MUSIC: Intentions of the Mind by Caroline Shaw
A good painter must depict two principal things,
namely the person
and the intentions of their mind.
The first is easy,
the second difficult.
MUSIC CONTINUES
RUMBLE OF THUNDER
- The modernity of Leonardo is that he understands that knowledge
and imagination are intimately related.
- LEONARDO: - Which nerve causes the eye to move
so that the motion of one eye moves the other...
..on closing the eyelids...
..on opening the eyes...
..on expressing wonder.
- There is a delightful, unbridled joy of curiosity in him.
His duty is to the question.
His duty is to the thirst for knowledge.
Basically he says, the thing that was given to me by the universe
was the chance to question it...
..and that is my divine duty.
- MUSIC CONTINUES
He began few paintings and finished even fewer.
But, more than 500 years after his death,
those he left behind are among the most revered works of art
of all time.
A draughtsman of incomparable talent, he sketched everything.
People and landscapes, flora and fauna,
machines, both real and imagined,
equations, fables and allegories.
Painting on wood panels made from walnut or poplar trees,
he devised new ways to portray how men and women
convey their deepest emotions.
Movements of the mind, he called it,
and elevated painting from a craft to an intellectual pursuit.
He read Greek and Roman philosophers
but frequently questioned their wisdom.
Real knowledge, he believed, was found in nature
and best gained through observation and experience.
He studied fossils and water dynamics,
dissected cadavers
and mapped the circulatory system and the human brain.
He attempted to solve the ancient geometric problem
of squaring the circle
and he staged experiments on the nature of falling objects
more than a century before Galileo and Newton.
To him, everything -
geology, physics, anatomy, mathematics, art -
was inextricably linked.
Writing backwards in a mirror script,
he began treatises on a vast array of subjects,
combining image and text to communicate profound insights
that were, in some cases, centuries ahead of their time.
But he left most of them incomplete and published none in his lifetime.
A singular genius, he filled his notebooks
with calculations and questions, theories and innovations,
revealing a mind of infinite curiosity.
In an age of astonishing artistic advances
and a new-found reverence for humanity,
Leonardo da Vinci made his way, he said,
as a "discepolo dell'esperienza" -
a disciple of experience.
EXHALING
LEONARDO: - Here forms...
..here colours...
..here the character of every part of the universe
is concentrated to a point...
- HEARTBEAT
- ..and that point is so marvellous a thing.
- BABY CRIES
- If there's a golden thread that runs through all of Leonardo's work,
I think it's an attempt to crack the code of organic form.
He's persuaded that there are profound likenesses,
profound equivalences to be found in the movement of the stars
and in the behaviour of an ant hill.
That, more than anything else, is what obsessed Leonardo,
and what gives his work a kind of unity.
- LEONARDO: - These indeed are miracles.
In so small a space, the universe can be reproduced
and rearranged in its whole expanse.
- In the spring of 1452, in a tiny village
tucked among the Tuscan hills, a prosperous 80-year-old farmer
and landowner named Antonio da Vinci made a note in his ledger.
"There was born to me a grandson, the son of Ser Piero, my son,
"on the 15th day of April, a Saturday,
"at the third hour of the night."
Ser Piero was a successful notary in his mid-20s,
who lived and worked in Florence
but returned at times to his ancestral village of Vinci.
Little is known about the baby's mother
other than her name - Caterina.
Though his parents were from different social classes
and did not marry, the arrival of their son
was cause for celebration.
The day after his birth, the boy was baptised
at the Church of Santa Croce in the centre of town.
They called him Leonardo.
Soon after Leonardo's birth, Ser Piero returned to Florence.
Within a year, his father would be married
to a bourgeois Florentine woman,
Caterina to a kiln worker and farmer who lived near Vinci.
- The father, in the case of Leonardo's early childhood,
is an absent figure,
and he probably spent more time with his mother, Caterina.
She was probably a serving girl, a "contadina" - a peasant woman.
- At times, the boy lived with his paternal grandparents,
Antonio and Lucia, and their son Francesco, Leonardo's uncle.
Vinci, a village of fewer than 100 families,
was made up of a medieval castle, a church
and a modest cluster of homes that gave way to vineyards
and olive groves.
Locals harvested medicinal herbs from Vinci's hillsides
to supply the pharmacies of Florence
and diverted a small mountain stream to power the town's olive press.
As a boy, Leonardo was enamoured of his natural surroundings,
exploring his grandfather's orchards and wheat fields
and the hills, valleys and woodlands beyond.
He also grew close to his uncle Francesco,
who loved the leisurely pace of country life.
Because he was born out of wedlock,
Leonardo was limited in what education he could receive
and, eventually, which professions he could pursue.
- The education he got was the kind of education, we think,
that merchants' sons got,
where you get practical mathematics
and you learn how to gauge how much oil is in a barrel.
- In time, Leonardo would regard his lack of a formal education
as among his greatest strengths.
RUMBLE OF THUNDER
HOWLING
LEONARDO: - Having wandered some distance among dark rocks,
I came to the entrance of a vast cavern.
And after some time there, two contrary emotions arose in me.
Fear...
..and desire.
Fear of the sinister, dark cavern.
Desire to see whether it contained something wondrous.
- The Renaissance is an enlightenment,
a rebirth of classical learning,
but it's also a time of tremendous change and, therefore, uncertainty.
Everything's up for grabs.
And I think the keynote of the time is uncertainty.
With every question comes a doubt.
And I think the story of Leonardo's, about looking into the dark cave,
is a very Renaissance viewpoint.
- As Europe emerged from a devastating pandemic
that had ravaged the continent in the mid 1300s,
the city states that crowded the Italian peninsula
established maritime trade routes to Constantinople and North Africa,
giving rise to a wealthy class of merchants and bankers
and accelerating an exchange of knowledge that helped ignite
the cultural explosion that would come to be known as the Renaissance.
- It started in the more mature part of the Middle Ages,
but the big change occurs with what is called humanism.
Humanism is really the beginning of the Renaissance
and it happens because scholars like Petrarch and others,
for the first time, don't look at the texts of the past
and try to Christianise them.
Before, it was always to take that knowledge
and try to fit the Christian doctrine.
Instead, now they're seeing it for what they are
within the historical context.
It's a secular approach that was not there before.
That's what sparks the Renaissance.
- The Renaissance reached its most profound expression
in the city state of Florence, with a blossoming of art and architecture
informed by mathematics and science and classical ideals.
- It's celebrating not only empirical but physical sensation,
and why does it happen, where does it come from,
how do we belong in the world?
There is a recentring of the world into man.
- Florence was first established on the banks of the Arno river
by Julius Caesar in 59 BC.
