A show at the Clos Lucé in Amboise, the manor where the master lived for three years until his death in 1519, details his tireless search for the "mechanics" of life through study, experimentation and especially dissection. Leonardo unlocked the secrets of digestion, respiration, circulation and reproduction, worked out the…
An 1818 painting by French artist Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres shows Leonardo da Vinci breathing his last in the arms of his patron, France's King Francis I. The Ingres painting hangs at the Petit Palais in Paris The scene was inspired by an account in "Lives of the Artists" by Giorgio…
A woman is often inconstant He who trusts her is a fool indeed. --Francis I, according to Victor Hugo Francis I, who reigned from 1515 to 1547, has an outsized place in France's history. The swashbuckling king with a legendary appetite for life reveled in earthly delights as well…
A story about Leonardo speaks to both his love of nature and fascination with flight. When at a market, Da Vinci would often pity the cooped-up birds that were on sale, plunk down the asking price for them, then release them into the air. Leonardo had a legendary obsession with…
Viewers put on a headset and get intimate with Lisa The Mona Lisa is conspicuously absent from the Louvre's retrospective of Leonardo da Vinci, but the world-famous Florentine makes up for it by holding court in a virtual reality experience. Organizers of the blockbuster show featuring 10 of the Renaissance…
The Louvre museum has kicked off its blockbuster retrospective of Leonardo da Vinci to mark 500 years since the death of the Renaissance master. Some 240,000 people have already reserved their place in line for the four-month exhibition, the biggest ever organized to showcase the Tuscan polymath's indelible contributions to…
Leonardo's "presumed" remains lie under a tombstone in the small Flamboyant Gothic chapel of Saint Hubert on the grounds of the royal chateau in Amboise on the banks of the Loire. The tale of how the bones were lost and possibly found winds through French history from the…
Two Italian doctors have advanced arguments to counter the widely accepted conclusion that Leonardo da Vinci suffered a stroke, paralyzing his right arm, some five years before his death in 1519. Davide Lazzeri, a plastic surgeon at the Villa Salaria Clinic in Rome, and Carlo Rossi, a neurologist at the…
In her 500 years of existence, Mona Lisa has been around, and she has taken some knocks. Since 1516 when she traversed the Alps in a mule caravan with her creator as he travelled to France, she has been twice stolen and twice vandalized, and her enigmatic face has been…
The Louvre has kicked off reservations for a blockbuster exhibition in October of most of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings to mark the quincentennial of the Renaissance master's death. Tickets to the show opening on October 24 will not be available at the box office, but only on the website www.ticketlouvre.fr…