Researchers traced Leonardo da Vinci’s family through 21 generations and found matching Y-chromosome markers in six living men — now bones from a Renaissance family tomb could connect that genetic trail directly to his time

Leonardo da Vinci had no children, which makes the six Italian men now sharing matching Da Vinci paternal Y-chromosome markers a strange sort of heir.

They descend instead from his father, Ser Piero da Vinci, a Florentine notary who, as reported by Science, fathered at least 23 children with several women. Leonardo’s own branch stops with him. His father’s did not stop at all.

Why the Y chromosome makes a usable trail

Most of the genome gets shuffled every generation, half from each parent, so ancestry blurs fast. Long stretches of the Y chromosome behave differently, passing from father to son largely unchanged, which functions like a biological surname carried down the line.

Art historian Alessandro Vezzosi and genealogist Agnese Sabato spent three decades building the historical case for that lineage, well before anyone ran a DNA test on it. Working through parish registers, wills and property deeds, the pair reconstructed Leonardo’s paternal line back to 1331, publishing the result as a 400-page volume in May 2025. Their tree spans 21 generations, more than 400 individuals and four unbroken male lines running out of Ser Piero. It named 15 living male descendants, now 14 after one died in December.

What the six samples establish, and what they do not

Six of those men agreed to be sampled. David Caramelli of the University of Florence and forensic anthropologist Elena Pilli found that all six share matching segments of the Y chromosome. The Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project presented that match as confirmation that the male line has run intact at least since the fifteenth generation of the documented tree.

Real finding, narrower than the headlines. It checks the genealogy against biology for the tree’s most recent branches, the ones where the paperwork was already decent. Leonardo’s own century sits on the far side of the gap.

The Y chromosome match itself has not been through peer review. It was announced alongside the genealogy book rather than in a scientific journal, and Caramelli has said the genetic analysis will be published separately. The project’s own FAQ page commits to future peer review without claiming it’s already happened. One announcement is one announcement.

A bone dated to the grandfather’s lifetime

That brings all of this to a church floor in Vinci.

Beneath Santa Croce sits a family vault thought to hold Leonardo’s grandfather Antonio, his uncle Francesco and several half-brothers. University of Florence anthropologists Alessandro Riga and Luca Bachechi have been leading an excavation there. Among the fragments they recovered was a petrous bone, the dense wedge behind the ear that holds onto DNA better than anything else in the skeleton. Radiocarbon dating placed it between 1421 and 1457, comfortably inside Antonio’s lifetime.

Caramelli’s paleogeneticists Martina Lari and Micaela Ciervo pulled enough degraded DNA out of it to establish that the individual was male. Comparison with the living men is still to come, and a second dig is planned into an untouched vault that may hold better material. Should a full profile ever emerge, the project says it could reveal things like left-handedness, visual perception and inherited health risks.

Line up a fifteenth-century bone with six men alive today and the family tree stops being a documentary argument. It becomes a physical one.

Leonardo’s own remains are off the table

His grave was wrecked in the turmoil around the French Revolution. The bones were later moved to the Chapel of Saint-Hubert at Amboise, but per Smithsonian magazine, they may have been lost or mixed with others along the way. Researchers have also been denied access to the presumed tomb at the Chateau d’Amboise, and Ser Piero’s grave in Florence has stayed closed to the project. He’s the hardest person in the whole project to track down.

The drawing that complicates the picture

In January a separate arm of the project, based at the J. Craig Venter Institute, came at the problem from the opposite direction: swabbing objects rather than graves. Researchers sampled Holy Child, a red chalk drawing that some scholars attribute to Leonardo, along with a letter written by a male relative, Frosino di ser Giovanni da Vinci, and told CNN they had recovered faint male Y chromosome markers from a lineage rooted in Tuscany. Charles Lee of the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, a co-author, cautioned that the finding was an early read, not confirmed proof.

Then there is everything else that came off the paper. In coverage by Nautilus, the team described genetic material from a crowd of people who had handled the object over five centuries, modern custodians included, with the signal they were chasing sitting faint inside all that noise. Contamination worried them enough that the DNA extraction itself was handled exclusively by female scientists, on the logic that a female researcher has no Y chromosome to accidentally contribute to the sample. The findings went up as a bioRxiv preprint and remain unreviewed.

Both threads report to the same project, and neither has closed the case yet.

Old paper remembers everyone who ever touched it. Bone, with luck, remembers exactly one man.