Since the Middle Ages,
it had been the seat of power of the Republic of Florence,
a city state that controlled a large swathe of Tuscany.
Its government, a council made up of members of the leading trade guilds
called the Signoria, was a source of great pride
for the city's inhabitants.
But, in reality, Florence functioned as an oligarchy
in which the richest families controlled the levers of power
from behind the scenes.
Cosimo de' Medici,
the politically astute head of a powerful banking family,
had become Florence's de facto ruler in 1434.
His clever diplomatic manoeuvres had led to a 1454 treaty
among the kingdom's republics and dukedoms
that divided the Italian peninsula, ushering in a delicate peace
for the first time in half a century.
Cosimo was also a generous patron of the arts.
- Increasingly, artists who previously would have sought to work
for the cathedral, to work for the city, to work for one of the guilds,
want to work for the Medici,
because working for the Medici is not only a good fee,
it also guarantees recognition in a new world of art appreciation.
- Florence had long been home to a flourishing garment industry,
with its silk and wool weavers, leather tanners and furriers.
As the arts grew, workshops that produced paintings, sculptures,
jewellery and metalworks expanded and prospered.
- The Italian word for a studio is "bottega", and that means a shop,
or, more precisely in this context, a workshop.
A noisy, communal, collective space.
Different people are working on different things.
There's hammers and tongs...
..and fires that heat up metal...
..and a lot of smells of solvents.
You might also hear, of course, the clucking of chickens,
because one of the major paints that were used was egg tempera.
- Some time in the 1460s,
Leonardo, now an adolescent,
made the long day's ride from Vinci to Florence,
where his father secured him an apprenticeship
in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio,
a talented sculptor, painter and goldsmith.
Verrocchio had trained many of Florence's most celebrated artists.
- I think he recognised very quickly that young Leonardo
was going to be the cream of these young apprentices,
someone that he could outsource some of the work to
and someone he could train up to be an extremely good sculptor, painter,
jewellery designer, whatever he wanted to be.
- In the late 1460s, Verrocchio received a commission
from the Medici family to cast a bronze statue of David,
the biblical shepherd boy who had slayed the giant Goliath.
Leonardo, whose contemporaries described him
as a beautiful, curly-haired youth, may have been his model.
As an apprentice, Leonardo prepared wood panels,
ground pigments for paint
and made models in clay and terracotta.
He also learned to draw -
a skill that artists viewed as the foundation
for all other artistic endeavours.
- Drawing is the key to almost everything.
If you can't really draw it well,
you're never going to be able to paint it well.
Leonardo said one should find for oneself
a really good master, copy their work,
because it will train your hand to good form.
- He drew with astounding acuity.
If there's one thing that makes Leonardo's drawings distinct
from the beautiful drawings of someone like his master, Verrocchio,
Leonardo adds a note of movement and internal agitation to drawings.
Everything is dissolved into the world of movement.
- Leonardo does a lot of studies of draperies and cloths,
and what it shows is he understands how light hits a curving object,
how shadows are formed...
..how depth is conveyed in a drawing.
The drapery studies give a sense of light, of depth,
but also of motion.
- LEONARDO: - The painter will produce pictures of small merit
if he makes other artists' work his standard.
But if he studies from natural objects, he will bear good fruit.
- In the summer of 1473,
Leonardo made a small high-angle drawing of the Arno river valley.
BELL CHIMES
- One of the remarkable things about Florence
is that there was a succession of geniuses,
decade after decade after decade, in the 1400s.
When Leonardo came to Florence in the 1460s,
he could look back at the previous 50 years
and see great public works of art. Things that you could see for free.
You could walk through the streets of Florence and see this.
He wants to take his place in the pantheon of great artists
like Alberti, Ghiberti and Brunelleschi.
- Filippo Brunelleschi was the city's most celebrated architect.
In 1418, he had entered a public competition
to engineer a dome for the city's central cathedral,
Santa Maria del Fiore,
which had been under construction since 1296.
At 143 feet in diameter, the long-planned dome
was intended to be wider than that of Rome's celebrated Pantheon,
still the world's largest 1,300 years after its completion.
Few believed it could ever be built, but Brunelleschi was undeterred.
It took 18 years, but the structure of the dome
was finally completed in 1436,
16 years before Leonardo was born.
Three decades later, Verrocchio won a contract to construct and install
a monumental copper sphere,
8ft in diameter and weighing more than 4,000 pounds,
to complete the lantern atop Brunelleschi's dome.
- And Leonardo da Vinci was 19 years old at that point,
and he'd been with Verrocchio for at least a couple of years,
learning his trade.
He would have seen up close and personal
everything that Brunelleschi had achieved.
Leonardo da Vinci says,
I want to do the impossible, I want to create miracles,
because he's inspired by these miraculous works of art
which have come before him.
- In the early 1470s, Verrocchio received a commission
from the Church of San Salvi to paint a baptism of Christ.
The master assigned sections of the work to his talented apprentice,
including the Messiah's feet...
..parts of the landscape
and one of the two angels.
While Verrocchio had painted in tempera
and used white highlights to produce contours,
Leonardo worked in oil,
applying imperceptibly thin layers of colour
to develop light and shadow
and create the illusion of three-dimensionality.
- Verrocchio's paintings and sculptures
both had a bit of a sense of motion,
and Leonardo builds on that and does it even better than Verrocchio did.
And it's our first sign that Leonardo
is beginning to surpass Verrocchio as a painter of motion and emotion.
- LEONARDO: - The art of perspective is such that it makes what is flat
appear in relief and what is in relief appear flat.
- Part of Leonardo's heritage was the revolutionary
invention of single-point linear perspective.
So a young man learning art in Florence in the 1460s,
as Leonardo would have done,
he understood that he had to be a complete master of that.
- Single-point linear perspective -
a method of bringing the illusion of depth to a two-dimensional work,
had been devised by Brunelleschi,
but it was the architect Leon Battista Alberti
who had enshrined it for Renaissance artists
in his treatise Della Pittura.
- Perspective was very important to the painters.
That's basically how things recede into space
and the vanishing point that parallel lines seem to go to.
Musicians had mathematical theories of harmony
and perspective was rather like that for painters - they had a theory -
so he began to develop an interest not just in the mathematics
of organising space in pictures
but also in how the eye works and how slippery it is.
He's the first of the theorists in painting who realises
that the business of seeing is very complicated.
- LEONARDO: - All objects transmit their image to the eye
by a pyramid of lines...
..which start from the edges of an object's surface
and, converging from a distance, meet in a single point.
And I will show that this point is situated in the eye,
which is the universal judge of all objects.
- In 1472, at the age of 20,
Leonardo joined a painter's guild
whose members were among the most talented artists in Florence -
Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Pietro Perugino and Sandro Botticelli.
