Howdy! Great to see you again, and today I am going to share with you none other than Amboise in the beautiful Loire Valley. We went on a class trip here last Friday, June 15th. The small town of Amboise may not have been at its most beautiful, as it was drizzling lightly with dark skies, but not much could compare with the amazing chateau that past kings have tried to get their hands on for years. We received a tour of the remains of the chateau, which is only a fraction of its size back in the day. I had wondered why the tour guide pretty much gave us an entire history of the chateau (nothing wrong with it, I was just wondering why), and it was because the chateau was literally so small had she only given us the backstory to every room we would have been done in less than 15 minutes. A very interesting fact about Amboise is that Leonardo da Vinci lived here in the latter stages of his life. King Francis I and da Vinci were great friends and Francis offered the Clos Lucé manor to da Vinci, who accepted and lived his last three years here. The manor was in close proximity to the Chateau Amboise, and Leonardo da Vinci continued with his work until he died of a stroke in 1519. The painting below depicts Leonardo being held by Francis I, but there is speculation that this was false and ordered by Francis I to be painted as propaganda to increase his popularity. He is currently buried in Amboise.
You might be wondering how any of this has to do with neuroscience. How does da Vinci, a painter, related to neuroscience? Leonardo was definitely an eclectic person and dabbled in the sciences. He was a skilled dissector performing and recording fine dissections of the brain and internal organs and led discoveries in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology (Jones, 2012; Pevsner, 2002). He also used a technique where he injected hot wax into brains to provide a cast of the ventricles, which is the first known method of the use of a solidifying medium to define the shape and size of an internal body structure (Pevsner, 2002). It was an honor to visit Amboise.
References:
Jones, R. (2012). Leonardo da Vinci: anatomist. Br J Gen Pract, 62(599), 319–319. https://doi.org/10.3399/bjgp12X649241
Pevsner, J. (2002). Leonardo da Vinci’s contributions to neuroscience. Trends in Neurosciences, 25(4), 217–220.