The painting, displayed at a news conference in Rome, was discovered in December in the collection of a family from Italy's southern Basilicata region. Medieval historian Nicola Barbatelli, who found the painting, said carbon-14 analysis of the wood supporting the canvas dated the material to the late 15th or early 16th century, when Leonardo (1452-1519) was alive. Alessandro Vezzosi, the director of a museum dedicated to Leonardo in his hometown of Vinci, said the painting may have been made much later as it is consistent with the depiction of the artist found in a 17th-18th century portrait kept at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. It will be displayed along with other portraits of the artist at an exhibition in the southern town of Vaglio, in the “instep” of the boot-shaped Italian peninsula, from April 8 through Aug.

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