Though Leonardo remained a part of Verrocchio's workshop,
he was now a "dipintore" - a professional painter
able to receive his own commissions.
Florentine artists were frequently hired by churches
and the city's wealthiest families
to paint the Bible's most popular subjects -
the Madonna and Child,
the Adoration of the Magi,
the Crucifixion.
Another frequently depicted scene was the Annunciation -
the moment in which the angel Gabriel descends from heaven
to proclaim to the Virgin Mary
that she will give birth to the Son of God.
It would be the focus of one of Leonardo's first independent works.
Though he borrowed freely in technique from Verrocchio,
Leonardo's Annunciation revealed his grasp of perspective,
his deftness with light and shadow
and his devotion to nature.
ETHEREAL MUSIC
- He's one of those people who lives in his own head.
We meet those people in life
and we recognise that they live on a planet other than our own.
There are very, very few times in history when what you did
when you had that kind of restless,
inquiring, creative mind
was to paint pictures.
Renaissance Italy was perhaps the only place in time
when that was so, and we're blessed that it was.
- Leonardo received another commission, to paint a portrait
of the young poet Ginevra de' Benci -
the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected banking family
who had occasional dealings with Leonardo's father.
- To look at the Ginevra de' Benci is probably one of the great ways
to understand Leonardo's early painting technique.
It is a very deliberated, very protracted process.
The painting is done on a very thin poplar wood panel
and it has a priming that is gesso.
Leonardo began by drawing the cartoon -
a full-scale drawing on paper.
He pricked the outlines...
..and rubbed with a pouncing bag...
..while the panel was underneath.
A technique we call "spolvero".
The oil medium, it's basically linseed oil and pigments.
He applied in the thinnest veils
what we call the glazes, or the "velature" in Italian.
Layer by infinitesimal layer,
he's able to calibrate the tonal transitions
that permit him to explore this "sfumato" technique,
where you blend the gradations in such a way
that they seem to be the manner of smoke.
- In a playful reference to Ginevra's name,
Leonardo surrounded her with juniper branches -
"ginepro" in Italian.
- We can already see how intensely Leonardo believes
that emotions of the mind and emotions of the soul,
so the "moti dell'animo e moti dell'anima",
shows through this almost inscrutable gaze that she holds,
and there is a connectivity with the viewer
that gives it this tremendous power.
- BATS SCREECH
BELL CHIMES
In April of 1476,
Florentine authorities received an anonymous note
accusing 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli
of sodomy and prostitution.
The accuser listed four men as Saltarelli's lovers, or customers,
including 24-year-old Leonardo.
- Theoretically, it's a crime.
Theoretically, it's punishable by death.
So Leonardo might well have been arrested,
he might well have spent time in the holding cells.
- But among the accused was a son of the Tornabuoni family,
a powerful Florentine clan
with enough connections to have the charges dropped.
Two months later, the four men were absolved.
No further prosecution was pursued against them.
Homosexuality, though condemned by the Church,
was widely tolerated in 15th century Florence,
where a number of notable artists and poets
were publicly known to be gay.
Leonardo wrote nothing about his sexuality or the allegation,
but just a few years later he would draw a device
for removing bars from windows and another for opening a prison cell.
They were some of his first mechanical inventions.
LEONARDO: - Painting is born of nature,
or, rather, it is the grandchild of nature...
- BIRDS CHIRP
- ..for all visible things are produced by nature,
and these, her creations, have given birth to painting...
..so we may justly call it the grandchild of nature
and related to God.
- Nature is God.
Nature is perfection.
Nature is proportion.
Nature is the entity which obtains every effect
with the shortest and direct way that is possible.
The best a scientist or a painter can do is imitate nature.
- He has an amazing sense that nature is a perfect invention,
that there is nothing superfluous and nothing lacking.
Nature does nothing in vain.
- HORSE SNORTS
- If the bone is that shape, then it must do something.
Every small aspect of that form must have a function.
- BAT SCREECHES
- He does claim that the human being can take things from nature
and put them together in a different way.
That you can invent things that nature didn't invent,
so you could act as a second nature in the world.
- In the late 1470s, Leonardo finally left Verrocchio's studio
and opened one of his own
with his own apprentices and assistants.
Between commissions, he devised and drew machines
for an array of purposes.
Some were inspired by the designs of classical inventors
or Renaissance engineers,
and all were informed by his close observations of nature -
the spirals in a snail's shell,
the eddies of water in a surging stream
and the swirls of wind induced by a thunderstorm.
He drew an Archimedes' screw - an ancient device
created to force water to flow upwards -
and sketched construction machines, a mill for processing grain
and a human flying contraption featuring bat-like wings.
For Leonardo, building the machines often seemed beside the point.
- What is beauty for Leonardo
is proportion and harmony among its parts
and is a balance between light and shade,
is organisation of all the inner parts
in a way that provides an immediate perception of coherence.
This is why I like to call these drawings portraits.
He takes the same care in making them
as he puts into portraying one of his famous ladies.
- In March of 1481,
an order of Augustinian friars hired Leonardo to paint
a massive altarpiece for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto,
located just outside the city's walls.
His father, who did legal work for the monks,
helped broker the contract.
He was to depict another frequently painted Bible scene,
known as the Adoration of the Magi,
in which three kings visit the newborn Jesus
and recognise Him as the Messiah.
- There's little evidence
that he was personally a very religious person.
It's evident that he knew the stories.
That was his bread and butter as an artist.
Even when he is dealing with non-religious subjects -
rocks or water or trees -
I think he brings that sense that all things
are part of this astounding system that God has made.
He never simply bows to conventional religious ideas
and makes himself the illustrator of the catechism.
He's always looking for something more.
- For the dozens of figures who would populate his painting,
Leonardo sat in the piazzas of Florence,
quietly observing and sketching.
LEONARDO: - You must wander around and constantly, as you go,
observe, note and consider the circumstances and behaviour of men
as they talk, quarrel,
laugh or fight together.
And make brief sketches of them in a notebook,
for the forms and movements of bodies are so infinite
that the memory is incapable of retaining them.
So keep these sketches as your guides and masters.
- In one preparatory drawing for his Adoration,
Leonardo used dozens of perspective lines
to create an intricate three-dimensional setting,
which he then populated with animals and figures.
On an 8ft-wide poplar panel coated with gesso,
Leonardo sketched and resketched an underdrawing by hand
using black chalk or charcoal.
On top of this, he began to rough out the figures
in black, brown and blue pigments,
which he applied by brush.
Next he added a thin coat of white paint.
Using layers of diluted black and brown glazes,
Leonardo masterfully developed contrasting areas of light
and shadow that eventually would give the scene dimension and depth -
a technique known as "chiaroscuro".
