The workshop, where Leonardo painted and drew in the early 1500s, is in the monastery of Santissima Annunziata in the centre of Florence. It is decorated with frescoes thought to be by Leonardo and his students. It was here that Leonardo is likely to have met the woman who inspired the Mona Lisa and worked on The Virgin and Child with St Anne, one version of which is held by the National Gallery.

His workshop was discovered during restoration of part of the monastery occupied for the past 100 years by the Institute of Military Geography. Cristina Acidini, head of conservation and restoration in Florence, said it was an “emotional moment” when the worskhop was found.

Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer and artist, recorded in his Lives of the Artists that the friars of the monastery “took him into their house and met all his expenses and that of his household”. But his workshop had never been identified until now.

“We need to do more research, but these frescoes are very encouraging,” Signora Acidini told the Florence newspaper La Nazione.

One striking fresco depicts the face of a winged angel flanked by birds, thought to be a representation of the Annunciation. Scholars said it bore a resemblance to an Annunciation by Leonardo in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Alessandro Vezzosi, a leading Leonardo expert, said the discovery of the workshop “will enable scholars better to understand the context in which Leonardo worked”.

The three researchers who found it, Maria Carchio, Alessandro Del Meglio and Roberto Manescalchi, also discovered a hidden staircase and doorway from the monastery to the workshop which had been covered up during earlier building conversions.

Leonardo, who was born in Tuscany and passed his early career in Florence, returned to the city at the age of 48 after 17 years in Milan at the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza, who fell from power in 1499.

While at Santissima Annunziata Leonardo worked on The Virgin and Child with St Anne, acclaimed at the time as one of his masterpieces, and also painted Madonna of the Yarnwinder, which today survives only in copies. Giuseppe Pallanti, author of a recent study of Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo and the original Mona Lisa, says Leonardo probably met her in the church of Santissima Annunziata, where the del Giocondo family had a chapel.

Leonardo left Santissima Annunziata in 1502 to serve as military architect and engineer to Cesare Borgia, the notorious son of Pope Alexander VI. But he returned to Florence after ten months to paint the Mona Lisa, among other masterpieces, and stayed until 1506, when he returned to Milan.

The discovery was announced at a press conference coinciding with the opening of a Leonardo exhibition at the Palazzo Panciatichi in Florence and another on the Atlantic Codex and Leonardo’s inventions at the Palazzo Corsini in Rome.

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