Decoding The Mystery of Da Vinci Portraits I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY

In 2008, Nicola Bavatelli, an art history professor, discovered an old painting that raised questions in the art world. The first thing I noticed, as soon as I saw it, is that it had a soul. He's enigmatic. The beard, the look in his eyes, he's very special, very unique. This was the start of a widespread investigation throughout Europe. This portrait of a strangely familiar looking man aroused the expert's curiosity. I immediately thought that it was a portrait of Leonardo. Through this investigation, we travel into the past, back to Renaissance Italy. Could this painting have been made by Leonardo da Vinci? Have we finally discovered the painter's true face? One morning in 2008, an art collector contacted me to examine his collection of paintings. As an art historian specializing in historic paintings, I immediately decided to go to his home in Salerno to look closely at his collection. Nicola Bavatelli. There were about a hundred paintings in the collection. Some works were mediocre and others quite interesting. At the end of my visit, the collector asked me to look at one particular painting. He showed me a portrait wrapped in a fleece blanket. I'll never forget that moment. He said, look at this little painting. It's a painting I want to auction off. Meet Galileo. What do you mean Galileo? I said, it's Leonardo. I immediately thought it was a portrait by Leonardo because the iconography was found in a similar painting in the Uffizi Gallery. This painting, exhibited in Florence's biggest museum, the Uffizi Gallery, was considered for many years to be a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. But in 1938, an expertise proved that it had been painted in the 17th century, 100 years after the artist's death. Therefore, it was a fake. How could the striking resemblance between the two paintings be explained? Could this portrait be the original one, copied in the Uffizi? Could it be the authentic self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, believed to have disappeared forever? A great deal was at stake here. There are only a mere 15 paintings by the Tuscan master, and nobody knows exactly what the artist looked like. The potential discovery of a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci immediately raised the issue of dating. Nicola Barbatelli goes to see Giancarlo Napoli, a restorer specialized in expertizing works of art. In my life, I have been fortunate to have seen a large number of paintings because I have always worked for major museums and collections. My instinct and my eye have never let me down. However, in the case of this painting, when I saw it, since it was in such good condition, I thought it could have been one of those copies made in the 19th century. So my immediate impression when I saw it was that it was too beautiful to be from the 16th century. Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 and died in 1519. The Lucan portrait depicts a man of approximately 50 years old. If it represents the artist, it would have to have been painted in the early 16th century in the city where Leonardo lived, Florence. In the 15th century, Florence was the city where an art revolution was brewing in painting, sculpture and architecture. It would later become known as the Renaissance. For the 15th century, Florence had an extremely high literacy rate and I should also say a very high rate of numeracy because of the fact that the Florentines were the great merchants of the Middle Ages. You had these great, first of all, wool merchants and then secondly, the bankers. And so that then really becomes the economic precondition for the cultural efflorescence of the 15th century in Florence. The Medici dynasty was at the head of the Florentine Republic. They were bankers and art lovers. First Cosimo, then the man nicknamed by his contemporaries Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo was passionate about architecture and poetry. He contributed to the protection and promotion of many artists including Botticelli, Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci. One of the most important workshops in Florence was that of the sculptor and painter Andrea Verrocchio, a protégé of the Medicis. If you wanted to be an artist as a young man, say when you were 12, 13, 14, you didn't go to art school. What you did is went into a bodega, a workshop, and you became an apprentice. There was an apprenticeship system and you went into the workshop of an established painter, goldsmith, sculptor and in that workshop you would learn all of the secrets of the trade. You would learn how to grind pigment, you would learn how to apply paint, you would learn silverpoint, you would learn draftsmanship, you would learn ultimately things like painting with tempera and then finally by the end of the 1400s at least how to paint in oil. Young