Soon, a riveting scene featuring the Virgin and Child,
three kings kneeling in homage,
a throng of astonished eyewitnesses,
ancient ruins
and horses and soldiers in a distant battle began to emerge.
It was unlike any Adoration ever painted.
- When the star stops and the kings see Mary and the Christ Child,
they are full of great joy.
They feel joy, but there are many people - there are three kings
and then there are all the members of the entourage -
and people do not all respond in exactly the same way.
So he's really looking at it in a way
that no-one had ever done before,
no-one had ever done before,
and that is simply astounding.
- Among the bystanders in the painting's lower-right corner,
Leonardo painted a male figure, likely a self-portrait,
who gazes away from the scene's dramatic centre.
But less than a year after beginning his Adoration of the Magi,
Leonardo abandoned the work.
"So grand was his vision..." wrote Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,
one of Leonardo's early biographers,
"..that he saw errors even in things that others called miracles."
- You can feel this sort of dissatisfaction.
He wants to not only capture the snapshot of that scene
but he wants to ask himself, "How would everyone have behaved?
"How would the camels and the animals and the Magi -
"how would everyone have behaved at that moment?"
He ends up with a lot of unfinished work because the questions he's
setting himself are not questions that you can answer easily.
- LEONARDO: - We do not lack ways of passing our miserable days.
Still, we do not want to spend them in vain,
drawing no praise and leaving no memory of ourselves
in the minds of mortals.
- We can see in Leonardo a despair and a gloom happening.
He hasn't finished the Adoration of the Magi
and he keeps jotting in his notebook...
- LEONARDO: - Dimmi. Dimmi. Dimmi se mai...
- .."Tell me. Tell me. Tell me if anything ever gets done."
- "Tell me, Leonardo, why such anguish?"
wrote a friend on a sheet of Leonardo's paper.
"Where will I settle?" Leonardo asked himself on the same page.
- It was time for Leonardo to move on. He knew it.
He needed to seek new horizons.
And he gets an opportunity when there's a delegation
that's sent from Florence to Milan.
It's almost cultural diplomacy, because the people in Florence
are trying to appeal to the Duke of Milan
by sending great architects and artists and painters.
- The delegation likely travelled on horseback,
first climbing the Apennine Mountains,
then riding up the Po River Valley,
before reaching the plains of Lombardy,
where Milan, a city of 80,000 people
surrounded by three miles of medieval walls,
rose up before the Alps.
Unlike Florence, a republic whose officials were elected
from the leading guilds, Milan was a city state
ruled for two centuries by merciless strongmen
who went by the title of duke.
Ludovico Sforza, though not officially Milan's duke,
had sidelined his nephew in 1480
and kept control through brute force and cunning statecraft,
which he used to navigate the ever-shifting alliances
of Italy's duchies, kingdoms, republics and the Papal States.
- Any prince, any government, had to be wary of all the neighbours,
all the other people in Italy,
because there was a kind of tense balance,
a kind of equipoise, between and among these states.
Ludovico was very much a spider at the centre of this web,
which would tremble whenever someone else began to move on the peninsula.
Brilliant figure in many ways, politically astute,
extremely deceitful and unscrupulous and,
by the 1480s, probably militarily
the most powerful person on the Italian peninsula.
- Known as Il Moro - The Moor, in part for his dark complexion -
Sforza had cultivated a court that was among the most sophisticated
in all of Europe.
He kept his palace populated with engineers and poets,
doctors, artists and mathematicians,
whom he commissioned to design and build churches and fortifications,
create works of art
and collaborate on plans for the elaborate pageants
he was fond of staging.
- One of the things that surprises us about Leonardo's choice
to go and live in Milan is that he went from a city
which had always prized its political liberty
to a Soviet-type situation.
He needs the leisure to be able to work his ideas out
in a creative way,
without the immediate market pressure of producing a work.
- LEONARDO: - Most illustrious Lord, I shall endeavour to explain
myself to Your Excellency, showing Your Lordship my secrets.
- Leonardo dictated a letter, addressed to the Duke,
proclaiming his skill as an engineer
and enumerating his ideas for military devices.
LEONARDO: - I have designs for extremely light
and strong bridges, suitable to be most easily carried,
and, with them, you may pursue the enemy and flee at any time.
I have methods for destroying every stronghold or other fortress,
even if it were built on rock.
I will make safe and unassailable covered chariots,
which, entering among the enemy with their artillery,
can withstand any attack, even by large groups of warriors.
Should bombardment operations fail,
I would contrive catapults,
mangonels, trebuchets
and other admirably efficient machines not in common use.
- There is no evidence Leonardo ever received a reply to his letter
or even sent it.
With no prospect of a job as Sforza's military engineer,
he needed to find other paying work.
Eventually, he formed a partnership
with brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis,
who operated a successful local studio.
Together, the three artists secured a commission to paint an altarpiece
for the Chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.
The contract, dated April 25th, 1483,
specified that the altarpiece should include an image
of the Virgin and Child, flanked by two smaller side panels.
Leonardo was to paint the central panel.
- Mary, of course, was the most common subject
in medieval and Renaissance art.
- ETHEREAL MUSIC
- Here, Mary is Leonardo's focus.
Mary's right hand,
which is on the back of John the Baptist,
is very tense.
The fingers are pressing into John's back
but the thumb is over his shoulder,
and what she's doing is holding him back.
Mary, in the popular theology that Leonardo
and everyone at the time knew,
already understood her son must one day die,
and here he shows her preventing the prophet
of her own son's future death from drawing near to Christ.
Christ, the child at her left, accepts this future death.
Indeed, He's turned to John the Baptist and He's blessing him.
She's lowering her left hand toward His head,
but her hand can never reach her child's head
because there's a figure, an angel, kneeling behind her son
and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.
Mary, as human mother, knows her son must die
but cannot accept that,
and so God sends his angel to prevent Mary's instinctive,
natural, maternal instinct
from avoiding the future Passion.
It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image
of the entire Renaissance.
Its complexity lies in a probing effort
to understand a deep mystery,
which is how, in a woman prepared from all eternity
to bear the Son of God, humanity still fully expresses itself.
- After a disagreement with the monks over money,
Leonardo and his partners withheld the painting.
Their dispute would go unresolved for decades.
- Leonardo will do what Leonardo does,
pretty much disregarding
what the expectations of the patrons are,
and the patrons learned, through their enormous frustrations,
and they would get quite angry that this was who Leonardo was.
- Leonardo soon formed his own studio in Milan,
where he collaborated on portraits and religious works
with assistants and other accomplished masters
and offered instruction to eager apprentices.
He started, but abandoned,
a painting of the 4th century theologian and ascetic Saint Jerome.
