Rome - It's an artistic mystery involving fingerprints, Leonardo da Vinci and a disputed masterpiece that hangs in Rome.
The whodunit's about who did the work on The Adoration Of The Christ Child attributed to Fra Bartolomeo in Rome's Galleria Borghese. Some of the illustrious names to come up through the centuries are Raphael, Ghirlandaio and Lorenzo di Credi, but scholars have never been sure.
A crucial clue - or perhaps a red herring - came during a recent restoration: a centuries-old fingerprint fixed in the paint. That, along with stylistic similarities, made scholars think of Leonardo - who sometimes left a digital imprint on his works as a kind of signature.
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"Once it was restored, a kind of yellowish halo could be seen in the sky in the upper left," the chief restorer Elisabetta Zatti said on Tuesday, describing the fingerprint she discovered on the painting Italians call the Tondo - meaning "round" - after its circular shape.
Photographs of the Adoration will be flown in March to Krakow, Poland, to compare its fingerprint, uncovered at the end of a yearlong restoration that ended in November, with the one on the Leonardo masterpiece Lady With An Ermine.
Other hitherto hidden details of the painting were uncovered in the restoration, including typically Leonardesque symbolism like wild primrose, which represents resurrection, and the blue veronica flower, symbol of the eyes of the Virgin Mary.
Perhaps most strikingly, the restoration work revealed that the Virgin Mary had the large and somewhat masculine hands that are a hallmark of many female figures in Leonardo's work.
"There are many details that make one think of Leonardo, like the stylistic power, the technique of 'sfumato,' the virile hands, the eyelids, and the expressive intensity of Saint Joseph, as well as that it's a work full of symbolic meaning," Zatti said in a telephone interview.
Leonardo pioneered the technique called "sfumato", which gives outlines a hazy edge and can lend both dreaminess and sense of heightened realism to a work. Many artists copied the technique, but Leonardo's use of it was unique.
Zatti said that if the fingerprint turns out to be Leonardo's, the painting could probably be attributed to him.
"It's difficult to imagine he would have left it on the painting of someone else," she said.
Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo near Florence who was not involved in the restoration, said the discovery of the fingerprints was interesting, but cautioned that a lot of research would be needed to give a definite attribution.
"Fingerprints are very useful, and Leonardo's paintings and manuscripts are full of them," Vezzosi said. "If that is his fingerprint, it means at least that he has worked on that painting."
The Adoration, with a diameter of about one metre, used precious materials like lapis lazuli and gold leaf that give it luminosity. The gold was used not only for halos and garments, but also to give highlights to the sky and landscape. The work, believed to have been painted in the late 15th Century or early 16th, depicts Joseph and the Virgin Mary gazing down at the infant Jesus.
Leonardo was highly cryptic. He famously wrote backward in notebooks where his genius is on display in fields ranging from art to engineering. The fingerprint on paintings was an enigmatic sign that nonetheless would identify the maker beyond doubt.
The attribution of the Adoration has been widely debated through the centuries. A 1926 study by art critic Roberto Longhi generated wide support for the Fra Bartolomeo thesis, but doubts have remained.
Fra Bartolomeo, originally Baccio della Porta, became a Dominican friar after falling under the influence of the fire-and-brimstone sermons of Girolamo Savonarola. He owes an artistic debt to Raphael.
Leonardo's Lady With An Ermine hangs in Krakow's Czartoryskich Museum. It represents a teenage beauty whom scholars believe to be Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of Milan's ruler Lodovico Sforza and the artist's patron at the time. - Sapa-AP
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