X-rays of famed artist Amedeo Modigliani's work bring "quite an amazing discovery"

Haifa, Israel — Curators at an Israeli museum have discovered three previously unknown sketches by celebrated 20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani hiding beneath the surface of one of his paintings. The unfinished works by Modigliani, an Italian-born artist who worked in Paris before his death in 1920, came to light after the canvas of "Nude with a Hat" at the University of Haifa's Hecht Museum was X-rayed as part of a sweeping forensic study of his work for an upcoming exhibit in Philadelphia.   Inna Berkowits, an art historian at the Hecht Museum, said it was "quite an amazing discovery."   "Through the X-rays, we are really able to make this inanimate object speak," she told The Associated Press.

Modigliani is considered one of the 20th century's great Modernist artists. His lived a short, turbulent, Bohemian life in France, where his nude paintings were controversial. 

His work is typified by slender, elongated necks and faces, a signature style influenced by African and Cycladic Greek art that was just starting to arrive in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.