He got further with a portrait of a musician,
likely Atalante Migliorotti, who had travelled with him to Milan.
And Leonardo finally began to get commissions from Ludovico Sforza.
Among them was a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani,
the well-educated teenage daughter of a Milanese civil servant
who had caught Il Moro's eye,
and, soon after, was living in a suite of rooms in his castle.
- What Leonardo has done is to tell a mini narrative in this image.
She is holding the ermine,
this animal which is symbolic of purity
because the ermine was said to prefer to die rather than get dirty,
and she is turning away from us,
looking and smiling slightly,
so we must imagine the Duke is over there.
We are looking at her, she is looking at the Duke.
She is given status by this unseen presence,
which is just spectacularly remarkable,
given the fact that portraits didn't have narratives in them.
- The way her wrist is cocked protectively around the ermine...
..the way the eyes of the ermine and the eyes of the lady
are both glancing in the same direction
and the way the light glints off of her eyes
and off the white ermine,
it's Leonardo at his best, showing a scene in motion.
- The greatest task of the painter is to paint the figure
and the intentions of the mind.
He says, "Where there is no life, make it alive."
- Leonardo moved into a spacious studio and living quarters
at the Corte Vecchia,
a former palace adjacent to Milan's colossal cathedral.
In the new workshop, which he would refer to as "la mia fabrica",
my factory, Leonardo would paint portraits, draw futuristic machines,
and make meticulous observations in dozens of notebooks.
DOG BARKS
- I think we get close to a key quality of Leonardo
in the notebooks.
It's not just that Leonardo knew an awful lot,
it's that he found out an awful lot.
- LEONARDO: - What light and shadow are? What outlines are seen in trees?
What rules should be given to boys learning to paint?
- The way he found out was by asking questions.
- Why the sun appears larger when setting than at noon
when it is nearer to us?
- And indeed the interrogative mode is quite often present
in the notebooks.
- LEONARDO SPEAKS ITALIAN
- Why is that happening?
- How does it happen? - LEONARDO SPEAKS ITALIAN
- What is the quality of that thing or person or emotion?
- LEONARDO SPEAKS ITALIAN
- He's posing questions and looking for answers.
- LEONARDO SPEAKS ITALIAN
- The beauty of what he does is that he is
carrying a catalogue of notions that are organised
almost like a stream of consciousness.
- LEONARDO SPEAKS ITALIAN
- His knowledge knows no boundaries.
- LION ROARS
- The way we absorb the world is all at once
and that's the simultaneous gluttonous impact
that you get from his notebooks.
He has to be there and he has to render it right away.
- LEONARDO: - Define first what is meant by height and depth,
also how the elements are situated...
- In one notebook, he designed a city built on two levels
to improve sanitation,
sketched castle and church architecture,
including a study for the dome of Milan's cathedral,
and invented weapons of war.
Leonardo also drew fantastical flying machines.
He wasn't the first to imagine conquering the skies.
Daedalus, a mythic craftsman of ancient Greece,
had fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus
in an effort to escape their captors on the Isle of Crete.
Aspiring aviators in China, Iran, Scotland and elsewhere
had designed machines and made ill-fated attempts at flight.
LEONARDO: - Remember that your flying machine must imitate the bat
because the web, being connected to the structure,
gives strength to the wings.
- Many of Leonardo's designs were ornithopters -
machines that relied on the human-powered flapping of wings
to achieve flight.
His wings would be constructed of cane, rope and fine linen -
the lightest materials he could find.
Pilots would use pulleys and cords to co-ordinate movement
and pedals and cranks to supply power.
LEONARDO: - A man with large enough wings, duly connected,
might overcome the resistance of the air
and succeed in conquering it and rising above it.
- In order to achieve lift, he needed to create,
basically, a deflection of the air.
We are flying because we are able to redirect the airflow
from horizontal to downward,
and Newton's law says that if you deflect it downward,
the reaction to it is it pushes you up,
and he basically understood that without being able to explain it.
- Though ingenious and of singular artistic beauty,
his flying machines could not have flown.
The materials of his day were too heavy
and human musculature too weak.
LEONARDO: - The dragonfly flies with four wings
and, when the front wings are raised,
the back wings are lowered,
but each pair needs to be sufficient of itself to bear the full weight.
- In the years ahead, Leonardo would fill his notebooks
with drawings of a multitude of other mechanical devices -
hydraulic screws, hoists,
a perpetual motion machine, clocks and their component parts,
springs, gears, ball bearings.
Many of his designs were utilitarian, some theoretical,
but all were devised with great consideration
for the properties of physics, such as friction, inertia and gravity.
- There's a great little phrase Kubrick said,
and I'll paraphrase him,
the lesson in the Icarus myth is not that we shouldn't fly that high,
we just need to build better wings, you know?
And I think Leonardo wants to build better wings.
From irrigation to circulatory systems
to machines of war -
everything.
- One of the greatest inventions by Leonardo
is not the submarine or the aeroplane.
They would not have worked
and I'm sure he was absolutely aware of that.
It is the way in which he used drawings to explain machines.
These drawings are spectacular as drawings.
He's able, for the first time, to portray a complex machine
with one drawing in a way that you can understand perfectly
even its interior parts.
He was making exploded views aside the general view of the machine,
and that was unsurpassed for many, many generations.
- One of my favourite things
is a little musical pun he does,
where he takes Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do,
and arranges those into Italian words that make a sentence,
but they're also, of course, notes, so you can sing it.
And what is being sung is,
"Love alone makes me remember.
"Love alone makes me alert."
And there's a little stray comment on the back
of one of the sheets of paper, "If there is no love, what then?"
- LEONARDO: - Giacomo came to live with me
on the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, 1490.
- In the summer of 1490, Giacomo Caprotti,
a ten-year-old from a nearby village,
joined Leonardo's household.
Caprotti's father had agreed to pay room and board
while his son learned painting from the master.
In time, the boy would show modest talent,
but at first he ran errands, modelled for Leonardo,
and caused trouble.
- He is immediately noted as a mischief maker, a disruptive figure,
and, indeed, the name that is given to him, Salai,
it means little demon, little devil.
And the first thing we learn about him is a long notation
in one of Leonardo's notebooks -
one of the longest continuous pieces of writing about another person
that Leonardo ever put down on paper,
and it's a list of Salai's misdeeds.
- LEONARDO: - The second day, I had two shirts cut for him,
a pair of hose and a jerkin,
and when I put aside some money to pay for these things,
he stole the money out of the purse,
and I could never get him to confess,
though I was quite certain of the fact.
Again, on April 2nd,
Gian Antonio left a silver point on a drawing he had made,
and Giacomo stole it.
- Thief... - Ladro. - ..liar... - Bugiardo.