Leonardo da Vinci began his apprenticeship at the Verrocchio Bodega in 1467 at the age of 15. He started off drawing and painting but also learned sculpture, architecture and mechanical arts. He remained with Verrocchio well into his 20s and Verrocchio I think spotted Leonardo very early, recognised his talents, nurtured them and so we see the two of them in the 1470s working in tandem, working in partnership together. The Baptism of Christ is a testament to this collaboration. Started by Verrocchio, this work was finished by Leonardo da Vinci, to whom the angel in the extreme left of the painting has been directly attributed. Fifteen days after his initial visit, Niccolò Barbatelli is contacted by Giancarlo Napoli. The restorer has finished cleaning the painting. The painting looked very different. It had snags, dents, cuts. We wondered where all this damage came from. The restorer told me that they had been covered by previous restorations which he removed during his cleaning process. These marks are only the tip of the iceberg. When I started cleaning the painting, I noticed micro cracks which were actually caused by the wood moving over the course of centuries. This is typical of Renaissance paintings. The restorator's conclusions are encouraging, but to confirm that the painting is definitely from the 16th century, it needs to undergo further investigation. This is the beginning of a major investigation, which will take the Lucan portrait across Europe. The first stop is the Innova Centre in Naples, specialised in the scientific study of historical monuments and works of art. The Lucan portrait was given to Giovanni Paternosta, an expert in X-ray analysis. This technique makes it possible to determine the precise age of the pigments that were used. You must bear in mind that from antiquity, through the end of the 18th or 19th century, pigments basically didn't change. They were mineral pigments or sometimes vegetable or animal based. It was only from the 18th or 19th century onwards that synthetic or organic pigments were developed. Right off the bat, one element of the portrait, the white feather decorating the hat, intrigues the researchers. Its extreme whiteness seems to indicate that it was painted with a synthetic pigment. It could prove that the painting doesn't date from the Renaissance. To be sure, the experts X-ray the entire painting. Let's look at the graph of the cheek. There you have it. You can clearly see the presence of antimony. There's no pewter and lead is very present, so it must be lead antimony, which could be a Naples yellow. The first traces of its use date back to the beginning of the 16th century. Naples yellow, vermilion red, indigo blue or azure green. These sometimes toxic substances were prepared by the apprentices. They were mixed with egg to obtain paint referred to as tempera grassa, which will progressively be replaced by oil painting at the end of the 15th century. This pigment was common during the Renaissance. But what about the feather? Its pigment is made of titanium dioxide, which wasn't introduced until the beginning of the 20th century. This means that the feather was painted at a later date, probably during a restoration. Aside from the titanium dioxide used for the feather, all the pigments in the Lucan portrait are compatible with Leonardo da Vinci's era. For Niccolò Barbatelli, this is a very promising result. He decides to pursue his analysis with Filippo Taurasi, a physics professor. It is time to examine the painting's base. The wooden panel is x-rayed. Three wooden fragments of several milligrams are lifted from the back of the painting. The wood of the painting, like any vegetable or animal organism, contains carbon-14. When the organism dies, the amount of carbon-14 decreases over time. By measuring the amount remaining today, we can deduce the age of the wood. It is important to note that carbon-14 dating does not establish when the panel was used as a base for a painting. The information collected pertains to the growth period of the tree that the wood comes from, and the period that we identified is somewhere between 1474 and 1517. The scientific analysis of the Lucan portrait through x-rays and carbon-14 dating confirms that the painting dates from the Renaissance, at the end of the 15th century or very beginning of the 16th century. This means it was painted during Leonardo's lifetime. In 1481, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by the Augustinian convent at San Donato in Scopito to paint an Adoration of the Magi. It was his first big commission. He had 30 months to complete the work. What you were given was a set of rules, things that you were going to do. And of course, usually the hard and fast rules, the three things that were absolutely key were the subject matter, virgin or child, crucifixion, whatever it was going to be, the amount you were paid, and that payment would include what you had