CultureLabel

News just in from today’s Independent:

The building where Leonardo lived for three years before his death has already reinvented itself as a Da Vinci museum and visitor centre. It now has ambitious plans to become the world’s first “intellectual and cultural theme park. cool!

The aim is to encourage visitors, from tourists, to school groups, to academics, to unlock the “real” Da Vinci code: the mystery of his dazzling, but exasperating, versatility. Leonardo was not only a painter, perhaps the greatest painter of all time. He was a poet, musician, philosopher, engineer, architect, scientist, mathematician, anatomist, inventor, architect and botanist. He attempted much but completed relatively little. He was a universal genius to some; a brilliant and frustrating dilettante to others. An exhibition on Leonardo’s French connections this summer will include a recreation, for the first time in nearly 500 years, of one of Leonardo’s most astounding inventions. During his stay at Clos Lucé, he designed a life-size, clockwork robot lion that could walk and move its head and open its chest to reveal bunches of fleur de lys (lilies), the French royal symbol.

“Leonardo was, as well as everything else, a kind of George Lucas of the early 16th century,” said François Saint Bris, director of the Château du Clos Lucé and Parc Leonardo da Vinci. “His special effects were legendary, especially the mechanical lion that he created for King François I. We have used contemporary descriptions to commission a celebrated clock-maker in Venice to make the lion come alive again this summer.”

A children’s workshop for the study of Leonardo’s ideas, and to trace their influence on later centuries, will open next month. A derelict industrial building next to the site will become, over the next couple of years, a library of works on Leonardo; a “virtual art gallery” of top-class reproductions of his 17 surviving paintings; and a hi-tech laboratory to investigate his prowess as an inventor, engineer and architect. M. Saint Bris, part of the family that owns the site, said: “Clos Lucé is unique. There is nowhere else in the world where Leonardo’s presence during his life is so well documented. We intend to become the foremost site for the study and enjoyment of the achievements of probably the greatest mind, certainly the most versatile mind, that ever lived. Beyond that we hope to become the most important site in Europe for the exploration of all aspects of the Renaissance, from music to science, from Leonardo to Machiavelli to Shakespeare.”