- ..obstinate... - Ostinato. - ..greedy... - Ghiotto.
- ..Leonardo wrote in the margin.
- Throughout it runs this wonderful sort of twinkle of fondness
from the maestro as he lists these misdeeds of the urchin Salai,
and this fondness for this mischievous
but rather attractive and charismatic young lad
carries on, really, throughout the next 30 years of companionship.
Salai is an apprentice, then assistant,
then companion,
one might almost certainly say lover,
and, erm, finally, sort of indispensable...
..erm, sort of, partner of Leonardo's life.
He has a very particular look, which becomes the sort of trademark,
almost, of Leonardo's presentation of the beautiful male face,
or, indeed, androgynous face,
because his angels often feature the look of Salai.
- LEONARDO: - Salai, I want to rest,
so no more wars.
No more war.
I surrender.
- There's a contemporary reference to Salai.
Someone says, "Our Leonardo stopped by the other day
"with the insufferable Salai." - SHE LAUGHS
- And yet something's being satisfied.
He was with him for the rest of his life
and I think you sort of can't argue with that.
- LEONARDO: - Pleasure and pain appear as twins,
since there is never one without the other.
They stand back-to-back as though they were attached.
If you take pleasure, know that behind him
is one who will deal you tribulation and repentance,
and they exist as opposites in the same body
because they have the same basis,
and the various forms of evil pleasure are the origin of pain.
- TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:
HOOVES CLOPPING
In January of 1490, Ludovico Sforza hosted a lavish celebration
to honour the marriage of his nephew to the Princess of Naples.
The evening featured a sumptuous feast and an elaborate pageant,
Il Paradiso, with costumed actors, music and dancing.
Near midnight, a curtain was drawn to reveal a giant half-egg,
the top edge arrayed with the 12 signs of the zodiac
and the inside gilded with gold.
The seven known celestial bodies were represented by actors.
Candles served as stars.
The performance culminated with the gods descending from heaven
to proclaim the bride's many virtues.
Leonardo had decorated the hall and designed all the costumes and sets.
He had finally found a niche on Sforza's court.
In time, Il Moro would appoint him an official engineer and painter.
- He became a guru of the court.
He had a stipend. He was a "stipendiato".
It gave him space. It also gave him an area where there were musicians,
and he himself was an accomplished musician.
There were poets, there were historians,
there were people doing natural philosophy, there are engineers.
He was a very gracious man, by all accounts. Rather charming.
The court suited him quite well.
- He was someone who loved the humorous and loved the grotesque.
Loved practical jokes.
We might not think of Leonardo da Vinci
as having a sense of humour, but he did.
- LEONARDO: - It was asked of a painter why,
since he painted such beautiful figures, his children were so ugly,
to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day
and his children by night.
- Leonardo also cultivates a huge network of intellectual friends
and craftsmen,
and his ambitions to write treatises really emerges.
In Milan, there was an interest in more Aristotelian ways of thinking,
which are much more based on empiricism, empirical observation.
Leonardo was able to befriend all these people
who translated treatises that probably enhanced his education
and he kind of got his sea legs as an author.
- RUMBLE OF THUNDER
- Plato said, "You have to start with the great ideas."
Aristotle said, "No, you have to start with the hard facts,
"like rocks and dirt and plants.
"In analysing them, you will come to the larger ideas
"that allow you to construct a system."
And I think that corresponded much more closely
to Leonardo's own curiosity about the natural world
and, in a sense, shaped it.
- Determined to become a writer and intellectual,
Leonardo acquired more and more books.
The German craftsman Johannes Gutenberg
had invented the printing press in 1452 - the year Leonardo was born.
Within two decades, Venice had established itself
as a centre for publishing,
and Milan and Florence each had their own print shops.
- Leonardo was an inveterate and omnivorous reader,
and if he couldn't buy a book, he would borrow it.
He's not just looking at the natural world, he's certainly doing that,
but he's also looking at the best that has been thought and said
by his predecessors.
- LEONARDO: - Try to obtain the Vitolone,
which is in the library of Pavia.
Ask Benedetto Portinari how people go on the ice in Flanders.
Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are placed on bastions
by day or by night.
Get the Friar at Brera to show you De Ponderibus.
- Leonardo also frequently quoted The Divine Comedy -
the epic poem by Dante Alighieri, Florence's most famous writer.
And he tried to master Latin, long the language of European scholars,
filling page after page of his notebooks with vocabulary words
written in his mirror script.
ETHEREAL MUSIC
LEONARDO: - Not being a literary man, certain presumptuous people
will think that they may reasonably criticise me,
alleging that I am a man without letters.
Foolish men.
They do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience
rather than by words...
..and experience has been the master of those who wrote well.
Therefore, I shall cite my master in all cases.
- He says that, I am "uomo sanza lettere".
I am a man who has no traditional knowledge.
And this is a kind of admission
which is in fact an expression of proudness.
I have learned, not from libraries, not from books,
but from the observation of nature.
Nature is the real teacher.
I am a disciple of nature.
Many expressions in his notebooks express this frustration
for not being considered as an intellectual.
We would say today, as a scholar.
At the same time, this was tempered by the self-confidence
of knowing much more than those people...
..being able to perform things that the others not even could conceive.
- Meanwhile, Leonardo had embarked on another ambitious project -
a series of books that together would present his core beliefs
on the art and science of painting.
LEONARDO: - Light is the chaser away of darkness.
Shade is the obstruction of light...
..and the eye can best distinguish the forms of objects
when it is placed between the shaded and illuminated parts.
- Using candles to illuminate spheres and cylinders,
he observed how light, when cast on curved surfaces,
created shadows of varying intensity and length.
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
LEONARDO: - The edges of shadows darken by degrees,
and anyone ignorant of this fact will paint things with no relief,
and relief is the heart and soul of painting.
- MAN EXHALES
Like his old master, Verrocchio,
Leonardo believed that a deep knowledge of human anatomy
was essential to depicting the human form.
But he and his contemporaries were still dependent
on the medical teachings of ancient physicians and philosophers,
whose centuries-old theories had mostly gone unchallenged.
Existing anatomical illustrations, which had been informed
by those theories, were inaccurate and inadequate.
LEONARDO: - A painter who learns about the nature of tendons,
muscles and sinews will know just how many
and which tendons cause the movement of a limb,
or which muscle bulges and causes that tendon to contract.
- Leonardo drew muscles, bones and organs and experimented
with different techniques, cross sections and transparency.
TRANSLATED FROM ITALIAN:
Now he obtained a skull...
..and set out to map it in a series of drawings.
- He sectioned it horizontally and vertically.
You think, well, that's obvious, but it wasn't obvious. Nobody did that.
