Leonardo da Vinci News Story

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"Sifting Leonardo's Mysteries"

"A tour of the chateau where the artist spent his last years"

• For visitors to the Renaissance manor in the Loire Valley town of Amboise, where the artist and inventor, Leonard da Vinci, spent the last three years of his life (1516-1519), was, and still is, brimming with evocative mysteries.
• The house is a showcase and display of the scientific inventions and weaponry Leonardo envisaged as much as four centuries ahead of their actual existence.
• Exhibitions of da Vinci's machines include hands-on contraptions that include an armored tank that visitors can clamber into and spin around, a paddleboat that can be guided across a pond, a helicopter prototype complete with twirling helicoidal rotor, an Archimedes screw that can be spun to raise water, a swivel bridge, and a flying machine.
• Inside the imposing, three-story château are forty large-scale, modern models of machines, containing hydraulic pumps, a machine gun, a glider, a section of a double-hulled ship and a primitive automobile propelled by compressed coil springs.
• Most of these devices existed only on paper in Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks; some would not be built until the Industrial Revolution or later.
• Financed by IBM, the models were constructed in 1952 for the 500th anniversary of da Vinci's birth.
• It was in the house that he sketched out plans for a castle equipped with a telephone network and automatic doors and completed work on his final painting, "St. John the Baptist", now in the Louvre.
• Frescoes by his disciple Francesco Melzi and others adorn the chapel.
• The kitchen is dominated by a monumental hearth where he welcomed visiting artists, nobles, and his host François I.
• In 1516, shortly after defeating the Swiss at the battle of Marignan near Milan, the twenty-two year old French king invited da Vinci to take up residence in Amboise.
• The terms were generous; in addition to buying the "Mona Lisa" and other paintings, François provided him with a salary of 700 gold ecus a year, free lodging and the freedom to "dream, think and work" on anything he fancied.
• Leonardo da Vinci accepted and after strapping three paintings, the "Mona Lisa", "The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne", and the unfinished "St. John the Baptist" on the back of a mule, he crossed the Alps with Melzi and a servant.
• The 64-year-old da Vinci kept up a busy schedule of drawing, designing, sketching architectural plans and a bit of painting.
• Despite suffering a stroke in 1517 that paralyzed his right side, the left-handed artist continued to work.
• Leonardo da Vinci died in his bed at the Clos Lucé on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.