ITALY:Anthropologists in Italy say they have pieced together Leonardo da Vinci's left index fingerprint - a discovery that could help shed light on such matters as the food the artist ate and whether his mother was of Arabic origin.
The reconstruction of the fingerprint resulted from three years of research and could also help attribute disputed paintings or manuscripts, said Luigi Capasso, director of the Anthropology Research Institute at Chieti University in central Italy.
"It adds the first touch of humanity. We knew how Leonardo saw the world and the future . . . but who was he? This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius," Capasso said.
The research was based on a first core of photographs of about 200 fingerprints - most of them partial - taken from about 52 papers handled by da Vinci in his life.
The artist often ate while working and Capasso and other experts said his fingerprints could include traces of saliva, blood or the food he ate the night before - information that could help clear up questions about his origins.
For instance, experts determined that the fingerprint suggested da Vinci's mother was of "oriental origin".
"It's not like every population has typical fingerprints, but they do have specific proportions among their signs. The one we found in this fingertip applies to 60 per cent of the Arabic population, which suggests the possibility that his mother was of Middle Eastern origin," Capasso said. The idea that da Vinci's mother could have been a slave who came to Tuscany from Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey, is not new and has been the object of other research.
Alessandro Vezzosi, a da Vinci expert, said: "This coincides with documented indications that she was oriental, at least from the Mediterranean area, not a peasant of Vinci."
Carlo Vecce, a leading expert on da Vinci, said that while the research on Leonardo's fingerprints was "very interesting", such a discovery did not necessarily add much to what was known about the artist.
"It give us the illusion of a contact with the genius. But the most important things about Leonardo are those that concern his intellectual activity, those that we get by reading his words or interpreting what he wrote."