Da Vinci Self-Portrait Unearthed
Italian researchers believe they have unearthed a previously unknown self-portrait (pictured) by Leonardo da Vinci drawn when the artist was a young man. The faint pencil sketch has emerged after being hidden for 500 years in one of the Renaissance genius’s most famous manuscripts, the “Codex on the Flight of Birdsâ€, written between 1490 and 1505. In a discovery that could have come from the script of a Dan Brown thriller, an Italian scientific journalist studying the document noticed the faint outline of a human nose hidden underneath lines of ink handwriting, It struck him as being similar in shape and drawing style to a later self-portrait of Leonardo. It is thought that Leonardo first made the drawing in the 1480s, then later reused the same piece of paper when he came to write his codex – a Latin term for manuscript – on bird flight.
