In 1995, a man named Anthony Ayers was traveling around England with his girlfriend.

They're bouncing around the English countryside.

Tony was an amateur artist and a furniture designer and so he always liked rummaging around

antique shops.

That's our colleague Kelly Crowe.

So they find themselves in this little antique shop.

He's sort of looking behind things and looking around things.

And anyway, he finds this arm-war but he actually was more curious about what was behind

it.

And there was this dusty, you know, wood-paneled painting that looked like it was a Madonna

picture, a picture of Mary and the baby Christ.

And he just was struck by the quality of it.

Ayers had a hunch that this painting was special.

It looked like something from the Renaissance.

He thought it might be a long-lost of Vinci.

He didn't have enough money to buy it though.

The shopkeeper wanted $30,000 for it.

So Ayers went back home to Chicago and convinced a small group of people to pool their money

and buy it together.

These were not art dealers.

These were not curators.

These were not trained people who had a hunch and then followed that scholarly hunch to

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