A centuries-old sketch may be holding more than artistic secrets—it might carry traces of Leonardo da Vinci himself. A team behind the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project says.
A centuries-old sketch may be holding more than artistic secrets—it might carry traces of Leonardo da Vinci himself. A team behind the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project says it has extracted human DNA from « Holy Child », a red chalk drawing some believe could be by da Vinci, and from a 15th-century letter written by one of his distant relatives, Science reports. In a paper posted to bioRxiv, they report that Y chromosome fragments from both objects fall into the same genetic branch, a lineage found in Tuscany, da Vinci’s home turf. That makes it plausible, but far from certain, that some of the DNA on the drawing is da Vinci’s.
« Establishing unequivocal identity . is extremely complex », notes project member David Caramelli of the University of Florence; another geneticist estimates the odds at roughly « a flip of a coin.
