Inside Leonardo da Vinci's Florence Home in 1500 | AI-Recreated History

Florence, spring of 1500: a forty-eight-year-old Leonardo da Vinci returns to his home city after nearly twenty years in Milan, notebooks packed with sketches and the earliest seeds of what would become the Mona Lisa. Step into his workshop, carefully rebuilt using AI. This piece reimagines Leonardo's everyday world in republican Florence from 1500 to 1508, under Piero Soderini's government following the Medici's exile and Savonarola's execution. Housed by the Servite friars near Santissima Annunziata, he works alongside apprentices grinding ultramarine pigment on porphyry stone, his companion Salaì, and the mirrored handwriting that would later fill the Codex Atlanticus. Watch the master through mornings bathed in cool northern light, layering translucent glazes across poplar panels as sfumato reaches its boldest form — first in the cartoon of the Virgin, Child, and Saint Anne, then in the portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the woman who would become the Mona Lisa. His afternoons take him to Santa Maria Nuova, where sanctioned dissections let him chart muscles and heart valves with an accuracy far ahead of his era. By 1502 he's traveling through the Romagna as military engineer to Cesare Borgia, surveying fortifications alongside Machiavelli. Returning to Florence, he finds himself pitted against Michelangelo — fresh off unveiling the David — in the ill-fated Battle of Anghiari at the Palazzo Vecchio, before departing for French-controlled Milan in 1508.