to spend on materials, and then thirdly, and this was a crucial one, the deadline. Leonardo da Vinci never finished the Adoration of the Magi. The recently restored painting has now been returned to its original state. For the first time, the wealth of detail and the virtuosity of its composition are visible. The artist managed to give each character the appearance of movement, while drawing the viewer's attention to the virgin and child at the centre of the painting. Back in Salerno, Nicola Barbatelli goes to see the restorer, who has made an incredible discovery on the back of the painting. During the cleaning process, the words PINXIT MEA appeared written backwards. It was strange. The text was written from right to left, with a graphic inversion of the letters. This mirror writing is characteristic of left-handed people. It was used by Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote and painted with his left hand. His notebooks, called codexes, in which he recorded throughout his life his thoughts and experiences in such diverse areas as anatomy, hydraulics, architecture and botany, confirm this. Thousands of handwritten pages are systematically written backwards. PINXIT MEA. Two Latin words. What could they mean? In Vinci, the artist's native village, Peter Hohenstatt, an expert on Leonardo, goes to the library which holds exact reproductions of the Tuscan master's codexes. PINXIT MEA, it's a text which the Latin is not 100% correct. It could be very easily read. MEA means probably myself. And PINXIT, he has painted myself. It could be a play to say that I is the one who is talking, but is also the one who is on the painting. But the Latin translation doesn't really support it perfectly. We know that the artist wrote most of the time in Tuscan dialect. The illegitimate son of a Florentine notary, he couldn't attend the university. His Latin was self-taught. Could PINXIT MEA's limited knowledge of Latin explain the strange grammatical form of PINXIT MEA? In Monteforte, Iapino, a meeting is scheduled with Silvana Iuliano, a criminal handwriting expert. The handwriting analysis is based upon a comparison of various writing samples. Silvana Iuliano works from reproductions of the Atlanticus codex, which contains over 1,000 pages of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. These characteristics, these minute details that we come across in certain letters, were evaluated and compared with the PINXIT MEA letters, which reproduced the same specificities. Let's say that the codexes reinforced our conviction that PINXIT MEA was very likely written by Leonardo himself. If Leonardo da Vinci was the author of the PINXIT MEA inscription, the Lucan portrait could indeed be his self-portrait. It portrays a man in his early fifties. The painter was born in 1452, and the Lucan portrait could have been painted around 1500. That year, Leonardo da Vinci was forced to leave Milan. War had started up again in Italy. King Louis XII's French army had invaded the Lombard city, causing the fall of his protector, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo chose to return to Florence, the city where he'd spent his first years of apprenticeship. He arrived in the spring of 1500. Twenty years had gone by. The Tuscan city had changed a great deal. The Medicis were no longer in power. At 50, the artist had to start all over again. He hoped he would still find some support in Florence. Very kindly, one of his friends, someone that he knew when he lived in Florence previously, Filippino Lippi, handed him a commission that he was given, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, really helping him out financially, helping him find his feet in Florence and begin to remake his reputation. In some ways, what this little parable tells us is that the patrons were less concerned about who did it than they were about what was going to be in the painting. Leonardo da Vinci never completed his altarpiece. He only did a preliminary sketch, which has unfortunately disappeared. But the artist worked his whole life on the theme of Saint Anne, the Virgin and the Child. Two ink drawings, a painting at the Louvre Museum, and lastly, a charcoal sketch enhanced with white, allow us to imagine what the first drawing must have looked like. The monks, awed by Leonardo da Vinci's preliminary drawing, decided to exhibit it publicly. All of Florence rushed to the Servite monastery. During these troubled times, with wars starting up again, people came to pray to Saint Anne, the patron saint of Florence. But they also came to admire the Tuscan painter's style. Painting is an intellectual process first and foremost, one which feeds off all sciences. It is a cosumentale, a mental activity, as Leonardo da Vinci would say. Behind the softness and finesse of the characters and the enigmatic landscapes lies a body of knowledge and intellectual processes compiled before starting to paint. He was