Think it ’s heavily living up to your home name ? Try encounter out you ’re a removed relative of Leonardo da Vinci . According toThe Guardian , Italian historians Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato announced last Thursday that they had used historic records to identify 35 bread and butter descendants of the Italian artist , along with a antecedently unknown family grave accent . Eventually , the two plan to trace Leonardo ’s DNA through his congeneric .
Leonardo da Vinci was a prolific writer , discoverer , artist , and intellectual . However , little was know about his extended sept until now . He never splice , and died in 1519 in Amboise , France , without leave any known successor . Adding to the whodunit , Leonardo ’s body is think to have likely been misplace during Europe ’s spiritual warfare in the 16thcentury , ending all theory of tracking his unmediated posterity via genetics .
Vezzosi and Sabato began their research in 1973 , using Leonardo ’s founder , a Florentine effectual notary public named Ser Piero da Vinci , as a jump - off point , Smithsonianreports . They pored through landed estate papers and other historical record , include documents left by Leonardo ’s grandfather , Antonio .
Complicating matters , there was n’t any information on Leonardo ’s mother . One track record mentioned that her name was Caterina , the wife of Achattabriga di Piero del Vaccha da Vinci — make Leonardo an illegitimate tike . Other historiographer recollect she may have been an Arab slave . This meant that Vezzosi and Sabato had to focus on Leonardo ’s paternal branch .
“ We checked documents and tomb as far as France and Spain to redo the history of Leonardo ’s folk , ” Vezzositold Discovery News . “ We even found [ an ] obscure grave of Leonardo ’s family in Vinci . ”
Eventually , Vezzosi and Sabato locate nearly three dozen presumed ascendant of Leonardo , all live in Florence and its neighboring villages . Among their ranks were an architect , a policeman , a pastry chef , an accountant , and a retired blacksmith .
One notable relation was Oscar - nominated director Franco Zeffirelli , who directed iconic flick adaptations ofRomeo and Juliet(1968 ) andThe Taming of the Shrew(1967 ) . He had antecedently take relation to Leonardo in an awards actor’s line in 2007,the BBC reports .
Another relative : Giovanni Calosi , who said that his family had once possess Leonardo ’s document and letters . He claim the correspondence was written in backwards handwriting and could only be interpret in a mirror . “ We never open any importance to those papers , which were lose and sold , " Calosi toldThe Guardian . " What we thought was a legend give-up the ghost down through generations turns out to be the truth . ”
[ h / tThe Guardian ]
