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An Oxford University researcher... an art historian at Britain's Oxford University has claimed that the full name of Leonardo da Vinci's mother was Caterina di Meo Lippi. Professor Martin Kemp said Caterina was a poor peasant, probably an orphan, living with her grandmother in a decrepit farmhouse about a mile from Vinci in the Italian Tuscan hills, The Times reported. The name emerged from previously overlooked archives in Florence and Vinci, including property tax records, Mr Kemp said. Caterina's father disappeared when she was young, leaving her to be brought up by her grandmother. In 1451, when Caterina was 15,...

Leonardo Da Vinci: Son of a Slave? By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News normalize font   |   increase font Sep. 26 — Leonardo Da Vinci may have been the son of a Middle Eastern slave, according to the director of an Italian museum located near the Renaissance master's birthplace in Tuscany. Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the Museo Ideale Leonardo Da Vinci, announced last week at the museum that, after over 25 years of research, he has concluded that Da Vinci's father was a minor nobleman or craftsman named Ser Piero Da Vinci, while the artist's mother was a Middle...

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the actual buyer of a painting by Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci that sold for a record-breaking $450 million at auction last month, the Wall Street Journal has reported. The young crown prince, known by his initials MBS, used an intermediary to buy the much-sought-after painting of Christ, 'Salvator Mundi', the newspaper reported, citing US intelligence and other unnamed sources. The son of Saudi King Salman is seen to be progressively consolidating his power, and is the architect of a wide-ranging plan dubbed Vision 2030 to bring social and economic change to his...

After the hammer went down on the staggering Leonardo da Vinci sale Wednesday night — $450.3 million dollars for a painting of disputed quality — it was difficult for the auctioneer and potential bidders to turn their attention to the other lots. “The air sucked out of the room after that,” said Paul Gray, a partner at Richard Gray Gallery. “It was kind of hard to move on.” And even into the next day, the art world continued to grapple with what seemed like a new landscape, with auction traditions upended and the ceiling suddenly limitless. Would this sale push...

You can’t put a price on beauty; you can put a price on a name. When the National Gallery in London exhibited a painting of Christ in 2011 as a heretofore lost work by Leonardo da Vinci, the surprise in art historical circles was exceeded only by the salivating of dealers and auctioneers. The painting, “Salvator Mundi,” is the only Leonardo in private hands, and was brought to market by the family trust of Dmitry E. Rybolovlev, the Russian billionaire entangled in an epic multinational lawsuit with his former dealer, Yves Bouvier. On Wednesday night, at Christie’s postwar and contemporary...

A painting by Italian Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci that depicts Jesus Christ holding an orb sold for a world record $450.3 million at Christie’s auction house in New York Wednesday night. The painting, called "Salvator Mundi," Italian for "Savior of the World," is one of fewer than 20 paintings by Leonardo known to exist and the only one in private hands. The buyer was not immediately identified. The highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction had been $179.4 million, for Picasso's "Women of Algiers (Version O)" in May 2015....

It’s the passion of the painting. Leonardo da Vinci’s haunting last work, depicting Jesus Christ, is coming to New York this month and is expected to fetch an estimated $100 million at a November Christie’s auction, a spokesperson said. “Salvator Mundi is a painting of the most iconic figure in the world by the most important artist of all time,” Loic Gouzer, chairman of post-war and contemporary art for Christie’s New York, said in a statement released by the auction house.

It watched as its then-owner, King Charles I, was beheaded in 1649. It was hanging in Buckingham Palace back when it was still called Buckingham House in 1703. It survived the Nazis’ 1940 London Blitz when its keepers abandoned it in their basement. By 1958, its origins had become so lost in time that it was sold for a paltry $90 to a collector from Louisiana. The long, strange journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterwork “Salvator Mundi” takes its next turn Wednesday at Christie’s, when it goes under the hammer for a hoped-for $100 million. It is the first Leonardo...

French scientist Pascal Cotte has astounded art historians with a major discovery about Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Lady With an Ermine (1489-90), the BBC reports. Until now, it had been assumed that da Vinci’s composition had always included the white ermine, but Cotte’s three year-long investigation has revealed that the Italian artist actually painted the work not in one, but in three clearly differentiated stages. His first version was ... [snip]

Born in Vinci, Italy, Leonardo died in 1519, age 67, and was buried in Amboise, southwest of Paris. His creative imagination foresaw and described innovations hundreds of years before their invention, such as the helicopter and armored tank. His artistic legacy includes the iconic Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. The idea behind the Project, founded in 2014, has inspired and united anthropologists, art historians, genealogists, microbiologists, and other experts from leading universities and institutes in France, Italy, Spain, Canada and the USA, including specialists from the J. Craig Venter Institute of California, which pioneered the sequencing of the human...

