LEONARDO DA VINCI 1452-1519

RELOCATION TO FRANCE Michelangelo and Raphael were Rome’s favourite artists during the reign of Pope Leo X, and in the autumn of 1516 Leonardo left for France. On 10 October 1517, Cardinal Luigi of Aragon, the grandson of King Ferdinand of Naples, was passing through Amboise and visited the ageing Leonardo at the Château de Cloux (known today as the Château du Close Lucé), the residence provided for him by the French king François I. Leonardo showed the cardinal and his suite three paintings he had been working on for over ten years (and whose final owner would be the king of France): Saint Anne , the Mona Lisa and Saint John the Baptist . Leonardo produced only about fifteen paintings in all. This was not, as has often been suggested, because he was only inte- rested in the original idea or conception, but on the contrary because, in his view, the science of painting found its truest expression in the infinitely extended process of execution. His contemporaries saw Leonardo as the forerunner of the ‘modern style’ because he was the first (and probably only) artist capable of endowing his work with an awe-inspiring realism. Such creative power was as overwhelming as the world inhabited by Leonardo – a world of impermanence, universal destruction, tempests and darkness.