he appeared in Rome to ask the Holy See for support. He didn’t get it. The Holy Father not only denied him alms but decreed that his future research—particularly his sacrilegious mutilations of the divine image—would be either restricted or proscribed. Luckily, the French crown, not for the first time, came to the rescue of Italian genius. Francis I invited the great pariah to Paris as “first painter and engineer to the king.” He left his native land immediately and forever, spending his last years in a little castle near Amboise, working to the end on architectural blueprints and canal
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