Museum of Ages

a digital museum

A room with a beamed ceiling, red floor tiles and lattice windows. Afternoon sun falls across a long trestle table with two small models on it. A mechanical lion stands by the wall on the left. A still from the museum's film. The room is a reconstruction built in code. — The great hall of Clos LucéReconstruction: a room of Leonardo da Vinci's last house, rebuilt in code.Still from the museum's own filmMusic in the film: “Adrift Among Infinite Stars” by Scott Buckley, shortened, licence CC BY 4.0.

We rebuild what was. You walk through it.

Open today: the Leonardo da Vinci wing.

Free entry, no account. What this museum is

At a glance

A wing: A real place, rebuilt in 3D, shown as a film.
The walk: One story, from the first stop to the last.
The works: Reproductions and reconstructions, not the originals.
Languages: English and German.

A digital museum by ChipMates gemeinnützige GmbH, a nonprofit company in Germany. Nonprofit · No tracking cookies, no profiling

The wings

A wing is one place at one moment, rebuilt in code.

One wing is open. More are being made, one at a time.

A tall brick house with stone corners stands on a walled terrace in low sun, under a branch with autumn leaves. A still from the museum's film. The house is a reconstruction built in code. — Leonardo da Vinci
1452 to 1519The wing shows Clos Lucé in Amboise, 10 October 1517Reconstruction: the house from the garden side, in low sunAfter plans and photographs of the house.Enter the museum More about this wing

How a visit works

A visit is a walk from stop to stop. At each stop something stands in front of you: a picture, a machine, a book or a place, and a short text.

The text has three layers: the line you read first, a drawer that opens when you want more, and the record, which names the sources. Here is one stop of the Leonardo da Vinci wing: stop 2, in front of the Mona Lisa.

A long dark blue wall hung with framed reproductions under spotlights. The Mona Lisa hangs among them, and more frames run on to her left. A still from the museum's film. — Mona LisaReproduction: the Mona Lisa in the picture room, the wall of pictures running on to her left. From the Louvre collection, Paris.Historical print digitised by the National Library of Poland. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. The other frames hold reproductions as well, each with its source and licence on its label in the wing.

The stop

A woman called Lisa

His age: 51

Documented

The line

Decades later he was painting a woman from Florence. A clerk wrote her name down: Lisa. Remember that name.

The drawer

What hangs here is a reproduction. The painting itself is in Paris. In Florence, in October 1503, a clerk wrote in the margin of a book. The note says Leonardo was at work on a head of Lisa del Giocondo. The name the picture carries today is in a book from 1550.

The record

The Louvre identifies the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo. The painting measures 79.4 × 53.4 cm.

The title and the three texts are the museum's own words.

How sure we are

Each stop carries one of four grades: documented, reconstructed, conjectural, or not known. The word stands under the stop's title.

Documented
Reconstructed
Conjectural
Not known

What this museum is

Read the full statement

What you see: Every picture, sheet and machine is a reproduction or a reconstruction, and its label says which. A reproduction is a copy of a picture or a page. A reconstruction is built again from what is left: a sheet, a plan, an old account. Built in code means a program describes every beam and wheel, and the computer draws the picture.
Where the originals are: With the museums, libraries and collections that keep them.
The sources: Every fact in a wing has a source.
Who runs it: ChipMates gemeinnützige GmbH, a nonprofit. No advertising, nothing for sale. It pays for the museum.
Independent: No partnership with any museum. ChipMates alone decides what it shows and says.
Where it is: On your screen. A website, built once for the phone and once for the desktop.

For museums, libraries and the press

If your institution holds a work shown here, its label names you as the holder, with the source and the licence line of the picture. It claims nothing more.

The page of each wing lists what it shows and names every holder of an original, in one list.

If a credit is wrong, or you have a better picture, write to us and we correct it. The address is in the legal notice. Journalists reach us there too.

To the legal notice The full statement

Come in and look closely

Some places are far away, closed or gone. Here you can walk into one of them, rebuilt as closely as the sources allow.

Enter the museum

Free entry, no account.