A self-portrait of young Leonardo

One of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci is a self-portrait in red chalk, where he looks quite old. In fact, there is a sketch in one of his notebooks, partially covered by written notes, that can be a self-portrait of the artist when he was young. The use of image processing, to remove the handwritten text and improve the image, allows a comparison of the two portraits. A special event at the Reggia di Venaria, Torino, is the exhibition "Leonardo, the Genius the Myth", from November 2011 to January 2012 [1]. The famous self-portrait in red chalk (Fig.1) will be on display in this exhibition along with works by other artists inspired over the centuries by the Leonardo's genius. The exhibition, as a journey through Leonardo da Vinci's works, includes several original drawings. The exhibition room was designed by Dante Ferretti, two times awarded by the Academy for Best Art Direction, who created a special shrine to contain the Leonardo's drawings. Besides the famous self-portrait, the visitors can see the Codex on the Flight of Birds, opened at the pages where, according to Carlo Pedretti, an Italian historian expert on the life and works of Leonardo, there is a self-portrait of the young genius [2,3]. As the self-portrait in red chalk, the Codex on the Flight of Birds is held at the Biblioteca Reale of Turin. The code is relatively small, dated approximately 1505. As we can see for Figure 2, the drawing in the Codex had been partially hidden by Leonardo, who wrote on it. Therefore, this portrait remained unappreciated for 500 years before being noted by Piero Angela, an Italian scientific journalist. On Saturday February 27, 2009, during a prime-time entertainment show of the RAI broadcaster on history and science [4], Piero Angela explained how he noted this portrait of a young man. Angela said that when he was observing a copy of the Codex on the Flight, he noticed what looked like a nose underneath the text (Fig.2). The fact that the drawing was made by a left-hand artist, as the directions of the sketching lines indicate, reinforced the supposition of a self-portrait of the artist. Moreover, comparing the drawing with a Leonardo self portrait of c. 1512-15, Angela told that the two men were looking like brothers. As previously told, a well-known researcher on Leonardo studies, Carlo Pedretti, agrees in considering the image …