Hidden under layers of thick writing on a page of the "Codex on the Flight of Birds," the sketch was spotted by the Italian scientific journalist Piero Angela, who will present images of his discovery on Italian state television RAI Saturday. Studying a high quality facsimile of the codex, Angela first detected the faint form of a nose behind the heavy black text of the codex’s tenth page, he told a news conference Friday. He enlisted the help of art historians, Carabinieri police forensic experts and RAI’s graphic department to turn the black text covering the sketch white, then the same tone as the paper. Criminal investigation techniques were used to digitally correlated the sketch with the known portrait and "age" it with facial reconfiguration technology, sinking the cheeks, hollowing the eyes and furrowing the brow. Leonardo expert Carlo Pedretti at California University described the sketch as "one of the most important acquisitions in the study of Leonardo, in the study of his image, and in the study of his thought too.

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