interested in representation of reality, how I can make it that this painting looks as close as when I look in the world. This was his challenge. The attention paid to the painting of faces and bodies, combined with the artist's anatomical research, makes them look hugely realistic. The characters look like they're captured in a natural moment, through a look that lights up or a faint smile. Leonardo da Vinci makes them seem incredibly alive. Can we find in the Lucan portrait these qualities associated with Leonardo da Vinci's painting? Is it possible that the man who painted the Mona Lisa also painted this portrait? The acute attention to detail that the artist glorifies in this painting, the jaw muscles including the slight indent in the cheek, the curls of the beard, practically drawn hair by hair with extraordinary care. Especially the way the hair is painted, this is typically his quality. But what most captures our attention in this portrait are the eyes. One is seized by this look that seems to follow the viewer wherever he may be standing. A gaze in motion, reminiscent of the Mona Lisa. Analysis of the Lucan portrait reveals similarities with Leonardo's painting style. If this painting were done by the Tuscan master, could it be a self-portrait? For five centuries, Leonardo da Vinci's appearance has been a never-ending subject of controversy. We know that the artist was born in Vinci, the Tuscan village that gave him his name. But his contemporaries left very few descriptions. The first biographies written by Paolo Giovio, the anonymous Marlia Becchiano or Giorgio Vasari are from the 16th century. The only written descriptions we have of Leonardo da Vinci sadly come from people who had never met him and in fact come from decades after his death. They're unanimous about how handsome he is, how he had long hair, how he had a beautiful curled beard, how he dressed incredibly well. The portrait in red chalk represents the artist with the features of an impenetrable old man. Until recently, it was considered to be the artist's only true self-portrait. This was the official representation of Leonardo's face. But a few years ago, it was discovered that this sketch was from around the 1490s, when Leonardo was only 30 years old. This cast doubt on the identity of the sitter. There remains the Windsor drawing. This profile portrait from around 1515 by Giovanni Francesco Melzi is the only pictorial evidence of Leonardo's appearance that hasn't been challenged. Leonardo da Vinci met Melzi in 1508. The young aristocrat from Milan wanted to learn to paint. The artist welcomed him as an apprentice in his workshop. Melzi stayed by his side for life. The question of Leonardo's face has always fascinated the art world. Some historians have ventured to say that the face of the Vitruvian man, or that of the young man in the Adoration of the Magi, belongs to the artist. Recently, a drawing which might be a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci was found in the Codex on the Flights of Birds. However, this is all pure speculation. This is an enigma in which portrait and self-portrait, real and fake, face each other off in an endless game of mirrors. To solve this mystery, Nicola Barbatelli decides to call on experts in facial recognition analysis. Several studies are launched. One takes place in Spain, in association with Cristian Galvez. This Spanish researcher is the author of a study on the evolution of pictorial representations of Leonardo's face. I've been in touch with the group who are specialized in morphopsychology of the Civil Guard, the UCO. They are facial recognition experts. They decided to apply the morphology ability towards art, and in this precise case, to the Tavla Lucana, to Melzi's portrait, and the alleged self-portrait from Torino. The faces are analyzed and compared to determine if there's morphological compatibility between the different portraits. The man in the Windsor profile portrait and the one in the Lucan portrait are the same person. The only one that does not coincide with these images is the alleged self-portrait from Torino. The faces represented on both the Lucan painting and Melzi's sketch look strangely similar. But how can one be sure that it is one and the same face? At Tallinn University, a 3D reconstruction experiment could provide proof. Orest Kormashov, director of the art history department, Helen Koch, a 3D designer, and Gianni Glini, consultant for the Lucan Museum, partner for this unprecedented research. The comparison of Melzi's profile and the three-quarter Lucan portrait enabled us to identify the specific points between the two works which perfectly coincide and to create a 3D reconstruction of Leonardo's face. In addition to the 3D reconstruction on the computer, Orest Kormashov tackled the modeling of Leonardo's face. It was the idea to use different approaches. First the classical one, that was in the form of sculpture, and