fallen out with Tajan.

Saying he learned through the press of their plans to put the drawing up for auction without his consent he revoked their sale mandate.

Baratelli claimed that Tajan had been "intoxicated" by the prospect of a hefty commission after the sale of "Salvator Mundi" attributed to Leonardo which set a record for the most expensive painting ever sold at auction in 2017 when it was acquired by the Saudi royal family for $450 million at Christie's.

Tajan, for its part, has sued the drawing's owner for 2 million euros for breach of contract, asking that he compensate the auction house for all the work it has carried out on his behalf.

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Varieties

Snowstorm Paralyzes Vienna Airport

People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
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Snowstorm Paralyzes Vienna Airport

People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl
People wait at a tram stop after heavy snowfalls in Vienna, Austria, February 20, 2026. REUTERS/Elisabeth Mandl

Massive snowstorms caused power outages and transport chaos in Austria on Friday, forcing the Vienna airport to temporarily halt all flights.

Flights departing from the capital, a major European hub, were cancelled or delayed, and more than 230 arrivals were similarly disrupted or rerouted.

"Passengers whose flights have been delayed are asked not to come to the airport," the facility said in a statement.

The area received 20 centimeters (nearly eight inches) of snow, national news agency APA reported.

The main highway south of Vienna was closed for several hours, and other sections of highway were temporarily inaccessible because of snowdrift, stranded lorries or poor visibility, said the national automobile association, OAMTC.

According to AFP, electric companies reported power outages in several regions in the south and east, including Styria, where 30,000 homes lost electricity.

The weather was forecast to improve from around midday, but the risk of avalanches remained high.

Varieties

NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
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NASA Delivers Harsh Assessment of Botched Boeing Starliner Test Flight

NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File
NASA duo Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were stuck on the ISS for nine months. Handout / NASA TV/AFP/File

NASA on Thursday blamed what it called engineering vulnerabilities in Boeing's Starliner spacecraft along with internal agency mistakes in a sharply critical report assessing a botched mission that left two astronauts stranded in space.

The US space agency labeled the 2024 test flight of the Starliner capsule a "Type A" mishap -- the same classification as the deadly Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters -- a category that reflects the "potential for a significant mishap," it said.

The failures left a pair of NASA astronauts stranded aboard the International Space Station for nine months in a mission that captured global attention and became a political flashpoint.

"Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware. It's decision-making and leadership," said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman in a briefing.

"If left unchecked," he said, this mismanagement "could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight."

The top space official said the investigation found that a concern for the reputation of Boeing's Starliner clouded an earlier internal probe into the incident.

"Programmatic advocacy exceeded reasonable bounds and place the mission, the crew and America's space program at risk in ways that were not fully understood at the time," Isaacman said.

He said Starliner currently "is less reliable for crew survival than other crewed vehicles" and that "NASA will not fly another crew on Starliner until technical causes are understood and corrected" and a problematic propulsion system is fixed.

But the administrator insisted that "NASA will continue to work with Boeing, as we do all of our partners that are undertaking test flights."

In a statement, Boeing said it has "made substantial progress on corrective actions for technical challenges we encountered and driven significant cultural changes across the team that directly align with the findings in the report."

- 'We failed them' -

Isaacman also had harsh words for internal conduct at NASA.

"We managed the contract. We accepted the vehicle, we launched the crew to space. We made decisions from docking through post-mission actions," he told journalists.

"A considerable portion of the responsibility and accountability rests here."

In June 2024 Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams embarked on what was meant to be an eight-to-14-day mission. But this turned into nine months after propulsion problems emerged in orbit and the Starliner spacecraft was deemed unfit to fly them back.

The ex-Navy pilots were reassigned to the NASA-SpaceX Crew-9 mission. A Dragon spacecraft flew to the ISS that September with a team of two, rather than the usual four, to make room for the stranded pair.

The duo, both now retired, were finally able to arrive home safely in March 2025.

"They have so much grace, and they're so competent, the two of them, and we failed them," NASA associate administrator Amit Kshatriya told Thursday's briefing.

"The agency failed them."

Kshatriya said the details of the report were "hard to hear" but that "transparency" was the only path forward.

"This is not about pointing fingers," he said. "It's about making sure that we are holding each other accountable."

Both Boeing and SpaceX were commissioned to handle missions to the ISS more than a decade ago.

Varieties

Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
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Abandoned Baby Monkey Finds Comfort in Stuffed Orangutan

A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
A baby Japanese macaque named Punch sits next to a stuffed orangutan at Ichikawa City Zoo, in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture, Japan, February 19, 2026. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon

At a zoo outside Tokyo, the monkey enclosure has become a must-see attraction thanks to an inseparable pair: Punch, a baby Japanese macaque, and his stuffed orangutan companion.

Punch's mother abandoned the macaque when he was born seven months ago at the Ichikawa City Zoo and when an onlooker noticed and alerted zookeepers, they swung into action.

Japanese baby macaques typically cling to their mothers to build muscle strength and for a ‌sense of security, ‌so Punch needed a swift intervention, zookeeper ‌Kosuke ⁠Shikano said. The keepers ⁠experimented with substitutes including rolled-up towels and other stuffed animals before settling on the orange, bug-eyed orangutan, sold by Swedish furniture brand IKEA.

“This stuffed animal has relatively long hair and several easy places to hold," Shikano said. "We thought that its resemblance to a monkey might help ⁠Punch integrate back into the troop later ‌on, and that’s why ‌we chose it."

Punch has rarely been seen without it since, ‌dragging the cuddly toy everywhere even though it is ‌bigger than him, and delighting fans who have flocked to the zoo since videos of the two went viral, Reuters reported.

“Seeing Punch on social media, abandoned by his parents but still trying ‌so hard, really moved me," said 26-year-old nurse Miyu Igarashi. "So when I got the ⁠chance to ⁠meet up with a friend today, I suggested we go see Punch together.”

Shikano thinks Punch's mother abandoned him because of the extreme heat in July when she gave birth.

Punch has had some differences with the other monkeys as he has tried to communicate with them, but zookeepers say that is part of the learning process and he is steadily integrating with the troop.

"I think there will come a day when he no longer needs his stuffed toy," Shikano said.