The News
A new exhibition explores Leonardo da Vinci’s impact on perfumery. The Florentine polymath is best known for his art and inventions, but he also spent years investigating fragrances, buying commercial perfumes and noting their ingredients and techniques, having become interested in how smell works compared with sight and hearing. Renaissance scents were often burned like incense, and da Vinci designed new perfume burners as well as fragrances.
The exhibition in Amboise, France, where da Vinci lived at the invitation of the French king for 30 years, examines the arrival of perfumes in post-medieval Europe from Asia and how da Vinci and others developed them, Artnet reported.
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