Mona Lisa’s eyes are said to follow you everywhere, but the same can’t be said when you’re sitting on her forehead. We’ve followed those eyes to get to this position; they drew us up a main street in Blois to the town’s Escalier Denis Papin where Leonardo da Vinci’s painting has been mounted on the 121-step staircase. We go up and down, telling the kids about Mona Lisa, Leonardo, his paintings and inventions — it’s certainly a better way to introduce him than trying to glimpse the original painting between a thicket of smartphones at the Louvre in Paris.
The enormous reproduction has been created to mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death in nearby Amboise, where he spent his final three years. The whole Loire Valley is embracing the anniversary and all-things Renaissance, the art movement that transformed the castles in this region of France from blunt military forts to temples of towers, turrets and tapestries. From the Hundred Years War, a succession of French kings held their courts in the Loire Valley, where the river provided easy transport and the forests were bountiful hunting grounds.
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