the other was using the latest digital possibilities. Both absolutely different ways and we were very curious if we come to the similar result. A few days later, Gianni Glini came back to the university to discover the sculpture in 3D reconstruction. For the first time, Leonardo da Vinci's face appears in three dimensions, giving it an uncanny realistic feel. This is the first reconstruction of this kind on da Vinci's face. You could say we were able to see what Leonardo looked like as though we recognized him if we ran into him in the street. But there was a problem matching the 3D reconstruction to the Lucan portrait. Of course the first thing we did was superimpose Leonardo da Vinci's reconstructed face onto the painting. And we got chills at that very moment, because the images did not correspond perfectly. When we looked to match the face at the level of the nose and mouth, we realized that the eyes did not fit. So we thought we had made a mistake, a reconstruction mistake. We had missed something. But what? We find the three-quarter pose in the Lucan portrait. But if we look carefully, we can see that the pupils diverge. The right eye looks straight ahead, but the left seems to be glancing slightly to the side. The position of the pupils seems strangely disconnected, as if the pupil from one eye was looking in a different direction than the other. This particularity is flagrant in Saint John the Baptist. It is slightly less obvious but nonetheless present in the Mona Lisa. It can also be seen in the Lucan portrait. Is this same asymmetrical gaze proof that the Lucan portrait was painted by Leonardo da Vinci? How can the divergence of the eyes be explained? He understood in the 19th century that humans are looking with two eyes on things. And this created an issue. And it created for him a really enormous issue, because he wanted to represent, in a painting, reality. Like we are looking at things. And how to represent something where we are looking normally with two eyes. It is an enormous challenge for the artist, because binocular vision enables us to perceive reality in three dimensions. It is the merging of two images in our brain, one from the right eye and the other from the left, which creates depth perception. As always, it was through experimentation that Leonardo da Vinci found a way to represent binocular vision in a painting. He took a sphere and drew the half seen by one eye and did the same on the other half with the second eye. And he realized that this produced a spatial perception of the object. Each half seems to stand out more. So, isn't it possible that in the Lucan painting, the two images, one from each eye, are superimposed? That would explain why our computer image can never match the painting. The Lucan portrait could therefore be a combination of two points of view. The nose and mouth, oriented in the opposite direction, would have been painted with the right eye. And the eyes and the rest of the face, oriented on a 22.5-degree axis, with the left. This explains the different axes observed between the eyes, nose and mouth. What he did with Giaconda and what he did with this portrait is he turned slightly around the head, so that the line of the nose is hiding one of the most critical parts, where you have to blur. And there he had a technique, which we call normally as sfumato. He was the first one who did the sfumato based on the binocular vision. Art and science. This is what hides behind the Lucan portrait. It's a combination of two points of view. Art and science. This is what hides behind the Lucan portrait. The painting's complexity sheds light on the Florentine master's vision. He considered painting to be an art that serves to better understand the world. In Chieti, in southern Italy, a final experiment is carried out. Research on digital fingerprints is entrusted to Professor Luigi Capasso, who collaborated with the police and scientific brigade. As a person, as a man, Leonardo da Vinci did not leave any traces of himself. As a result, what possibilities are available to us scientists in terms of paleobiological information on this very important Italian personality? The only option is to look for any biological traces on the materials he touched. In this context, the idea of searching for fingerprints is an obvious choice. Out of a hundred pages from Leonardo da Vinci's Bottega, over 200 fragments of fingerprints have been identified. A fingerprint was also found on the lady with an ermine. This is how we produced Leonardo da Vinci's left thumbprint. This was the first item of biological information that we've ever had on this great master. The police decided to do research on the prints on the Lucan portrait. Macro shots are taken across the surface of the painting. On the Lucan portrait, our colleagues from the police found three fragments of fingerprints, two on the surface of the painting and one on the wooden base. We