From Science:
In April 2024, microbial geneticist Norberto Gonzalez-Juarbe stood over an enigmatic drawing in a private New York City collection. Gently, he rubbed its centuries-old surface, front and back, with a swab like those used in COVID-19 testing. “It’s not every day,” Gonzalez-Juarbe recalls with a laugh, “that one gets to touch a Leonardo.” Rendered in red chalk on paper, Holy Child shows a young boy’s head inclined slightly to the side, his features sketched with feathery strokes. Light pools softly around his cheeks and brow, dissolving the edges of his pensive face in a haze of sfumato. The late art dealer Fred Kline, who acquired the drawing in the early 2000s, had claimed stylistic features such as left-handed hatching, a trademark of Leonardo da Vinci’s, link Holy Child to the Renaissance master. But its authorship remains in dispute; experts say one of his students could have produced it.
Gonzalez-Juarbe’s swabs may have captured a biological clue. In a remarkable milestone in a decadelong odyssey, he and other members of the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project (LDVP), a global scientific collective, report in a paper posted today on bioRxiv that they have recovered DNA from Holy Child and other objects—and some may be from Leonardo himself.
More here.
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