500 YEARS OF GENIUS
In 1519, Leonardo da Vinci was already a legend. The man born out of wedlock in an obscure village in Tuscany had risen to become the friend of France’s greatest Renaissance king, Francis I. He was renowned as an artist, an engineer, an architect, an anatomist, a botanist, a scientist, a cartographer and a musician, among other accomplishments.
Leonardo arrived in the Loire Valley in 1516, accompanied by the three paintings that, and . Francis installed the polymath in Clos Lucé, a modest château with a view of the royal residence of Amboise, and bid him create whatever his heart desired.