Maybe Vasari fresco refers to presence of greater art behind it ROME -- "Cerca trova" ("Seek and you shall find") is the tantalizing 5-century-old message painted on a fresco in the council hall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio. Researchers now believe these cryptic words could be a clue to the location of a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting and are pressing local authorities to allow them to search for the masterpiece of Renaissance art. Maurizio Seracini, an Italian art researcher, first noticed the message during a survey of the hall 30 years ago, but his team lacked the technology then to...

Forget the Da Vinci Code. Dr Seracini thinks he's cracked art's biggest mystery Step by patient step, one man is drawing ever closer to the real Da Vinci mystery: tracking down the master’s greatest painting, lost for four and a half centuries. And it is hidden, he believes, in a room at the heart of political power since the Middle Ages in Florence. For art historians, finding Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari is in the same league as finding the Titanic or the still lost tomb of the Ancient Egyptian architect Imhotep — as big as you can get. The...

Maybe this is yet another reason to say “God save the Queen”: dozens of Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomy drawings, so far reserved for those who visited Buckingham Palace, have been carefully digitalized and made available for you, lucky internaut. But besides this collection of the beautiful, intricate and detailed drawings and sketches of the Italian Renaissance master, along with his notes and observations, the Royal Collection Trust has also launched an iPad application that compiles the whole 268 pages of the da Vinci notebooks. This is no coloring book, but you might enjoy trying to copy some of these! 

Jihad in Los Angeles? The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has arrested a suspect, Dawud Abdulwali, 56, on arson charges connected with the massive downtown fire last December that consumed the Da Vinci apartment complex. The Los Angeles Times reports that Abdulwali was arrested Tuesday morning during a traffic stop, and after a lengthy investigation. Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the arrest Wednesday, saying: “This arrest illustrates that crime will not be tolerated in Los Angeles.” Abdulwadi’s alleged motive has not been revealed. He was arrested by the LAPD’s anti-terrorism unit, though officials say that there is no reason to suspect...

Dawud Abdulwali was taken into custody Tuesday by members of the Los Angeles Police Department, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the Los Angeles Fire Department, LAPD Officer Tony Im confirmed to KTLA. Abdulwali was arrested at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday and was booked less than two hours later at the LAPD’s 77th Street station, according to Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department online inmate records. No other details of the arrest were immediately available. The suspect’s bail was set at $1,036,925, according to the Sheriff’s Department. Officials from the arresting agencies and the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office...

A long-lost painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was confiscated from a bank vault in Switzerland after Italian police said it had been exported illegally and was in danger of being sold for up to £90 million. Swiss police, acting on a request by their Italian counterparts, seized the portrait of Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, from a private bank vault in Lugano on Tuesday. After being lost for centuries, the painting was rediscovered in 2013 in a collection of 400 artworks kept in a Swiss vault. The authorities then were alerted to the existence of the painting, but it...

Archaeologists say they have found a complete skeleton buried beneath the floor of an abandoned nunnery in Florence, Italy, which might belong to Lisa Gherardini, the woman believed to have inspired Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The bones were found beneath the remains of an altar in the church of the now derelict Convent of St. Orsola. "That altar was certainly in use at Lisa Gherardini's time," said Valeria D'Aquino, an archaeologist at the Tuscan Superintendency

MADRID—Spain’s Prado art museum said Wednesday it had discovered an unusual copy of Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Gioconda,” painted by one of the master’s pupils at the same time that the original was being completed. The copy had been on display at the Madrid art museum for years without experts being aware of its importance. A routine restoration led experts to discover that the dark background behind the female figure popularly known as Mona Lisa had been added afterward and that it covered an Italian landscape similar to that in da Vinci’s original.

Queen’s University Classics professor emeritus Ross Kilpatrick believes the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, incorporates images inspired by the Roman poet Horace and Florentine poet Petrarch. The technique of taking a passage from literature and incorporating it into a work of art is known as ‘invention’ and was used by many Renaissance artists. “The composition of the Mona Lisa is striking. Why does Leonardo have an attractive woman sitting on a balcony, while in the background there is an entirely different world that is vast and barren?” says Dr. Kilpatrick. “What is the artist trying to say?”

BBC reports that Dr. Vito Franco from Palermo University believes that Mona Lisa has a build-up of fatty acids under the skin of her eyes. That is supposed to be a sign of high cholesterol. The news is so absurd I decided to join the fray and come up with few matching thoughts of nonsense.... There was no McDonald’s back in the 1507 when Lisa Del Gioconda posed for Leonardo. I wonder what Mona Lisa’s diet was back then. What we know for sure is that Mrs. Gioconda did not eat French fries because the potatoes were imported from the...