Opening paragraphs..........................................

Not far from the Turin Cathedral, which houses the famous but now disputed Shroud, there is, in the Biblioteca Reale, the least contested self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.  It is a drawing in red chalk on a medium-sized sheet of paper (33.3 x 21.4 centimeters), highly detailed and finished.  Below the portrait, an unknown hand - but certainly one from the sixteenth century - has written, also in red chalk, the painter's name:  Leonardus Vincius, with a further notation, in black: "portrait of himself in fairly old age" (ritratto di se stesso assai vecchio)  The words have become almost illegible, and the paper is covered with red blotches.  Like the Shroud this self-portrait is rarely exhibited in public;  ravaged by time, it is stored away from the harmful effects of air and light.
      One might say it is Leonardo's destiny, or at any rate it comes close to his spirit, to remain both celebrated and secret, a legendary jewel, buried in the dark.  One of his notebooks contains the following  sentence from Ovid's Metamorphoses:  "I doubt, O Greeks, that my exploits can be written down, although you know of them, for I accomplished them without witnesses, with the shades of night as my accomplice."
-Serge Bramly,   Leonardo:  Discovering the Life of Leonardo da Vinci