Displaying items by tag: Leonardo da Vinci

The stream of news and discoveries about Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa are seemingly never ending. In a shocking twist, it's now been reported that a second version of the iconic portrait might have been discovered in a private collection in St. Petersburg.

Experts are now analyzing the artwork in order to establish whether it is a genuine work by Leonardo da Vinci or simply one of the many convincing replicas in existence around the world.

An image of a portrait underneath the Mona Lisa has been found beneath the existing painting using reflective light technology, according to a French scientist.

Pascal Cotte said he has spent more than 10 years using the technology to analyze the painting.

He claims the earlier portrait lies hidden underneath the surface of Leonardo's most celebrated artwork.

An oceanfront Tuscan villa that was once home to Leonardo da Vinci is on the market for just $14.6 million, and includes walls designed by the Renaissance master in 1502 while he was working as a military engineer. A few years later, he would paint the Mona Lisa, between 1503 and 1506.

Built in the 1400s as a fort, the four-story, five-bedroom estate is in the town of Livorno, about 15 miles from Pisa and 55 miles from Florence.

A music professor has identified a new portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. The 500-year-old engraving, if verified, will be only the third known portrait of the Renaissance Master created during his lifetime.

The engraving was created by Marcantonio Raimondi in 1505, and has resided at the Cleveland Museum of Art since the 1930s, but the figure in in the 500-year-old image, which can be seen playing an instrument called the lira da braccio, was long thought to depict the Greek mythological figure of Orpheus, a prophet and musician.

Opening today, on what would have been Leonardo da Vinci's 563rd birthday, the exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The show will feature a recently rediscovered self-portrait of the artist and a suite of masterpieces by Leonardo including the long-admired "Head of a Young Woman (Study for the Angel in the 'Virgin of the Rocks')," a metalpoint drawing from the 1480s, widely renowned for its naturalism, and which art historian Kenneth Clark called the “most beautiful . . . in the world."

The exhibition marks a rare opportunity to see "Head of a Young Woman," in the US. The work, which Bernard Berenson believed was “one of the finest achievements of all draughtsmanship," belongs to the Biblioteca Reale in Turin, Italy.

Is Leonardo da Vinci's "Head of a Young Woman" the greatest drawing ever made?

Granted, that may sound like a presumptuous question. Yet both the drawing and its subject — an ethereal young beauty who might easily pass for the Mona Lisa's kid sister or one of the elf-maidens in "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy — have had plenty of admirers over the years. The Renaissance art scholar Bernard Berenson, for example, called it "one of the finest achievements in all draughtsmanship."

A rare Leonardo da Vinci manuscript from the collection of Microsoft founder Bill Gates is coming to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) this summer.

The "Codex Leicester," one of only 31 Leonardo notebooks known to exist, features the artist and scientist's distinctive right to left "mirror writing" and includes his drawings, texts, and observations about the properties of water, and how it might behave on the moon and other planets. The MIA will offer visitors a complete translation and explanation of the codex through an interactive touch-screen digital device called Codascope.

When the College of William and Mary's' Muscarelle Museum of Art landed its latest world-class art exhibit – this one featuring more than 30 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci – the tourism community at last stepped up in support.

"Leonardo da Vinci and the Idea of Beauty" opens Saturday at the Muscarelle and runs through April 5. It's the second huge exhibit at the Muscarelle in three years, following 2013's "Michelangelo: Sacred and Profane." Like the Michelangelo exhibit, the da Vinci art will only have one other U.S. venue, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

If not for the presence of the Carabinieri and its appearance in the Tribune de Geneve, this report of a Leonardo work missing for centuries that traded hands privately for “several hundreds million of Euros” would seem like a plot point from a poorly written thriller:

The financial Pesaro Brigade (East Central) and Carabinieri specialized in the theft of works of art of Ancona (center-east), announced that they had seized a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, disappeared for centuries, and recently sold for several hundred million euros.

The world best remembers Leonardo da Vinci as a painter. His "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper" rank among the most famous works in history.

But Leonardo also was an architect, musician, cartographer, mathematician, inventor, engineer, writer, botanist and geologist, among other things. Often described as the archetype for the Renaissance man, Leonardo was curious about the world and how things work. He recorded his observations, thoughts, inventions and theories down on paper, later bound into a number of codices.