Retrato lucano de Leonardo da Vinci

In 2008 an art historian opened a cupboard in an old family's house near Salerno, in southern Italy, and pulled out a small panel the owners had long taken for a portrait of Galileo. The face, an old man with a long beard under a dark hat, looked instead, to some eyes, like the way Leonardo drew himself. The claim that followed, that this is a Leonardo self-portrait in tempera, has never settled. Alessandro Vezzosi, who runs a Leonardo museum at Vinci, ruled out the self-portrait idea but still called the panel intriguing, a new piece in the puzzle. In 2017 a university in Malta cancelled a show built around it, its art historians unconvinced. The beard and hat match the familiar image of Leonardo; the hand that made them is still argued over.