The Mona Lisa hangs in Paris because Francis I lured Leonardo to France
When Francis I became king in 1515, French royal palaces held only a scattering of fine paintings and not one sculpture. He set out to change that, persuading an ageing Leonardo da Vinci to spend his last years in France. Leonardo painted little there, but he brought his greatest works, including the Mona Lisa, which never left.
Francis was born in 1494 at Cognac, a distant royal cousin nobody expected to reign. Then Charles VIII died childless and his successor, Louis XII, produced no son, so under the rule barring women from the throne the four-year-old became heir. He married Louis's daughter Claude and was crowned at Reims in 1515. Though not formally schooled as a humanist, he was shaped by the Italian Renaissance more than any French king before him, learning several languages and loving both jousting and poetry.
His patronage was extravagant. Besides Leonardo, he employed Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Primaticcio and the goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini, and kept agents in Italy buying art and rare manuscripts. He began the Château de Chambord, possibly to a design by Leonardo, remade the Louvre from medieval fortress into Renaissance palace, and lavishly expanded Fontainebleau, his favourite home. He enlarged the royal library, actually read its books, opened it to foreign scholars, and in 1537 decreed that it receive a copy of every book sold in France, which earned him the title Father and Restorer of Letters.
War dominated his reign. He opened spectacularly, routing papal and Swiss forces at Marignano in 1515 and taking Milan. But his great rival Charles V, who ruled Spain, the Netherlands and Austria and won the imperial election of 1519 that Francis also contested, hemmed France in on several sides. A fortnight of lavish diplomacy with Henry VIII at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520 produced no alliance.
Disaster came at Pavia in 1525, where Francis was captured on the battlefield; legend holds that a local soup was invented on the spot to feed the royal prisoner. Undeterred, he later made a startling pact with the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, controversial for a Christian monarch. His reign also saw Jacques Cartier claim lands in the Americas, laying foundations for France's first colonial empire. He died in 1547.
Source: Francis I of France
