On May 2, 1519, Leonardo da Vinci died at Cloux, a manor house in the town of Amboise, in the Loire Valley of France, that is now called Clos Lucé. He was 67, and no record of the time names what killed him.
A stroke is the cause most often proposed, because the one detailed account of his end describes a sudden seizure. His right hand had also failed two years earlier.
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Leonardo had come to France in the autumn of 1516, at the invitation of the young King Francis I. The king named him First Painter, Architect and Engineer of the King, a court title that came with a generous pension, and lodged him at Cloux, a short walk from the royal château.
Few witnesses describe his years in France. Three documents survive: the diary of a visitor who met him in 1517, a letter from his pupil Francesco Melzi, the son of a noble Lombard family, who had come with him to France, and the will Leonardo dictated nine days before he died.
The version most people know is a deathbed. The king of France holds the dying painter in his arms, a scene French painters put on canvas more than once. Yet the king's own paperwork places him elsewhere, and the tomb that bears Leonardo's name in Amboise holds bones no one can prove are his.
The king who was probably elsewhere
The deathbed scene took shape in 1550, in the first great book of artists' lives, written by the Italian painter Giorgio Vasari. In a book meant to honor artists, a king's embrace made the finest ending, and Vasari described the room, the gesture and the dying man's last thoughts as if he had stood beside the bed.
What You'll Discover
The last words Vasari gave him.
What happened to his right hand.
Who got what in his will.
Whose bones lie in his tomb.