Da Vinci portrait found in manuscript

Perugia: It sounds like a plot from a Dan Brown thriller, but Italian researchers believe they have discovered a previously unknown self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci drawn when the artist was a young man.

The delicate 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 Birds, written between 1490 and 1505.

An Italian scientific journalist who was studying the document noticed, concealed by lines of bold ink handwriting, the faint outline of a nose which struck him as being similar in shape and drawing style to a later self-portrait of Leonardo.

Piero Angela enlisted the help of art historians, Carabinieri police forensic experts and graphic artists to tease out more detail from the ghostly image. Over months of micro-pixel work, graphic designers gradually "removed" the text by making it white instead of black, revealing the drawing beneath. What emerged was the face of a young to middle-aged man with long hair, a short beard and a pensive gaze.

Angela was struck by similarities to a famous self-portrait of Leonardo, made when the artist was an old man around 1512. The portrait, in red chalk, is kept in Turin's Biblioteca Reale, or Royal Library.

The research team used criminal investigation techniques to digitally correlate the newly discovered sketch with the well-known portrait. They employed facial reconfiguration technology to age the drawing of the younger man, hollowing the cheeks, darkening the eyes and furrowing the brow. The two portraits were so similar "that we may regard the hypothesis that the images portray the same person as reasonable", police photo-fit experts declared.

To make doubly sure, the ageing process was reversed, with researchers using a digital 'facelift' to rejuvenate the older self-portrait. After removing the older Leonardo's wrinkles and filling out his cheeks, the image that emerged was almost identical to the newly discovered sketch.

"When I actually tried to age the face [of the newly discovered portrait], and to put the hair and the beard of the famous self-portrait around it, a shiver ran down my spine. It resembled Leonardo like a twin brother," said Angela. "To uncover a new Leonardo drawing was astonishing." The similarities were also studied by a facial reconstruction surgeon in Rome.