"De Ludo Schacorum," written by the Franciscan monk and mathematician Luca Pacioli in about 1500 is a collection of chess conundrums remarkable for the "originality of its teasers" and the "novelty and beauty of its illustrations," the paper said.
In the fabled volume, also known as the Schifanoia (the "Boredom Dodger"), the king, queen, bishop and knight are all represented by elegant and distinctive symbols, the paper said.
A Milanese sculptor and architect, Franco Rocco, told the Guardian that was just one of reasons he was "more than certain" that the illustrations were Leonardo's.
Rocco, who spent over a year researching the issue for the owners of the manuscript, told the paper that "the proportion of the pieces, and especially the pawns, coincides with the Golden Mean [an arithmetical ratio of approximately 1: 1.618], which fascinated both Leonardo Da Vinci and his friend Pacioli."
As a further argument in favor of his theory, Rocco said the symbol used for the queen had also been used by Da Vinci - author of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper - for the design of a fountain that figured in the so-called Atlantic Codex.
The Atlantic Codex contained Da Vinci's avant-garde and prophetic diagrams for war machines and other machinery.
The newspaper said the Coronini Cronberg Foundation, the non-profit organization that owns the manuscript, had invited the director of the Los Angeles-based Armand Hammer Centre for Leonardo studies, Carlo Pedretti, to make an independent assessment.
