https://www.science.org/content/article/have-scientists-found-leonardo-da-vinci-s-dna
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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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Moonlight shimmers strangely in the landscape paintings of Ralph Albert Blakelock.
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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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