After analyzing samples taken from a red chalk drawing and letters written by one of Leonardo da Vinci’s cousins, scientists are now one step closer to putting together fragments of da Vinci’s DNA.
The genetic material obtained from the artwork can be traced back to a common ancestry in Tuscany, the region where da Vinci was born.
The process of identifying his DNA began nearly 10 years ago, and now, a breakthrough has finally been made. The DNA on the painting possibly belongs to the Italian artist.
Although the DNA cannot be definitively linked to da Vinci, the new discovery could reshape the way the art world determines the identities of artists.
Currently, it is done by closely examining brush strokes and making educated guesses. Added identifiers, such as fingerprints left on artwork, could make guesses more accurate.
“Together, these data demonstrate the feasibility as well as limitations of combining metagenomics and a human DNA marker analysis for cultural heritage science, providing a baseline workflow for future conservation science studies and hypothesis-driven investigations of provenance, authentication, and handling history,” wrote the research team.
Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most famous figures that we know of from the European Renaissance. Researchers in Italy claim to have found 14 living descendants of his direct relatives. Historians believe that da Vinci never had any children of his own.
His remains also cannot be analyzed because the church in which he was buried collapsed after the French Revolution.
Furthermore, researchers have not been allowed into his tomb at the Château d’Amboise in Amboise, France.
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That means his genetic material must be gathered through his works. For this study, the research team focused on “Holy Child,” a chalk drawing that had been housed in the private collection of the late art dealer Fred Kline for the past two decades.
In April 2024, the team gently swabbed the surface of the drawing. Some of the DNA they collected belonged to Kline.
His wife remembered that he had sent a vial of his saliva to a personal genetics company, so they were able to rule out Kline’s DNA sequence. Still, the scientists had a lot left to go through.
Most of the DNA recovered from the “Holy Child” wasn’t human-related at all. About 99% came from plants, fungi, and bacteria. One of the sequences belonged to sweet orange trees, which were grown in Medici gardens in central Italy when da Vinci was alive.
They also detected signs of a single-celled parasite called Plasmodium. It was responsible for killing multiple Medici family members.
Next, they needed the DNA from letters passed between da Vinci’s relatives to narrow down the rest of the human DNA from “Holy Child.”
The Y chromosome samples in the drawing and the letters could be traced back to the E1b1b lineage from Tuscany. This suggests that both samples are from the same family line.
“The samples had composite profiles that show more than one person handled the piece and having more than one artifact from two different locations showing a similar Y chromosome marker was the interesting observation,” said Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe, the lead author of the study and a microbiologist from the University of Maryland.
“However, this needs to be further validated by additional sampling. We cannot confirm at this stage that the result is the lineage of Leonardo just yet.”
The findings were published in the preprint server BioRxiv.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
