In a week when a purportedly authentic original work by Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci sells at a Christie’s auction for over $450,000,000 (had to use the zeros!), to a private collector with, clearly, too much money, I thought it timely to share a memory from our family trip to Vinci, in the Tuscany region of Italy.
There are few places as beautiful as Tuscany in the fall. This image was taken on the day of our special private tour to Vinci and to the fascinating Museo Leonardiano Vinci. It was an overcast, rainy day, but we persevered! The rain left the breathtaking countryside saturated in a brilliant blanket of green, fresh, living spectacle. This was the view from the museum.
As you enter the museum’s courtyard, you are welcomed by a beautiful sculpture representing one of Leonardo’s most famous works, Vetruvian Man. Vetruvian Man was not meant to be a commercial work of art, but, rather, a study of the “essential symmetry of the human body, and by extension, the symmetry of the universe as a whole.”
Touring the halls and rooms of the museum, you are awestruck by the genius of Leonardo – artist, sculptor, architect, inventor, mathematician, engineer, musician, cartographer, paleontologist, astronomer – he embodied the Renaissance, and was the original ‘renaissance man.’
Our visit to Vinci was a feast for all of the senses, and amongst our most special travel memories.
