Piero Angela, an Italian science journalist, has uncovered what is thought to be a self-portrait of a young Leonardo da Vinci drawn in the pages of one of the artist’s manuscripts, reports the Evening Standard.

The discovery was made while Angela was looking through Leonardo's Codex on the Flight of Birds, written between 1490 and 1505. He spotted the outline of a face rendered in red chalk underneath the ink handwriting. Dating based on other drawings in the eight central pages of the codex, it is believed that Leonardo created the pages containing his portrait between 1482 and 1489, when he was in Milan at the court of Ludovico Sforza, and then later reused them for the codex.

The drawing was compared to other portraits of the artist, including his famous self-portrait dated ca. 1512–15, by the police scientific unit in Rome via digital techniques that render people older or younger. A member of the unit, Luigi Ripani, said that he found the results to be very striking. "I would go so far as to say without doubt the face is that of da Vinci,” he said.

A maxillofacial surgeon was also asked to compare the two faces and concluded that they could belong to the same person at different points in his life.

One of the world's leading Leonardo experts, Professor Carlo Pedretti of the University of California in Los Angeles, said of this investigation, “It is one of the most important acquisitions in the study of Leonardo, his image, and thought.”