Drawing a picture of da Vinci

Brilliant artist's eccentricities power the mysteries embedded in 'Code'

For a fellow born more than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci is keeping a high profile these days.

Just who was da Vinci — and where can you see his work? Those are mysteries we can quickly clear up.

The Associated Press (enlarge photo) Leonardo da Vinci, Italian High Renaissance master, is shown in this undated portrait drawing. Da Vinci was born in Florence, Italy in 1452 and died in 1519. Read reviews of 'The Da Vinci Code'

RENAISSANCE MAN

The phrase must have been created for da Vinci. In addition to being the painter of some of the world's masterpieces, he was an inventor, architect, engineer, military strategist and musician.

• Love child: He was born April 15, 1452, in the Tuscan town of Vinci, west of Florence, the son of a notary, Ser Piero da Vinci, and Caterina, who may have worked in the household. Since he was illegitimate, he could not attend university, but he displayed promise at drawing as a teen and was given an apprenticeship with the Florentine artist and engineer Andrea del Verrocchio.

• A beautiful mind: Along with "Mona Lisa" and "The Last Supper," most prominent among his surviving paintings, he left thousands of notebook pages filled with ideas, discoveries, drawings and line after line of notes scrawled in his bewildering backward handwriting. Yet the notebooks reveal precious little about him. In that respect, he was the perfect vessel for mysteries that swirl in "The Da Vinci Code."

• Unfinished business: His adulthood was marked by genius — and contradictions. He advised or was commissioned by dukes, popes and kings, yet migrated from job to job. He was a pacifist who designed weapons for war; a perfectionist who rarely saw projects to their completion. (Even his younger rival Michelangelo ridiculed da Vinci's procrastination.)

Martin Kemp, author of the biography "Leonardo," notes, "If there is a frustration apparent in his notebooks, it involves the impossi

bility of not being able to do everything simultaneously. There is a repetitive doodle ... that reads: 'Tell me if anything were ever done?' "

MYTHICAL, MYSTICAL 'MONA'

Crowds elbow near the semicircular barrier up front. People crane their necks for a glimpse. Shutters click.

"Mona Lisa" just smiles enigmatically from her wall of the Louvre museum in Paris. If one of the world's most famous paintings seems somehow to be making eye contact from inside her climate-controlled case, it's not your imagination. The level of psychological realism that da Vinci brought to the painting was a breakthrough in the history of portraiture.

His sitter was Lisa de Gherardini, wife of a silk merchant. Some believed she was pregnant when she posed, which might explain that smile. There's also conjecture that da Vinci set her mood with musicians and jesters in the studio.

Louvre officials have smiled since "Mona Lisa" entered the collection in 1798, during the French Revolution. (www.louvre.fr)

SHOWING IN D.C.

The "Ginevra de' Benci," at Washington's National Gallery of Art, is thought to be the only da Vinci painting in the Western Hemisphere. The National purchased the portrait, from the 1470s, for $5 million in 1967.

Painted in a landscape setting, in front of a juniper tree, Ginevra was 16 when da Vinci was commissioned by her family, probably to mark her engagement. Though the artist was only 22, he achieved a lifelike representation, blending oil paint in places with his fingers and palms to soften edges and create atmospheric effects. (www.nga.gov)

SLOW HORSE

Da Vinci was commissioned to create a horse sculpture by the Duke of Milan and started working on a full-scale, 24-foot-tall clay model in 1489. But the French invaded Milan, and the 70 tons of bronze set aside for the sculpture were instead turned into weapons. Adding insult, French archers used da Vinci's clay model for target practice.

Five centuries later sculptor Nina Akamu completed two identical, full-scale versions in homage, one in Milan, Italy, and this one, "American Horse," at the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Mich. (www.meijergardens.org)

DECODING THE INVENTIONS

"Leonardo da Vinci: Man, Inventor, Genius," on view at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry through Sept. 4, shows just how far the Renaissance inventor was ahead of his time.

The exhibit includes 60 working models created by craftsmen in Florence from da Vinci's drawings. In addition to this paddleboat, which he imagined centuries before Mark Twain's beloved steamboats plied the Mississippi, there is a tank, robot, underwater breathing device, an automatic hammer machine and more. Many, such as the catapult that fires cannonballs, are interactive. (www.msichicago.org)

UNENDING INSPIRATION

• Da Vinci thought big when, in 1502, he did a simple drawing of a 1,080-foot stone bridge to span the Golden Horn inlet in what is now Turkey. Norwegian artist Vebjorn Sand's tribute, the Leonardo Bridge, a 330-foot wooden footbridge, opened in 2001 near Oslo. (www.vebjorn-sand.com/thebridge.htm)

• "Avanti, da Vinci! The Secret Adventures of Leonardo da Vinci," which Atlanta's Center for Puppetry Arts premiered in 2004, transformed the artist into an evil-bashing superhero (shown with puppeteer Jason Hines, right), with Mona Lisa as a damsel in distress.

• Andy Warhol, the Pop artist famous for riffing on iconic imagery such as Campbell's Soup cans and images of Marilyn Monroe, produced this double vision of the Mona Lisa. Salvador Dali and Marcel Duchamp are among the many who have reinterpreted the mysterious Mona.

• From Tuscany's ancient rolling hills to the instant suburbs of east Cobb County, Mona Lisa gets around. Here her image is appropriated for the stone entrance of the Renaissance, a new lux subdivision. Maybe she's smiling because she's tickled about her new digs.

Sources: "Fodor's Guide to the Da Vinci Code," Wickipedia.com, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago