Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it's actually a da Vinci.

Biro said Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought "La Bella Principessa" at auction in 1997 for about $19,000. One London art dealer now says it's worth over $150 million.

If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by da Vinci to be identified in 100 years.

Biro said the print of an index or middle finger was found on the painting and that it matched a fingerprint from da Vinci's St Jerome in the Vatican. Biro examined 3-D images of the painting taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris. The lab used a special 3-D digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."

Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence also point to it being a da Vinci. Biro said there's strong consensus among art experts that it is a da Vinci painting.

"I would say it is priceless. There aren't that many Leonardo's in existence," Biro said. He said he had heard that one London dealer felt it could be worth 100 million British pounds (more than $150 million).

Asked what Silverman's reaction was when he found out about the fingerprint, Biro said: "There was already a fairly good consensus about the piece before I was asked to consult on this case. Peter's reaction was that the fingerprint was the icing on the cake. Those were his words."

At least seven employees working on Christie’s financial projects have been fired or have left the London-based auction house since December, the people said.

Christie’s spokesman Toby Usnik wouldn’t comment on the status of the investment fund or lending operation. He said “a handful of employees in financial services” have left the company this year, though he wouldn’t give specific numbers.

The auction house, owned by French billionaire Francois Pinault, reported a 35 percent sales decline in the first half of 2009. Christie’s announced “significant staff reductions” in January and another round of cutbacks in June without disclosing specific figures or names.

“Christie’s retrenchment, and the continued paring down of financial officers and staff is symptomatic of the state of the art market,” said Peter R. Stern of McLaughlin & Stern LLP, a lawyer who specializes in art issues. “These actions are necessary if the auction houses want to survive.”

J. Ezra Merkin, whose Ascot Partners LP invested billions with convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, sold his Mark Rothko-packed art collection for $310 million last month to a still-unknown buyer, according to court filings According to Bloomberg News.

The sale generated $37.5 million in fees and left art dealers also puzzling over the identity of Merkin’s agent, named in court documents as “TLIA, LLC.”

That mysterious entity received $26.5 million for its role in the transaction.

According to the Commercial Recording Division for the State of Connecticut, TLIA, LLC is registered to 83-year-old retired art collector and adviser Ben Heller. Heller, reached by phone at home, declined to comment.

PaceWildenstein, the gallery representing the Rothko estate, received $11 million as agent for the anonymous buyer. Andrea Glimcher, a gallery spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Art dealers and advisers were reluctant to carp, but conceded that the commissions seemed steep.

“On the face of it, without having all the facts, it does seem high,” said art adviser Liz Klein. “The seller’s fee does seem high, compared with what Pace made.”

Erik S. Lesser for The New York Times
The rundown World’s Folk Art Church in Pennville, Ga., built by the folk artist Howard Finster.

It was in the Howard Finster Vision House, a name it has acquired since his death in 2001, that Mr. Finster said he was directed by God to stop repairing bicycles and paint “sermon art.” And it was here, years later, that he made a “garden of paradise,” a sprawling art environment he lovingly tended for 30 years that many consider to be his greatest work.

In these Paradise Gardens, as they are now called, Mr. Finster salvaged and transformed everyday objects into whimsical statues, mosaics and playhouses. He collected and saved so much junk for his art projects at one point that he had to make a deal to appease his wife, Pauline. She could have the front half of the house and its tidy front porch, if he could have the back of the house and its garden.

Today it is Mr. Finster’s legacy that seems divided, almost along those same boundaries.

Ballerina

“When things go down, no matter how much you have, you think you are poorer and therefore your tendency is to withdraw completely,” said Mr. Briggs, a retired legal-publishing executive. “The problem is that this is the time when you can do the most good, when you really need to give.”

So the Briggses changed their giving priorities, at least until the economy recovers. What they devised was a strategy to fit the needs of the times. “We cut back a little on some agencies, like art galleries,” Mr. Briggs said. “I sent a note with each check saying we were cutting them back so we could give more for things like food banks, where they really need the money right now.”

Over all, the worst economy since the 1930s has halved many stock portfolios. Bailouts have put bonds at risk of inflation. And even the best jobs no longer seem secure. On top of this, many prosperous Americans find themselves helping grown children and other relatives who are out of work through no fault of their own. A third of the jobless do not qualify for unemployment benefits.

Many charities face not just tough times, but disaster. At some organizations, volunteer trustees, especially those on the finance committee, have grown accustomed to monthly projections of income and expenses that are soaked in ever more red ink.

Nationwide, charities are reporting that donations are flat

Peter Doig’s oil “Night Playground” (1997-98).

Summer season of evening contemporary art auctions ended here at Christie’s on Tuesday night when collectors went bargain hunting, feeling comfortable dropping $2 million, but thinking hard when the numbers started rising according to the New York Times.

Bidding was thin at the sale, which consisted of commercially appealing art by popular, time-tested names. The 40 works brought $31.7 million, in the middle of the estimate of $28.6 million to $40.9 million. Five works failed to sell.

Three paintings, including canvases by Gerhard Richter and Richard Prince, vied for the title of top seller. The winner was a work by the Scottish artist Peter Doig, who has fetched solid prices here recently. On Tuesday “Night Playground,” his densely painted landscape from 1997-98 being sold by Joel Mallin, a New York collector, went for $5 million, well above its high estimate of $3 million. Five bidders competed for the work, which went to a telephone buyer. (Last week Sotheby’s sold “Almost Grown,” a Doig canvas from 2000, for $3.3 million.)

A true (and sometimes terrifying) original, Ms. Bourgeois, now 96, is more than the sum of her parts. The uncommonly elegant and evocative portrait “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine” reveals much about this haunting and haunted master while leaving intact what Georges Braque once wrote was the only thing that mattered in art: the thing you cannot explain.

At Ms. Bourgeois’s Brooklyn studio, the filmmakers Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach attend to her rambling, entrancing ruminations on the archetype of “the runaway girl”; the necessity of silence; and the power of fear and the primacy of memory in her work — of the mangled bodies of World War I veterans, of her mother twisting fabrics in a stream, of abandonment, of dreams.

The Pushkin Museum is Moscow's leading collection of Western European art, and owns about 650,000 items. It attracts about 1 million visitors a year, and has one of the finest collections of French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, with major works by Matisse, Monet, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

The museum has the backing of the Foundation for Support of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, a private organization headed by Dmitry Medvedev until he became President of Russia in May.

``President Medvedev has been deeply involved in getting this support, for which we are very grateful,'' Irina Antonova, the museum's director, said in an interview. The money, given over three years, ``will help us expand and reconstruct the museum as part of plans to mark our centenary in 2012.''

In November, the museum approved plans by U.K. architect Norman Foster to add 110,000 square meters (1.2 million square feet) to the museum's current 40,000 square meters. The Pushkin aims to mark its centenary in 2012 with four new buildings on adjacent land within sight of the Kremlin, and the renovation of several decrepit czarist-era structures.