The art historians behind the project, which has spanned several decades, say they have so far found 14 living relatives aged between one and 85.

All of them live in the region of Tuscany, where the painter, scientist, engineer and architect was born in 1452.

The study’s findings, published in the Human Evolution journal, document the male line over the past 690 years, through 21 generations.

Born in the Tuscan town of Vinci, da Vinci was the illegitimate son of a local notary.

Though da Vinci never married and had no children, he had at least 22 half-brothers.

This was confirmed by the researchers, Alessandro Vezzosi, founder and director of the Ideal Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Vinci, and Agnese Sabato, president of the Leonardo da Vinci Heritage Association.

“By 2016, we had already identified 35 of Leonardo’s living relatives, but they were mostly indirect, in the female line, as in the best-known case of the director Franco Zeffirelli,” Vezzosi told Italian news agency ANSA.

“So they were not people who could give us useful information on Leonardo’s DNA and in particular on the Y chromosome, which is transmitted to male descendants and remains almost unchanged for 25 generations.” 

Vezzosi said the 14 living descendants identified in the study, through painstaking research over the decades, were from the male line.

“They are aged between one and 85; they don’t live right in Vinci but in neighbouring towns as far away as Versilia [on the Tuscan coast] and they have ordinary jobs such as a clerk, a surveyor and an artisan,” Vezzosi said.

The relatives’ DNA samples will be analysed in the coming months by the international Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, led by the Jesse Ausubelof Rockefeller University in New York and supported by the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

The discovery aims to identify da Vinci’s DNA and allow researches to study some of the biological aspects of the life of the Mona Lisa painter.  

Elements such as health, the ageing process, left-handedness and the extraordinary sight capacity of da Vinci could now be explained scientifically.