The journey of a thousand miles—stretching over more than ten years—would end unexpectedly with a seconds-long phone call somewhere in a European capital. “One fine day, an old friend in the art business rang me up with a tantalising message. He said he had something special that I would certainly want to see and then asked me to go to a certain address and to come precisely at 10am,” confides Jaime Ponce de Leon, whose name has become interchangeable with the “find of the century”, none other than Luna’s lost masterpiece, Hymen, oh Hymenee.
He had no idea what to expect at the time.
“In my mind, I thought, perhaps it was a Resurreccion Hidalgo painting or one by Miguel Zaragoza. Perhaps even a Juan Luna, but Lunas had become extremely rare,” says Ponce de Leon. He is, of course, not a stranger to finding links and chasing down leads worldwide. “Once, I was in Brussels and