There are no anatomical drawings in earlier books
with sections of the skull, and he's looking at the skull empirically
for its features, what it looks like,
and wonderful, delicate drawings,
which are just awesome in terms of technique.
And you think, well, he's doing the anatomy of the skull,
but what he's really looking for is where the centre of the brain is.
He talks about the pole of the cranium
and the point where all these proportional systems cross
is where the senses all go into this central clearing house, as it were.
Those skull studies, which look like descriptive anatomy,
are actually devoted to understanding
the workings of the brain.
- LEONARDO: - What sneezing is.
- MAN SNEEZES
- What yawning is.
Sweating.
Fatigue.
Hunger.
Sleepiness.
Thirst.
Lust.
- Aristotle had believed that sensory impressions converged
in a brain cavity, where they were processed, interpreted and stored.
He called it the Sensus Communis.
LEONARDO: - The soul seems to be located in the site of reason
and the site of reason seems to be where all the senses converge.
This is called the "senso comune".
And the soul is not all throughout and in every part of the body,
as many previously believed, because if it were,
it would not be necessary to have the instruments of the senses
converge in a single location.
- To Leonardo, the transmission of information from the eye,
which he called the window of the soul,
to the brain and nervous system and the reaction that followed -
joy, fear, concern, surprise -
was the essence of the human experience.
Artists, he believed, should understand this phenomenon
and the science behind it to effectively portray emotion,
reveal character and tell riveting stories.
Leonardo saw proportion in the natural world
as evidence of nature's matchless gift for design.
Using male models, he began a meticulous study.
LEONARDO: - On the changing measurements of the human body
through the movements of the limbs from different views...
..the measurements of the human body vary in each limb
according to how much it is bent and from different views
so that they grow or diminish to a varying extent on one side,
while they grow or diminish on the opposite side.
- Seeking inspiration,
Leonardo studied a treatise by Vitruvius,
a Roman architect of the 1st century BC,
who wrote about the symmetry between the human body
and a skilfully designed temple,
and carefully measured the proportions of what he described
as a well-shaped man.
- And this was classical belief -
that the symmetry and proportion of the human body
reflected as in a microcosm the greater harmony of the world.
- "Just as the human body yields a circular outline,
"so too a square figure may be found from it",
wrote Vitruvius.
LEONARDO: - The space between the parting of the lips
and the base of the nose is one-seventh of the face.
- Leonardo's very, very scientific about it.
- The space from the mouth to the bottom of the chin...
- He does all sorts of measurements.
- ..and equal... - From the forehead to the nose... - ..the mouth.
- ..to the chin, to the navel, to the genitals, of all of his assistants,
so he gets all the proportions exactly right,
the way Vitruvius had suggested.
- The distance from the top of the nose, where the eyebrows begin,
to the bottom of the chin is two-thirds of the face.
- Leonardo is interested in the human proportion
and he thinks that's divine enough to be represented.
He says, "There is enough poetry and enough cosmos
"and enough infinite in another human being
"or a rock and a waterfall or a half-smile."
- LEONARDO: - Caterina came on the 16th day of July, 1493.
- TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
Since leaving Vinci decades earlier,
Leonardo had rarely made any note of his mother,
who, by 1493, was in her mid-60s and widowed.
One year later, on a page of his notebook,
he recorded the costs of burying her.
LEONARDO: - For the bier, eight soldi.
A pall over the bier, 12 soldi.
For bearing and placing the cross, four soldi.
For four priests and four clerics, 20 soldi.
For the gravediggers, 16 soldi.
Sugar and candles, 12 soldi.
Every evil leaves pain in our memory
except the supreme evil - death,
which destroys this memory along with our life.
- In November of 1493, Ludovico Sforza hosted a celebration
for his niece Bianca, who was marrying the King of Germany.
On display for the occasion was a colossal 20-foot-high clay horse
sculpted by Leonardo, the model for part of a bronze monument
honouring Il Moro's father.
"I'm certain that neither Greece nor Rome", one astonished witness said,
"ever saw anything more massive."
HORSE NEIGHS
The artist had studied live horses obsessively,
measuring their proportions and drawing their features
in his notebooks.
- I think he was better at horses than anyone has ever been.
- HORSE SNORTS
- HORSE NEIGHS - He has the horse rearing...
- ..and then he has the neck and the head turned in three different ways,
and there's so much motion.
You see all the different possibilities
and you see how accurate he is with all of them, too.
- Rather than cast the massive statue in the tried and tested way,
divided into pieces,
Leonardo planned to create one giant mould.
LEONARDO: - When you shall have made the mould upon the horse,
you must make the thickness of the metal in clay.
Dry it in layers.
Make the outside mould of plaster to save time in drying
and the expense in wood.
And with this plaster, enclose the irons
both outside and inside to a thickness of two fingers.
Make terracotta.
- He planned to build a lattice metal frame to secure the mould
before lowering it upside-down into a pit
using a pulley machine of his own design.
Finally, he would pour molten bronze through holes
spread across the mould,
using furnaces arrayed around the pit to cool the metal evenly.
Ludovico Sforza gave him the 75 tonnes of bronze he needed,
but in the fall of 1494, before Leonardo could put it to use,
SWORDS CLANGING Sforza confiscated it all.
The French King, Charles VIII, had ordered his troops south
to conquer the Kingdom of Naples,
setting the entire Italian peninsula on edge.
To preserve his control over Milan,
Il Moro quickly aligned himself with Charles.
At the same time, he sent the valuable metal
to his father-in-law, the Duke of Ferrara,
who feared a French invasion
and planned to make cannons with Leonardo's bronze.
- He couldn't have been human if he wasn't disappointed
at losing this commission, which, had he been able
to bring it to fruition, it really would have made his reputation.
It would have been his work of fame.
- Ludovico Sforza would soon assign a new project to Leonardo -
a painting Leonardo believed few would ever see.
In the early 1490s, Il Moro had chosen a monastery
to serve as a mausoleum for his family.
Home to an order of Dominican friars, the site featured
a cloistered garden, quarters for the monks, a sacristy,
and the recently completed church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
To adorn the south wall of the refectory,
Sforza commissioned a fresco of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
For the north end,
Leonardo was to paint a scene suitable for the monks
who dined there in silent contemplation.
The final meal Christ shared with his apostles
before he was crucified -
The Last Supper.
It would be his most ambitious painting to date,
featuring multiple figures engaged in a complex, dynamic narrative
on a physical scale much larger than any of his previous works,
including the abandoned Adoration of the Magi.
- It's a difficult subject for painters because it's a long,
thin, wide picture, which is slightly difficult to organise,
and you want some drama, or Leonardo wanted drama in it.
- For the most part,
Last Supper paintings would be very sedate scenes.
