Other than the first known painting of Michelangelo’s now on display at the Met in NYC, where else in North America can one view a painting by Da Vinci or Michelangelo? Or for Michelangelo, do any places in North America have a sculpture?
Isn’t there a couple of Leonardo’s works at the National Gallery. Off the top of my head, I think one is Minerva something-or-other, and the other is the Lady with the Ermine…
Lemme go check…
ETA: Okay, it was Ginerva de’Benci- sue me! 
And here is the Ermine Lady…
Okay, what do I win?
There’s a da Vinci experience here in San Diego until Jan of next year.
[Elitist, snobby, twit-like nit]
It is not appropriate to refer to Leonardo as “da Vinci” - it is only a reference to where he is from, not a last name. He was a bastard, IIRC, so I don’t think he was allowed access to his father’s surname or something…
…yet another thing Dan Brown (author of The da Vinci Code) got wrong…
So you can refer to Michaelangelo as “Buonarroti” because that is his last name - but Leonardo is, well, “Leonardo”…
Carry on.
[/Elitist, snobby, twit-like nit]
Yeah, that bugs me too. It’s as odd of thing to catch on as referring to Al Capone as “of Chicago”.
I don’t know, it’s sort of like referring to Andrew Jackson as “Old Hickory” or Hugh Laurie as “that guy from House”. It’s just culturally what we’ve come to know. Do you think of someone else when you hear the term da Vinci?
There’s a study of the Mona Lisa attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci in, of all places, the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York.
Dude, google “Leonardo” under images and observe the ratio of “da Vinci” to “DiCaprio” 
At any rate, back to the topic at hand, SVP!
There’s a surprising number of famous artists in that collection, including Picasso, Thomas Eakins, El Greco, Botticelli, Winslow Homer, Renoir, Reubens, and Seurat.
It’s a great experience because the museum is set up like a house – furniture and all. You go walking around the library and in one corner is the interesting painting tucked away. Then you look at the artist and it lists Rembrandt van Rijn. No fanfare and no indication it’s anything special.
Heh. This is like complaining that it’s improper to refer to Dan Brown as “Brown” because it refers to a color.
As I understand, there’s some uncertainty regarding whether he was a bastard or not. Even if he was not though, the use of actual surnames was by no means universal (hence names such as “Cosimo de’ Medici”). Even people with surnames were typically referred to by their first names, e.g. Dante Alighieri and Michelangelo Buonarotti.
No, it isn’t. Brown is his actual name. It doesn’t simply describe where he’s from or even anything about the person.
Those examples are not at all analogous. “Old Hickory” is universally understood to be a nickname for Andrew Jackson, and probably one that he himself accepted. As for Hugh Laurie, it’s okay to refer to him as “that guy from House,” but only an idiot would think that this phrase is his actual name.
Well I wouldn’t want confuse him with a ninja turtle. da Vinci works just fine.
**D18 **- sorry about that. I really didn’t mean to be a thread twit (well, over and above being Fact-Establisher Man).
Look - it is what it is. Of course using “da Vinci” or other words added to “Leonardo” enable better searches, precision, etc. - cool. And yeah, language evolves, so previously *verboten *word constructs and uses become acceptable.
The fact that da Vinci is not his surname is just one of those Fighting Ignorance things that a Doper like me can’t leave unmentioned…but I agree with **D18 **(great guitar, by the way)…let’s carry on.
Now, to raise the level of the conversation, can I just say that I always remembered the Lady, the one holding the ermine, as really attractive, but now that I look again, she kinda looks like Ginny Weasley? 
And the Ginerva portrait just didn’t come out right; flat and lifeless - between stuff like Ginerva, the unfinished cartoons of various paintings like the one with Saint…Joan? in a Madonna and Child portrait and the famously instantly-deteriorating Last Supper, you get the impression that he had ADHD, bounced all over the place, and basically treated painting like second-level work he used to get commissions to do the stuff he preferred…