Photo by PakyuZ, courtesy Flickr

The stained-glass windows at Arezzo's cathedral. Leonardo is thought to be the bearded man in a hat, in the third panel up from the bottom.

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The windows, which depict the biblical story of the raising of Lazarus, were created by a French master of the medium, Guillaume de Pierre di Marcillat, in 1520, one year after Leonardo's death. Vezzosi believes that one of the figures in the piece, a bearded old man wearing a red hat, is Leonardo; the image falls into one of the five portrait types that Vezzosi has identified for the Renaissance artist — "the old bearded man with a hat" category.

Vezzosi says his theory "is strengthened by the fact that a detail from The Last Supper is evoked in the scene. The figure next to the old bearded man strongly recalls the profile of the apostle Matthew in Leonardo's masterpiece."

No definitive portraits of Leonardo exist, though many images have been put forth by scholars as possibilities. Carlo Pedretti, director of the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, writes in his foreword to Vezzosi's book that "when studying Leonardo, everything should be considered an hypothesis."