Experts reconstruct Leonardo fingerprint

Discovery could provide more detail about the artist's life, ethnicity

By Marta Falconi

"ROME - Anthropologists said they have pieced together Leonardo da Vinci's left index fingerprint _ a discovery that could help provide information on such matters as the food the artist ate and whether his mother was of Arabic origin.



The reconstruction of the fingerprint was the result of three years of research and could help attribute disputed paintings or manuscripts, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist and director of the Anthropology Research Institute at Chieti University in central Italy.

"It adds the first touch of humanity. We knew how Leonardo saw the world and the future ... but who was he? This biological information is about his being human, not being a genius," Capasso said in a recent telephone interview.

The research was based on a first core of photographs of about 200 fingerprints — most of them partial — taken from about 52 papers handled by Leonardo in his life. Capasso's work, presented in 2005 in a specialized magazine called Anthropologie, published in the Czech Republic, is on display in an exhibition in the town of Chieti through March 30.

The artist often ate while working, and Capasso and other experts said his fingerprints could include traces of saliva, blood or the food he ate the night before. It is information that could help clear up questions about his origins.

Certain distinctive features are more common in the fingerprints of some ethnic populations, experts say.

"The one we found in this finger tip applies to 60 percent of the Arabic population, which suggests the possibility that his mother was of Middle Eastern origin," Capasso said.

Other experts, however, say that determining ethnicity based on fingerprints is vague.

What the science says, "generally speaking, is that if your parent has a lot of arches, you'll probably have a lot of arches," said Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine.

'The science essentially comes up with breakdowns: x percent of Asians have arches, x have whorls, x have loops. Some races have very low incidences of some patterns and very high incidences of others.'"

Da Vinci judge's secret code revealed

"Mystery solved. It was the admiral.

A secret code embedded in the text of a court ruling in the case of Dan Brown's bestseller 'The Da Vinci Code' has been cracked, but far from revealing an ancient conspiracy it is simply an obscure reference to a Royal Navy admiral.

British High Court Justice Peter Smith, who handed down a ruling that Brown had not plagiarized his book, had embedded his own secret message in his judgment by italicizing letters scattered throughout the 71-page document.

In Brown's book, a secret code reveals an ancient conspiracy to hide facts about Jesus Christ.

The judge's own code briefly caused a wave of amused speculation when it was discovered by a lawyer this week, nearly a month after the ruling was handed down.

But the lawyer, Dan Tench, cracked it after a day of puzzling. The judge's code was based on the Fibonacci sequence, a mathematical progression discussed in the book.

"After much trial and error, we found a formula which fitted," wrote Tench, who had nothing to do with the Brown case but discovered the italicized letters when studying the ruling.

The judge's secret message was: "Jackie Fisher, who are you? Dreadnought," Tench wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

Judge Smith is known as a navy buff, and Fisher was a Royal Navy admiral who developed the idea for a giant battleship called the HMS Dreadnought in the early 20th century.

Tench wrote that the judge had e-mailed him to confirm he had guessed the secret code right.

The judge later confirmed the existence of the code, and revealed that the Fibonacci sequence was indeed the secret to its solution.

"The message reveals a significant but now overlooked event that occurred virtually 100 years to the day of the start of the trial," he said in a statement.

He said that he is not normally much of a fan of puzzles, such as the Japanese number puzzles that have become an obsession of the British press.

"The preparation of the Code took about 40 minutes and its insertion another 40 minutes or so," he wrote. 'I hate crosswords and do not do Sudoku as I do not have the patience.'"