Da Vinci

A woman lies anesthetized on the operating table. Bright primary colors dominate the room: the brilliant yellow of iodine-scrubbed skin, the red of blood, the green of surgical scrubs worn by all. Medical students flank a far wall, the Greek chorus of the surgical theater. From a CD player in the corner, the Beatles croon softly, "I wanna hold your haaand." This looks like any operating room, but this surgery - a heart-valve repair - will be anything but typical. The surgeon, sitting at a console that resembles a virtual-reality game console, will use a robot to operate from across the room.

It is widely viewed - more widely, of course, when the temperature hits 99 degrees - as one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. Without air conditioning, Houston would still be a cow town, glass skyscrapers wouldn't grace city skylines, and people like Marlene Kells and family would have no refuge from the oppressive heat and humidity that blanketed Baltimore this week. "We take turns going in that room," Kells said as she sat outside her rowhouse on South Hanover Street, drinking Pepsi on ice and pointing up to the droning window unit in her second-floor bedroom.

BEACON, N.Y. -- Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci's long-held plan to cast a 24-foot-tall bronze horse for his patron, Duke Lodovico Sforza of Milan, crumbled when invading French troops used the full-size clay model for crossbow practice.Leonardo never completed the piece, which would have been the largest equestrian sculpture in the world, and some biographical accounts have him crying on his deathbed over the unfulfilled vision.Leonardo's dream, first articulated as a postage-stamp-size sketch, was revealed in three jaw-dropping dimensions, in the form of a proudly prancing 15-ton bronze stallion that was cast and assembled at a foundry here, 60 miles north of New York City.

Art and history will collide in two weeks when an exact replica of a 24-foot bronze horse envisioned by Leonardo da Vinci is donated to Italy.The 15-ton "horse that never was," created at the Tallix Art Foundry in Beacon, N.Y., is a goodwill gesture and tribute to da Vinci, said Rod Skidmore, the project's artistic director.Skidmore estimates the cost of building the horse at over $6 million -- most of which came from American donors.Da Vinci, the legendary Renaissance artist, was commissioned in 1482 to design and build the largest equestrian statue in the world.

NEW YORK -- Andy Warhol captured the 1960s in all its giddy heights of narcissism, exhibitionism and consumerism -- an artistic quest that made an indelible impression on popular culture and brought him celebrity and wealth. Now, nearly a dozen years after his death, Warhol's little-known spiritual side has emerged from an under-explored body of the pop artist's works.A pious Catholic, Warhol produced more than 100 drawings, prints and paintings with religious themes. Among them are a monumental series of at least 40 paintings inspired by the familiar "Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci that Berkeley art historian Jane Daggett Dillenberger describes as the largest series of religious art by a major American artist.

When you know the answers to these questions, go to http://www.4Kids.org/detectives/1. How many varieties of sweet corn exist?2. Africans make up how much of the world population? To answer this question go to The Living Africa site at http://hyperion.advanced.org/16645/3. What is the primary topic of da Vinci's Codex Leicester?A Scientific MasterpieceYou've probably heard that Leonardo da Vinci wasn't just painter, right? Sure, Mona Lisa's face is on everything from spaghetti sauce to beach towels, but Leonardo was a serious thinker and a real Renaissance man!

More Theatre, Baltimore's newest local company, is presenting its inaugural production. But despite an amusing premise, "Leonardo's Last Supper" is one of those plays in which less is not more.Focusing on a family of 16th-century undertakers down on their luck, the 70-minute one-act play mixes flatulence jokes with slides of some of Leonardo da Vinci's greatest works. It's the kind of juxtaposition you'd expect from Monty Python or, perhaps, from eclectic playwright Peter Barnes, whose other writing credits include the screenplays of "The Ruling Class" and "Enchanted April."

BEACON, N.Y. - Artist Rod Skidmore commutes halfway to New York City every week to oversee what he believes will be the next Statue of Liberty.Here in this town on the banks of the Hudson River, the 64-year-old painter is coordinating the re-creation of a lost - and unfinished - Renaissance masterpiece: Leonardo da Vinci's 24-foot-tall horse, which was destroyed by French soldiers nearly 500 years ago.The aim of the volunteer group - known as Leonardo da...

Reggie didn't get it."Who cares about some guy who died nearly 500 years ago?" she groused in the museum lobby, one eye on the shopping mall across the street.That this particular "guy" happened to be Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most creative thinkers of all time, didn't make any difference. Nor was my 11-year-old daughter moved to learn that this massive (15,000-square-foot) Boston Museum of Science exhibit is the largest ever to explore da Vinci's brilliance as a scientist and inventor as well as an artist.