Clos Lucé: Where Leonardo Spent His Last Three Years
Centre-Val de Loire, France
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Château du Clos Lucé
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250
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+100 France
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1 day
Clos Lucé: Where Leonardo Spent His Last Three Years
250 + 100 XP
Charles VIII bought Clos Lucé in 1490 and turned a medieval stronghold into a pleasure house; it was the summer residence of the kings of France for two hundred years. In 1516 Francis I put it at the disposal of Leonardo da Vinci, who arrived from Rome at sixty-four with his notebooks and three paintings — the Mona Lisa, the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and Saint John the Baptist — in his leather saddlebags, and who lived and worked here until he died on 2 May 1519, leaving his manuscripts to his pupil Francesco Melzi. The tunnel said to run from here to the royal château a few hundred metres away is a legend that excavation has disproved, and the scene of Leonardo dying in the king's arms, which Ingres painted, never happened. The house is now a museum of his life and work, with forty models built from his drawings in four basement rooms and a 7-hectare park crossed by the Amasse.
Required Activities
1
of 5
Stand in the first-floor chamber where Leonardo died on 2 May 1519, and notice that everything in it is a guess: the room was restored in 2011 and furnished with period objects from elsewhere, because no description of the rooms he actually used survives and none of his furniture does
2
of 5
In the tuffeau oratory Charles VIII built for Anne of Brittany in 1492, find the three murals left by Leonardo's disciples — an Annunciation, a Last Judgement, and above the door the Virgo Lucis, the Virgin of Light that is said to have given the Clos Lucé its name
3
of 5
Work through the four basement rooms holding the forty working models IBM built from Leonardo's drawings, and use the 3D animations beside them to see which of the machines actually move the way he drew them
4
of 5
Stand back from the pink-brick and white-stone façade, the one part of the house barely touched since the Renaissance, and pick out the stretch of old wall-walk that survives from the same period
5
of 5
Cross the 7-hectare park on both banks of the Amasse, the little Loire tributary that runs through it, and go inside the 15th-century dovecote Estienne le Loup built — a thousand nesting holes cut into the wall, a measure of how much land the owner held
Stand in the first-floor chamber where Leonardo died on 2 May 1519, and notice that everything in it is a guess: the room was restored in 2011 and furnished with period objects from elsewhere, because no description of the rooms he actually used survives and none of his furniture does
In the tuffeau oratory Charles VIII built for Anne of Brittany in 1492, find the three murals left by Leonardo's disciples — an Annunciation, a Last Judgement, and above the door the Virgo Lucis, the Virgin of Light that is said to have given the Clos Lucé its name
Work through the four basement rooms holding the forty working models IBM built from Leonardo's drawings, and use the 3D animations beside them to see which of the machines actually move the way he drew them
Stand back from the pink-brick and white-stone façade, the one part of the house barely touched since the Renaissance, and pick out the stretch of old wall-walk that survives from the same period
Cross the 7-hectare park on both banks of the Amasse, the little Loire tributary that runs through it, and go inside the 15th-century dovecote Estienne le Loup built — a thousand nesting holes cut into the wall, a measure of how much land the owner held
Before you go
The Clos Lucé opens every day of the year except 25 December and 1 January: 10am to 6pm in January, 9am to 6pm in November and December, 9am to 7pm from February to June and in September and October, and 9am to 8pm in July and August. The ticket office shuts a full hour before the site, so the last chance to go in on a winter afternoon is 5pm. The machine models in the basement and the park's full-size reconstructions are outdoors or in unheated rooms, and the park is the better half of the visit, so pick a dry day in winter.
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XP Breakdown
Challenge XP
250 XP
France country bonus
+100 XP
Potential total
350 XP
Country bonus earned on completion of your first challenge in France.
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