The most outlandish case I was ever asked to investigate as a private fingerprint consultant was the bizarre case of Leonardo da Vinci’s reincarnation.
To my new contacts and followers, I post here every Sunday night with a story from my career dating back to 1973. I tell of things I got right and some that I got terribly wrong, in hopes that my readers will think about the situations I recount and be better prepared if they ever find themselves in similar straits.
But back to the strange case of Leonardo da Vinci. I received a call from a woman who wanted to meet with me to discuss fingerprints in the paint on the works of Leonardo da Vinci. I was living in Salem, Oregon at the time. She lived out of state and she asked if I could meet her in Portland. Something about her approach intrigued me and I said I would. I asked her to name the place and time. She named a certain microbrewery and designated a time and evening for the meeting.
When I showed up and we met face to face, she finally explained the examination she wanted me to conduct. She had an intense dream in which she was climbing a scaffold in the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy. In her dream, she was stretching her arm out with a brush and painting the Last Supper. She told me the dream was so vivid that she knew she must be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci. In her dream, she maintained that she was reliving what she had once experienced in real life.
She wanted me to fingerprint her, then compare her prints to those in paint on known works of Leonardo to confirm that she was, in fact, Leonardo reincarnated. She went on to explain that Leonardo was actually a woman and was the greatest male impersonator in history, and that the Mona Lisa was her self-portrait. Who am I to dispute the idea of reincarnation, accepted as true by millions if not billions of people around the world? I decided to treat the request seriously and refrained from commenting that she looked nothing like the Mona Lisa to me.
I spent a couple of months reading up on the old masters’ use of their fingers in their paintings and learned that they often used a little paint on a fingertip to shade or add background texture to a painting. In modern times, look at the amazing portraits painted by Jennifer Hannaford using nothing but her fingertips. But for all the high-resolution images I could find of Leonardo’s paintings, none had a sufficiently large area of friction skin impression to conduct a comparison with any hope of reaching a conclusion. Some had friction ridge detail to be sure, but such tiny and overlapping fragments as to preclude any kind of reasonable examination.
In the end, I issued a report to the client that summarized my findings as inconclusive due to insufficient friction ridge skin detail for a comparison in any of Leonardo’s paintings. I ended my report with a philosophical comment that perhaps some mysteries are never meant to be solved.