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.
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