Oct. 28, 2006 — Leonardo da Vinci may have had an Arab heritage,
according to Italian researchers who have
isolated and reconstructed the Renaissance master's fingerprint.
The fingerprint represents the only biological
trace of the Florentine genius, said Luigi Capasso, an
anthropologist at Chieti University.
"It is actually the first evidence of Leonardo's corporeality," Capasso told Discovery News.
Indeed, nothing is left of the painter,
engineer, mathematician, philosopher and
naturalist. The remains of Leonardo, who died in
1519 in Amboise, France, were dispersed in the
16th century during religious wars.
The research began in 2002, following the
discovery of hundreds of fingerprints in the
master's notebooks and drawings.
"Not all belonged to Leonardo. There was a
mixture of traces, with marks also left by his
apprentices," said Alessandro Vezzosi, director of
the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci,
where the artist was born in 1452 and where the
fingerprints are collected.
Capasso and colleagues at the University of
Chieti first worked on isolating and
extracting the real Leonardo's fingerprints.
Through nondestructive spectrometry, they
examined about 200 fingerprints from about 52
papers and found that only in a few cases had Leonardo left a complete fingerprint.
In most cases, the partial fingerprints consisted
of the radial half of the left thumb, indicating
that left-handed Leonardo was just moving and leafing through the papers.
"But when we examined the 'Portrait of a Lady
with an Ermine', we noticed that the
artist used his finger when applying the
finishing touches to the necklace's shadow," Capasso said.
After scouring manuscripts and notebooks, the
researchers found two other fingerprints that
matched and completed the Ermine markings. The
result was an entire fingertip, possibly belonging to the left forefinger.
