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The hunt for Leonardo’s DNA has been a high-profile proving ground for “arteomics,” an emerging field that could transform how the art world authenticates and protects its most precious objects (see sidebar, below). Today, authorship decisions hinge on expert opinion on, for example, how a brushstroke was made. “Connoisseurship is still what counts,” says LDVP chair Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at Rockefeller University who previously led a major project to census the diversity of marine life.
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With human Y chromosome and other nuclear DNA sequences from both the drawing and the letters in hand, the LDVP team approached Lee, a Y chromosome expert, in late 2024. Lee was intrigued, and LDVP sent him blinded sequence data from swabs of Holy Child, several Frosino letters, and the cheeks of the scientists who sampled the materials. ….
Lee, Loftus, and Jackson geneticist Pille Hallast compared the sequences with a panel of some 90,000 known markers—changes in individual base pairs—that group Y chromosome sequences into lineages called haplogroups. Four samples from Holy Child and the Frosino letters could be reliably assigned a haplogroup—and they all converged on E1b1b, a lineage found in the Tuscany area that Leonardo’s extended family might have carried.
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When Andrew Miranker peers at a Blakelock canvas, he sees more than brushwork and varnish. He sees a molecular archive. “Paint is a recording device,” says Miranker, a biophysicist at Yale University. As oil paint slowly cures, it traps fragments of DNA—human, animal, microbial—along with the dust and air of a studio. By interrogating vanishingly small samples of the strata on supposed Blakelock canvases, Miranker’s team hopes to uncover clues to whether they were done by the artist himself or a clever forger.
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For instance, minuscule paint flakes from an oil painting of a family farmhouse by John Fairbanks, an American artist from the turn of the 20th century, yielded genetic signatures of farm animals, a dog, and regional crops such as wheat and clover.
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DNA often gets star billing, but proteins can also be telling, says Julie Arslanoglu, an organic chemist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who co-founded Art Bio Matters, an international consortium decoding molecular signatures in art.
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She and University of Bordeaux analytical chemist Caroline Tokarski, a pioneer in applying proteomic analysis to artworks, probed a long-standing puzzle about 18th century English artist Thomas Gainsborough. …. In 1773, Gainsborough wrote to a friend describing a “secret recipe” for preventing smoke’s dimming effects: He dipped drawings in skim milk.
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To test that claim, the Met-Bordeaux team analyzed rubbings from Gainsborough drawings in the Morgan Library & Museum. Their results, published in Heritage Science in 2020, confirmed the legend: The coating on Gainsborough’s sketches, including Hilly Landscape with Cows on the Road, contained bovine milk proteins, especially casein. But exactly how the artist applied the skim milk—and why it
helped—remains a riddle.
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https://www.science.org/content/article/have-scientists-found-leonardo-da-vinci-s-dna
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