Leonardo at the Table?

Of all the works Leonardo da Vinci left posterity, only one has been recognized as a self-portrait: a red chalk drawing showing a fierce, lion-headed old patriarch with a furrowed brow and burning eyes. Last week an Italian artist and scholar by the name of Lorenzo Ferri insisted that he had found a second. The face of the Apostle Thaddeus, he said, second from the right in Leonardo's famed Last Supper* is none other than that of the painter himself.

A resemblance between Leonardo and the apostle first struck Ferri in 1937, when he painted a reproduction of the Last Supper for a Franciscan refectory in Bengasi, Libya. Later, he pored over portraits of Leonardo by contemporary artists, studied descriptions, drew up charts detailing the painter's hair, beard, nose, eyes, mouth and cheekbones. He photographed the original to compress and sharpen the faded outlines, then worked in the features, adding light and shadow. After years of work, Ferri has a 328-page illustrated manuscript crammed with his notes and impressions. One impression: the Apostle Thaddeus' whole manner and bearing point to Leonardo; he is a man "indifferent to what is happening around him . . . motionless, bent under the weight of a problem he is trying to resolve."

Rome's art scholars greeted Ferri's announcement with deep skepticism. "Every painter," snorted Expert Lionello Venturi, "shows something of his own appearance in his paintings."

Answered Ferri: "They are slow to accept new ideas here in Rome. Leonardo himself had difficulty. He was put to work on machinery instead of painting."

* Painted on the refectory wall at Milan's Santa Maria della Grazie, Leonardo's masterpiece started going to pot even before his death, has faded and flaked so badly that only the barest details remain.

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