Sold for $2,240,000

It is only a fragile piece of paper, 39 by 54 inches, but Britain's Royal Academy figured that it would sell for $2,800,000. And why not sell it? Leonardo's drawing of Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist would not be much missed -to judge from the scant attention it got in nearly 200 years at the academy, mostly not even on public display. Off to Sotheby's last March went the announcement that the drawing, thought to be the cartoon of Leonardo's similar painting in the Louvre, would be auctioned.

Then it dawned on the British pride that some rich American collector or museum would in all likelihood buy the drawing and take it away. Snowed under by protests, the fusty academy agreed to postpone the sale. Since then, more than 703,000 Britons have seen the once neglected work on display at the National Gallery -and a sizable number of them have thrown a shilling or two into a collection to buy it for the National Gallery. By last week, these and other contributions reached within $980.000 of the cut-rate $2,240,000 that the academy is now willing to settle for. Prime Minister Macmillan thereupon announced that the government would pay the difference. The charcoal drawing thus just misses topping the price of the most expensive oil painting ever sold -Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer, which Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art bought for $2,300,000 at auction last fall.

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