An international team from a genome project led by researchers at the University of Florence assembled experts from multiple fields, including forensics. The team says it successfully extracted DNA from a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance artist, scientist, and inventor, titled “The Holy Infant.”
The results aren’t definitive and need additional validation, but the group’s DNA-collection method is already being hailed as a breakthrough for studying historical artworks.
What Did the Scientists Report?
Researchers from institutions around the world may have pulled DNA from Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing and other objects he touched. If confirmed, the find would be a major milestone in a decade-long effort to reconstruct the artist’s genome.
Cultural heritage objects—drawings, manuscripts, archival documents—can hold biological traces in addition to historical information.
Leonardo painted with both brushes and his fingers, and some of his DNA could have transferred onto the work and survived. Researchers say this genetic data could be invaluable to artomics, a new field that uses modern techniques to learn about artists, their environments, and the histories of their works.
Artworks are extremely fragile, so studying them often requires invasive methods that risk damage. DNA traces on objects also pick up contamination over time—from storage, handling by owners, or lab preparation—making it hard to separate genuine biological signals from background noise.
However, the project team developed a new minimally invasive sampling method to extract DNA from cultural heritage objects. In a preprint, they say they potentially recovered DNA from “The Holy Infant,” a drawing dated between 1472 and 1476.
In the 2000s, the late art dealer Fred Klein acquired the drawing. Many experts attribute it to Leonardo because of a left-handed shading technique associated with him, but some specialists argue it could have been made by one of his students.
They used swabs similar to those used for COVID-19 tests to collect DNA from the drawing, and they also sampled a letter likely written in the 1400s by Leonardo’s cousin.
Y-chromosome sequencing of DNA from both the drawing and the letter indicated the samples share a common ancestor from Tuscany, the region where Leonardo was born. That makes it possible the DNA came from him, but the evidence isn’t conclusive.
Confirming the match is difficult: Leonardo’s grave was destroyed during the French Revolution, so his remains can’t be located, and he left no direct descendants.
The team also recovered DNA from a mixture of fungi, bacteria, plants, and viruses that accumulated on the drawing over the centuries. This data can shed light on the materials the artist used while making “The Holy Infant,” and on how the work has been preserved and handled over time.
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