Dr Joseph Vancell

Piero Angela, the Italian television journalist renowned for his long-running science and technology programme Quark, has claimed that he has recently made a very important discovery in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. While examining the Codex on the Flight of Birds Piero Angela noticed that an image was hiding behind layers of thick handwriting.

In a statement on RAI’s website Angela said that, when he was studying a high quality facsimile of the Codex, he detected the faint form of a nose underneath Leonardo’s writing on the Codex’s tenth page. He enlisted the help of art historians, police forensic experts and RAI's graphic department to turn the black text covering the sketch white, then the same tone as the paper.

Over months of painstaking micro-pixel work, graphic designer Giovanni Stillitano gradually "removed" the text and revealed the drawing underneath. What emerged was the face of a young to middle-aged man with long hair, a short light beard and a penetrating gaze.

Piero Angela said that he compared the image to all known self-portraits and the many sketches of young men by Leonardo, but no match was found. Then, struck by similarities to a famed self-portrait of Leonardo in advanced age from around 1512, a work in red chalk on paper and housed in Turin's Biblioteca Reale, Angela wondered whether it might not be a new, younger Leonardo self-portrait.

Criminal investigation techniques were used to digitally correlated the sketch with the known portrait and "age" it with facial reconfiguration technology, sinking the cheeks, hollowing the eyes and furrowing the brow.

The police experts found the two images compatible "to such an extent that we may regard the hypothesis that the images portray the same person as reasonable." The results were validated by a plastic surgeon, Giuseppe Leopizzi, and then double-checked via a digital face-lift to rejuvenate the older self-portrait.

Wrinkles removed, eyes brightened, the younger version of the established older self-portrait was superimposed on the newly discovered sketch and found to be almost identical.

Professor Carlo Pedretti at California University, a world authority on Leonardo Da Vinci, described the sketch as "one of the most important acquisitions in the study of Leonardo, in the study of his image, and in the study of his thought too" and he was “perfectly convinced” that the image portrayed the famous Renaissance artist.

More on Leonardo da Vinci can be found in the following sites:

BBC: Leonardo's Studio

Universal Leonardo

Leonardo at the Museum