good morning
let 's look for a minute at the greatest icon of all
we're all familiar with his fantastic work his drawings his paintings his inventions his writings
but we do not know his face
thousands of books have been written about him but there's controversy and it remains about his looks
even this well known portrait is not accepted by many art historians so what do you think
is this the face of leonardo da vinci or isn't it
i find that hard to believe his contemporaries made faces like the ones you see here en face or three quarters
so surely a passionatedrawer like leonardo must have made self portraits from time to time
so let 's try to find them i think that if we were to scan all of his work
and look for self portraits we would find his face looking at us
so i looked at all of his drawings more than seven hundred
and looked for male portraits there are about one hundred and twenty you see them here
which ones of these could be self portraits well for that they have to be done as we just saw en face or three quarters so we can eliminate all the profiles
it also has to be sufficiently detailed
so we can also eliminate the ones that are very vague or very stylized
and we know from his contemporaries that leonardo was a very handsome even beautiful man so we can also eliminate the ugly ones or the
and look what happens only three candidates remain that fit the bill
yes indeed the old man is there
as is this famous pen drawing of the homo vitruvianos
and lastly the only portrait of a male that leonardo painted the musician
we go into these faces i should explain why i have some right to talk about them
i've made more than one thousand one hundred portraits myself for newspapers over the course of three hundred thirty years sorry thirty years
they have the same broad forehead the horizontal eyebrows the long nose the curved lips and the small well developed chin i couldn't believe my eyes when i first saw that there is no reason why these portraits should look alike
all we did was look for portraits that had the characteristics of a self portrait and look they are very similar now
made in the right order the young man should be made first and as you see here from the years that they were created it is indeed the case they are made in the right order
what was the age of leonardo at the time does that fit yes it does he was thirty three thirty eight and sixty three when these were made so we have three pictures potentially of the same person of the same age as leonardo at the time
but how do we know it's him and not someone else
well we need a reference and here 's the only picture of leonardo that's widely accepted it's a statue made by verrocchio of david for which leonardo posed as a boy of fifteen and if we now compare the face of the statue
with the face of the musician
you see the very same features again the statue is the reference and it connects the identity of leonardo to those three faces
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