Fiction. These paintings were never painted. Images are AI-generated, stories and auctions are invented.

Lady with a Falcon

From the Whatifs Catalogue, the encyclopedia of paintings that never were

This article is fiction. Leonardo da Vinci never painted this work. The image was generated by AI and the story below, including its discovery and sale, is invented.

Lady with a Falcon is an imagined painting attributed, within the Whatifs fiction, to Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1491). It belongs to the Whatifs series of works the great masters never painted.

History and rediscovery

Mentioned in a letter by Ludovico Sforza, the Lady with a Falcon was meant as a pair to the Lady with an Ermine. It was believed unfinished or never begun. In 2024 infrared reflectography of an anonymous panel in a Swiss collection revealed a left-handed underdrawing and a fingerprint in the paint layer. It became the second most expensive painting ever sold.

Sale

Within the fiction, the painting sold for $402,000,000 (2025). Tap the board to replay the imagined bidding. The auction pictured below never took place.

Imagined saleroom (AI-generated photo)
AI-generated photograph of a fictional auction.

See also

Notes

  1. Image generated with AI from a prompt written by Whatifs. No real painting, signature or auction house is reproduced.
  2. Story written for Whatifs. Any resemblance to real discoveries is coincidental.

Hang the painting that never was

A 50 × 60 cm museum-grade print of “Lady with a Falcon”, labelled as a Whatifs creation on the back. 29 €, shipped in Europe.

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