Probably not, unless you’ve got some Italian blood in your veins, and even then still probably not.
If you’re 1 of 14 currently living people, you might be.
Researchers wanted to know so badly they dug up what are thought to be his remains to get a DNA sample, then went hunting for descendants. This involved constructing a family tree consisting of 21 generations and 4 branches. Read the story here.
The key phrase of the story is “purported remains.” If they got the wrong body, those 14 people are related to someone else. To examine that possibility in further detail, consider this:
“Leonardo’s wish was to be buried in the church of St. Florentin in Amboise, which took place on August 12, 1519. However the church was demolished during the French Revolution in the late 18th century (and later by Napoleon I). The alleged bones of Leonardo da Vinci were discovered in 1863 and moved to the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in the gardens of the Château d’Amboise.”
(Quoted from here.)
It doesn’t take much imagination to see how relying on an assumption those bones are his might go sideways. A work crew is assigned the task of reconstituting his grave. The money behind the effort is primarily interested in making the town a tourist attraction. It’s been a long day, and maybe it’s raining. The crew is tired and wants to go home. Maybe they threw a farmer’s bones into the hole, so they could fill it in, and clock out. Nobody really cares whose bones are in the hole, right?
Now, a century-and-a-half later, along come some researchers looking for living relatives. If the guy in the hole was a local farmer, there will probably be some nearby.
It occurs to me that if you really want to find da Vinci’s relatives, then first you have to make sure you’ve found da Vinci. How? Well, obviously you have to get his DNA from something he left. What? Well, paper he wrote on, drawings, and paintings. Ask Bill Gates if he’ll lend the Codex Leicester for analysis; maybe the master sneezed on it. On the other hand, the researchers might come up with a comprehensive list of Bill Gates’ relatives if he sneezed on it.
However this shakes out, none of those 14 currently living people can flash a genuine Mona Lisa smile, because they’re not related to the woman in the picture. To find a young Italian beauty with a real Mona Lisa smile, which makes a lot more sense than tracking down da Vinci’s descendants, you’d have to trace Lisa del Giocondo’s family tree down to the present time. And even then, there will be some uncertainty, because she’s only thought to be the woman in the picture, just as the bones in the church are thought to be da Vinci’s.
What you could end up with is a picture of a local merchant’s teenage bride slopped onto canvas by a local farmer who dabbled in painting as a hobby in between plowing fields or milking cows. But would anyone really care? Nah, a good tourist attraction is a thing of beauty in itself, and who cares where it came from?
