The artist's remains are reportedly buried in France's Chateau d'Amboise. Now, scientists are one step closer to identifying them.
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00:00 Move over Dan Brown because scientists are getting closer to cracking the real Da Vinci code.
00:07 And by the real Da Vinci code we mean Leonardo Da Vinci's genetic code, his DNA.
00:13 A new family tree, pieced together by two Italian art historians, has revealed that Da Vinci has 14 living male descendants.
00:24 And that's really exciting to scientists because they think it could help them unravel the hidden mystery of where the Mona Lisa painter is buried.
00:34 Leonardo Da Vinci was pretty much the definition of a multi-talented guy, a renaissance man.
00:41 He was an inventor, an anatomist, a scientist, an architect, as well as being one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance.
00:52 He was no slouch. And alongside being really talented also came loads of peculiar personality quirks.
01:00 He would fill his notebooks with these fanciful drawings of precursors to tanks and to flying machines and helicopters,
01:09 as well as really, really detailed drawings of human anatomy.
01:14 The Vitruvian Man is a really famous example of this. It's a human male with his arms and legs and a few other things,
01:23 splayed out and sketched in elaborate detail.
01:26 And alongside capturing all of these details and these inventions and these drawings,
01:32 he would make notes alongside, above and below them and in the margins, in mirrored writing.
01:37 It would be writing that was back to front and written in his own shorthand so that none of his contemporaries could steal his ideas.
01:45 Despite Da Vinci being this really famous guy during his time and that fame only having really grown in the centuries after that,
01:53 it's actually really, really hard to reconstruct his family tree. And there's two big reasons for that.
02:00 Firstly, he was born out of wedlock. So his dad was a fairly notable lawyer at the time, San Piero da Vinci.
02:09 But his mum was an orphan child, Katerina, that we don't really know loads about.
02:15 So we can only really look at him through his father's lineage.
02:20 And also when he died in 1519, Da Vinci had no children. So there's no ability there to directly trace any family history.
02:31 Despite having no children, he did have 22 half brothers on his dad's side.
02:37 And it's from looking at historical documents and tracing their ancestry and looking at their descendants
02:43 that the art historians were able to find the 14 living descendants of Da Vinci.
02:49 And they did that by looking across 690 years and 21 generations.
02:55 And his ancestors have professions as diverse as Da Vinci's interests were.
03:01 One is a blacksmith, another a porcelain seller. They even have an artist among them.
03:07 Now the reason why scientists are focused exclusively on male descendants of Da Vinci is because of a chromosome called the Y chromosome.
03:17 Only men have it and it's passed down from father to son.
03:21 And scientists think it remains largely the same across 25 generations.
03:27 The reason why that's really exciting is because it could allow scientists, if they sequence the DNA, the Y chromosome of Da Vinci's descendants, to get a peek at the DNA of Da Vinci himself.
03:43 What is it that scientists actually want to use Da Vinci's DNA for?
03:49 Well, some want to use it to create an accurate 3D model of what his face might have looked like for a process called DNA phenotyping.
03:58 Others would like to identify whether artwork and notes purportedly belonging to him actually do belong to him.
04:07 And others, possibly the most exciting purpose, want to use it to figure out if remains that supposedly belong to Da Vinci actually do.
04:19 Now, Da Vinci was originally recorded as being buried in the chapel of Saint Florentine in the Chateau d'Amboise in France.
04:28 But the French Revolution came through, busted the chapel up, and it had to be demolished.
04:33 And there were remains that were excavated from the chapel belonging to a mysterious male that were then buried in the nearby chapel of Saint Hubert.
04:47 Now, many people claim that these actually belong to Da Vinci, but none of us really know.
04:55 And so, if they were able to match the DNA taken from his descendants, discovered through this new family tree,
05:05 and compare it with the DNA found in the remains underneath Saint Hubert,
05:12 maybe they might actually find the real Da Vinci and finally crack the mystery of the true Da Vinci code once and for all.
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