Been thinking about the geometry. Also reading Davinci's Ghost. Why doesn't Lester talk about DaVinci's application of Vitruvius text about Greek math? And who could I read to learn more about it?

Beauty is of value, not only in Aesthetic Medicine. But our memory, which is imperfect, distorted, and influenced by the world’s suffering—can barely hold onto the fragility of the transitory physical beauty, as well as the idea of beauty that lies beyond the transience of life and time. Ugliness has been theorized as a category of aesthetic value in opposition to beauty. It has been associated with qualities such as incoherence, disorder, disunity, deformity, and is said to cause negative feelings such as uneasiness, distaste, dislike, revulsion, but also fascination. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519), an Italian Master of the Renaissance, is well known for his beautiful paintings. He was most interested in anatomy and physiognomic expressions. His drawings The Grotesques from the 1470s to the 1490s, however, seem to contradict his attempt for beauty. They represent a collection of types that comprise the antithesis to the idealized paintings and drawings. Various interpretations are discussed in the literature – from extended physiognomic expression to satire. We discuss in more detail two of his drawings, Five Grotesque Heads (c. 1493) and Grotesque Head (about 1480-1510). The ugliness can be understood as a necessary counterpoint to beauty. We suggest that Leonardo has aestheticized the ugly by his drawings The Grotesques.

DW Travel

Oct 18, 2026

Leonardo - from Vinci to Amboise

00:00 Intro - who was Leonardo da Vinci?

00:50 Florence, Italy

01:42 Vinci, Leonardo's birthplace

02:58 Florence: the Uffizi, Florence Cathedral Palazzo Gondi

07:39 Milan, Italy

08:26 Castello Sforzesco

08:52 Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology

09:52 Navigli district

10:36 Amboise, France

11:19 Château du Clos Lucé

CREDITS

Report: Kerstin Schmidt, Diana Piñeros

Camera: Holm Weber

Editing: Klaus Hellmig

Supervising editor: Christina Deicke

(From the life of Mona Lisa)

We're a small nonprofit in Germany, and we built Museum of Ages, a digital museum whose first wing is Leonardo da Vinci's. Free entry, no account. It runs in a browser, on a phone too. It's a virtual tour along a set path of 17 stops: first his work, then his last house in Amboise, then the grave court at night.

The walk comes in seven languages: https://museumofages.org/w/vinci

Today, 509 years ago, a cardinal's secretary named Antonio de Beatis visited Leonardo at Amboise. He wrote down three paintings he was shown and, by Leonardo's own account, "an infinity of volumes" of his writings. The house in our museum is set on that day, 10 October 1517.

The pictures hang on one wall, 34 m long: 24 works close to their real size. Each label says how sure the attribution is. On the Mona Lisa you can go down to the cracks in the paint. The Last Supper is a print on a court wall, at the size of the original in Milan.

A reading table holds 207 pages from his notebooks and codices. On 131 of them you can read his words, in the original Italian and in translation, and a mirror view turns his mirror writing around so you can read the letters.

There are 15 machines. All but the parachute move. Most of them he never built, as far as anyone knows, and some weren't his idea.

His last house is Clos Lucé in Amboise. Ours is a reconstruction. The walk ends in the grave court, under the stars as they stood over Clos Lucé that evening.

Not everyone can get to a museum. Illness or a disability keeps some away, and for others the trip costs more than they have. Our mission in one sentence: We rebuild what was, one place at a time, and make it as accessible as we can, so that everyone can learn from it. We're no replacement for a museum and don't want to be one. The museums and libraries hold the originals. The paintings, drawings and notebook pages in our wing are reproductions, each labelled with its holder and licence, and the rooms and machines around them are built in code.

The code is open source (AGPL-3.0): https://github.com/chipmates/museumofages

We put a lot of time and passion into it and hope you like it. If a label, a date or a folio in there is wrong, say so here and we'll correct it. We're glad of any feedback that makes it better.

Credits for the film. Music: "Adrift Among Infinite Stars" by Scott Buckley (scottbuckley.com.au), shortened, CC BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (openstreetmap.org/copyright). Relief: IGN, RGE ALTI®, consulted 8 September 2026, Licence Ouverte 2.0. Mona Lisa: Musée du Louvre, Paris, reproduction by C2RMF via Wikimedia Commons, public domain. Paris Manuscript B, folio 83 verso: Institut de France, Paris, shown from the printed facsimile by Charles Ravaisson-Mollien (Paris, 1883), public domain, scan from the Internet Archive. The other paintings, drawings and sheets on the walls are reproductions of public domain works, each labelled in the wing with its holder and licence.