concentrated on the fingerprint fragment near the feather on the hat. We compared this fingerprint fragment with the reconstructed one, and this comparison highlighted three concording details. The prints are partially compatible, interchanged, the prints are partially compatible in technical terms. This print fragment was certainly made at the same time the paint was being applied, because it is embedded. It was left there, printed on the painting before it dried. The paint was still wet. A print left on wet paint. This gesture takes us back to Leonardo da Vinci's technique. Creating shadows with his fingers. Who else but the artist could have put his thumb on a painting that was being worked on? After travelling across Europe for the needs of the investigation, painting was returned to Nicola Barbatelli and his Lucan Museum. The possible attribution of the portrait was an event in the art world. In 2009, Nicola Barbatelli welcomed Professor Carlo Pedretti, one of the most eminent specialists on Leonardo da Vinci's work. I am always very circumspect and very careful, but also very optimistic. I have great trust in the ability of works of art to tell their story, and this painting is telling its story. I feel there is something here, and we must keep studying it. After this last stage of restoration, the Lucan portrait finally appeared in its original state, without varnish or the white feather. Discovering the restored painting was an extraordinary moment. The most interesting part was the discovery of the skin tones, the sfumato, and the astounding light effects. For the last 15 years of his life, Leonardo da Vinci travelled continuously, searching for a patron. In 1516, the artist set off on what would be his last journey. At 64, he crossed the Alps on the back of a mule, carrying his most precious possessions, his notebooks and three of his paintings, the Mona Lisa, the St Anne, and the St John the Baptist. The young king of France, Francis I, invited him to live in Amboise. It was here, in the Clos Lucé chateau, not far from Francis I's chateau, that was the first chateau that Leonardo da Vinci spent the last three years of his life, in the company of his faithful companion, Giovanni Francesco Melzi. It was a golden exile for Leonardo. As a show of affection, Francis I gave him a chateau just 500 metres from the royal palace, the Clos Lucé, as he called it, the Palazzo del Clou. A surprising relationship developed between this young 22-year-old king and this great artist. Francis I considered Leonardo to be an important scholar, a great scientist and a magnificent artist, but also as a mentor. At the Clos Lucé, contrary to what one might think, Leonardo remained extremely active. He worked on his projects in royal commissions. And crucially, he also has a number of his paintings, the most famous of which, not famous then, famous now, but maybe his most beloved painting, of course, the Mona Lisa. The Mona Lisa, the St John the Baptist and the St Anne, but no sign of a self-portrait. During the last three years of his life in the Clos Lucé, Leonardo da Vinci asked Giovanni Francesco Melzi to help organise his notebooks. He intended to write several treaties on the various subjects he had studied throughout his life, but the task was immense, and the artist didn't get a chance to see it through. It's very sad to contemplate Leonardo da Vinci in the spring of 1519 as he lay dying on his bed, because of the fact that he, I think, believed that everything he had done was either going to be lost or was going to be unnoticed. And one of the last things that he writes in his notebooks is, tell me if I ever did a thing. And it's very sad to contemplate that he felt he had not done everything that he could have done, and that as he lay dying, and as he died, his work was going to be forgotten, and the waters of history were going to close over his head. Leonardo died on May the 2nd, 1519, in Clos. He wanted his remains carried by 30 beggars carrying torches to the St. Florentine church and the royal chapel of Amboise, where he was buried. The story is fascinating because, five centuries later, Leonardo has allowed himself to be discovered. It isn't us who quote-unquote recovered a painting potentially done by Leonardo. No, it's Leonardo who, after five centuries, decided to come out of the shadows. It's not a fingerprint, it's not a signage, it's not... But it's what is represented, what is the technique of representation, and there we have one painter who did something strange like this. This is Leonardo. This, for me personally, makes it convincing. Leonardo da Vinci's physical appearance has remained an enigma for centuries. The investigation into the Lucan portrait suggests that it might be an authentic self-portrait of the artist. 500 years after Leonardo's death, this incredible discovery offers us a glimpse of his face, lifting the veil on one of art history's greatest mysteries.