Earlier diagnosis makes rebuilding a smile much easier

LEONARDO Da Vinci captured one of the most enigmatic smiles of the early 16th century with the Mona Lisa but his journals and other paintings contain an even more interesting smile – one whose crooked cupid's bow hints at a medical tale that is still being written today.

One of his models, plucked from the cobbled streets of medieval Florence, shows the distinctive scar, rising from lip to nose, of the surgical repair to a cleft lip.

While the first medical illustration of cleft lip surgery was not published until...