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The king holds the painter's head like a relic he has just inherited. The court registers put him two days' ride away; Vasari put him here, and here he stays.

Leonardo spent his last three years in France because the king of France collected him. Francis I gave him a manor at Clos Lucé, a pension of a thousand crowns, and a title with room for everything: First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King. No large commissions were expected. His right hand was partly paralyzed by then; he organized court festivals instead, built a mechanical lion that walked the length of a hall and opened its chest to spill lilies at the king's feet, and kept three paintings in his rooms that he would not be parted from, one of them the portrait of a Florentine silk merchant's wife. The king visited down a private lane, some say a tunnel, and talked with him for hours. He died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519, 67 years old, having tidied his affairs like a notary's son: will made, masses arranged, the manuscripts and paintings left to his companion Francesco Melzi. Vasari, writing 30 years later, gave the death its immortal staging: the king happening to enter, the old man raising himself in bed to apologize for having offended God and men by not working at his art as he should have, and then the seizure, and the head of Leonardo going still in the arms of Francis. The court registers make trouble for the scene, placing the king's household at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, two days' ride away, the following morning. Registers can be signed in a king's absence; so can legends. What is certain is what the king kept. The paintings from the dead man's rooms passed into the royal collection, which is the entire reason a Florentine portrait called the Mona Lisa has spent five centuries in France and hangs in the Louvre and not in Florence. Francis said, in a line reported secondhand years on, that no man had ever known as much as Leonardo. Kings' compliments are cheap, but he had backed this one with a pension. Ingres painted Vasari's version in 1818, exactly as literature and not as evidence: the king cradling the great head like a father, the pillow white, the room red, a courtier reaching out to interrupt and a cardinal declining to. France had just lost an empire and was shopping in its own past for scenes worth believing. This one has never gone out of stock.