Today is the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci

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After a few quarrels, France and Italy, or at least their presidents, are making up by a visit to the tomb of Leonardo in Amboise, followed by a lunch in his last home, the castle of Clos-Lucé. Speaking of the tomb, it is only a «presumed» tomb. It is a bit embarrassing, but let’s tell the truth. A few decades after the death of Leonardo, the collegiate church of Saint-Florentin where he was buried was badly damaged by the Protestants during the wars between Catholics and Protestants, and the tomb may have been desecrated. In 1811, the owner of the royal castle of Amboise, the Count (since a couple of years) Ducos, decided to pull down the collegiate church. He was born in Gascogne, a poor area where a penny is a penny, and sold not only the stones but also the lead of the tombs remaining in the church... The children of Amboise played with the bones and the skulls until a gardener collected them in an ossuary. Nobody was knowing where Leonardo was buried long before Ducos, which was a bit shameful. Then, in the 1860’s, came Arsène Houssaye. He was not an archeologist but a minor writer of the Romantic school, a friend of Théophile Gautier and Gérard de Nerval. During about ten years he had been the Administrator of tne Théâtre-Français, where he did a good job. When Napoleon the third decided to remove him from the National... hmm Imperial theater, he named him Inspector of Fine Arts... in charge of the museums of Province. I cannot tell if it was a real job or a sinecure (when Gautier was named Librarian of princess Mathilde, a cousin of the emperor, the first thing he asked was «Does the princess has a library ?»), but he had some free time in 1863 to do excavations in Amboise to search the tomb of Leonardo da Vinci. He found first the ossuary of the gardener, and kept a skull that was looking good enough to be the skull of Leonardo. Later he found a heart in a lead box that could have been the heart of the great man. Finally he found the skeleton of a tall man with some hair and piece of brown cloth and decided that this one was da Vinci. What he wrote shows his hesitation. He was honest and this skeleton was moved in the castle and exhibited like the «presumed» tomb of Leonardo. You will tell me that it would be easy to do a DNA test today to know if it is really Leonardo or not. Yes, but would people continue to pay to visit the tomb of an unknown man like they pay to visit the tomb of the «presumed» Leonardo ? The second part of the visit, the castle of Clos-Lucé, has nothing left from the time of Leonardo, although you will visit the bedroom, the workshop, etc of Leonardo. Until 2017 the castle had a few rooms from the 18th C protected as historical monuments, but it was difficult to make people believe that a 18th C room was there in the 16th C. French, those visiting castles, are too cultured to do such confusions. The owner destroyed the 18th C rooms to «restore» 16th C rooms, hoping to receive more naive visitors (about 300000/year, it is a lot of money) in his Dis... Vinciland. He is actually sued by the Ministry of Culture, and I see like a very bad sign the fact that our president is lunching with this cynical vandal, two weeks after having decided to vote a law to get rid of historical monuments regulations to restore Notre-Dame... The illustration is a painting in the Petit-Palais in Paris (a must-see museum, with a free entrance) by Ingres showing Leonardo dying in the arms of king Francis the first. Well, it is a legend, Francis I was hunting in Saint-Germain en Laye, near Paris, when Leonardo died in Amboise on May 2d 1519. But the painting is nice...