The 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci will bring big doings to Paris this fall with the largest-ever and one-stop-only career survey at the Louvre. And New York gets a shot of buzz in advance with the opening at the Met on July 15 of a single-painting show of one of the most rawly emotional image s in the Leonardo canon.

Leonardo was a star from the start. According to the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari, his contemporaries found him terrifically attractive. (Vasari calls him “divine” a dozen times in a 20-page Leonardo biography.) Genial, gorgeous, brainy and a fashion plate (partial to pink), he had the poise of a prince and a philosopher’s ruminative mind. In his long career as artist, architect, scientist and inventor, grace and talent combined to smooth his path from rural Tuscany, where he was born in 1452, to the courts of Milan and papal Rome, to France where, as pet artist to Francis I, he died in 1 519.

But that ruminative cast of mind caused problems. Basically, before Leonardo did anything he had to know everything: how his paints and varnishes were made, how the human body was internally structured, and what creating art might mean in the cosmic scheme of things.