The most personal remnants of artists from the past are the finger marks they left while creating their masterpieces. These have been largely ignored in art history, but new research aims to unlock their full potential in the future.

Art historians display something close to mystical reverence when discussing possible finger and palm prints on Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings, but other such personal marks have received little attention in fine arts research. Džemila Šero, who worked on documenting finger marks on artworks for her postdoc research at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam, offers an explanation for the fact that these marks have frequently been neglected and scarcely reported in museum records: ‘It’s probably because curators lacked the means to properly document them, other than just photographing them, and there was no possibility to effectively compare them to other marks.’