If you look at these paintings, Christ and the apostles
ranged across the table mostly in silence,
eating, maybe one or two talking together,
and they're very placid scenes.
- He bought a Bible, a widely-read Italian language edition
that had been translated from Latin two decades earlier.
The Gospels - the books attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,
offered varied but similar accounts
of the evening on which Jesus gathered his 12 apostles
and, during dinner, staggered them with a declaration.
"He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish,
"the same shall betray me."
- It's an incredibly emotional moment,
where we have this charismatic religious leader
with His band of brothers, and they're meeting in
an occupied city whose authorities are plotting against them.
And, of course, sitting in their midst is a traitor -
the one who is going to betray the leader.
And I think Leonardo is probably electrified by this story
and he was going to tell it in a very dramatic, theatrical way.
A way in which no artist previously had thought about,
let alone attempted.
- Leonardo began exploring how the disciples, roiled by Christ's words,
would twist their limbs, wring their hands,
and distort their faces.
LEONARDO: - One who was drinking and has left the glass
where it was and turned his head towards the speaker.
Another, weaving the fingers of his hands together,
turns, frowning to his companion.
- For Leonardo, he had to understand
how the body worked as a responsive machine.
What happens when Christ says, "One of you will betray me",
with the brain and the nervous impulses and so on?
He would see, if he was looking, say, at a disciple
who reacts to Christ's pronouncement by, say, throwing out their arms,
that figure is expressing "il concetto dell'anima" -
the purpose of the mind, the purpose of the soul.
It's a way of expressing character and expressing emotion.
- Leonardo erected scaffolding along the north end of the refectory
and began his mural...
..first by coating the wall with a layer of plaster,
then a binding agent,
and on top of that, a primer of lead white.
He pounded nails into the plaster for reference, and used a ruler
to draw construction lines and a stylus to etch grids.
Using the incisions,
he laid out the scene's ceiling and walls,
constructing a space with realistic scale and depth
and geometric harmony.
One nail hole at the very centre would serve as the point
at which all prospective lines would converge.
It was where he would paint the face of Christ.
LEONARDO: - Filippo, Simone,
Matteo, Tome,
Jacopo Maggiore...
- He made sketches in chalk and used a brush to paint outlines
directly atop the plaster.
- ..Pietro, Andrea...
..Bartolomeo.
- The moment you lay down the first mark or the first line,
you're engaged in a process of evaluating every next step
and understanding whether or not you have to make some major changes
or some minor changes.
This is what's going on all the way through the process.
- Rather than follow the traditional technique for fresco
in which pigments ground in water are painted on wet plaster
and bind to the wall in a matter of hours,
Leonardo used a mixture of oil and tempera that he concocted himself.
- This allowed him the luxury of painting
during a long process of time,
so he was not limited to eight hours a day
and just one part of the design,
and it also, very importantly, allowed him to create
the transitions of tone and the transitions of light,
because you could not get the effect of light with fresco.
- In layer upon layer,
he applied the pigments that would, over time,
bring the scene to life...
..often disregarding his initial outlines
as the contours of his design evolved.
For Christ's garments, he used vermilion,
a pigment made from a brick-red mineral called cinnabar,
and ultramarine, created by crushing lapis lazuli,
a costly but brilliant blue metamorphic rock
that could only be found in Afghanistan.
"Often he would not put down his brush from first light
"until nightfall, forgetting to eat and drink",
wrote the novelist Matteo Bandello, who, as a boy,
had watched as Leonardo toiled on the mural.
On other days, he added little to the wall.
BIRDS CHIRP
Meanwhile, Sforza had grown impatient
with Leonardo's unhurried pace and directed his secretary
to draft a revised agreement
that would impose a deadline on the artist.
Within months, Leonardo was finished.
ETHEREAL MUSIC
The mural rose 15 feet from bottom to top
and spanned 29 feet across the refectory's north wall.
It showcased his gift for blending tones and colours,
his mastery of light and shadow
and his command of geometry, which he wielded
with great precision to bring harmony to a moment of chaos.
- It's often said he's portraying a moment,
that it's like a kind of flash photograph of what's going on.
It is in a way, but it's more complicated than that
because if you look in the picture, the main thing is that Christ
is saying, "One of you will betray me."
- And they're all saying, "Is it I?", "Is it I?", "Is it I?"
And this central figure, totally focused on what's going to happen
the next day, and on the sign that he's giving of the offering
of His body and blood, He gazes down in deep sadness.
He doesn't look at the apostles.
- And all the disciples react in a particular way
apart from Judas, who is rigid and his tendons on his neck stick out
because he's aware of what's going to happen.
The announcement of betrayal then ripples out.
- TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
- This was the heart of the painting for him, because it allowed him
to show gesture and action and facial expression -
the motions of the mind.
All of this three, four seconds that happens at this table
is unfolding before our eyes in this single image,
and the brilliance of him being able to bring this off
is truly astounding.
- Leonardo da Vinci had magnificently rendered the gestures,
both subtle and dramatic,
that testified to the psychological states of his subjects...
..and he had resoundingly answered the question
that he had asked himself many times before.
"Tell me if anything was ever done."
- For him, painting was an entire
philosophical meditation.
It is so much a process of thinking,
of engaging, of feeling,
that was essential in his creative process.
And, really, this is part of the reason that this painting
has that transformative, transcendental aspect to it.
When we go as viewers and look at it,
we all fall into the same reverie.
- The artist now turned his attention to other projects.
He provided illustrations for De Divina Proportione -
a book on mathematics by his friend Luca Pacioli.
He painted another mural for Sforza -
a canopy of tangled tree branches knit together by a golden rope
for the vaulted ceiling of a tower in the Duke's castle.
But in early 1499, Louis XII,
who had recently succeeded his cousin Charles as King of France,
began mustering his troops for another invasion
of the Italian peninsula.
This time, the French planned to depose Sforza.
TRANSLATED FROM FRENCH:
Il Moro fled to Innsbruck.
The French took Milan without a fight.
Louis XII arrived that fall and visited the refectory.
When he saw the beauty of Leonardo's Last Supper,
he decided that he wanted to take it back to France,
but his engineers could find no way to safely remove the mural.
After 18 years in Milan,
Leonardo decided it was time for him to move on.
He was 47 years old.
His best known painting remained out of sight
in a monastery's dining hall.
RUMBLE OF THUNDER
- Leonardo was tremendously ambitious, intellectually ambitious.
He had no concern for being a successful professional painter
and to be admired and adored for that.
He wants to be admired for his intellect.
- Eager to find a patron who would support his artistic
and scientific curiosity, Leonardo headed east toward Venice
with his friend Luca Pacioli.
Although he had no commissions on the horizon,
Leonardo da Vinci's greatest work was yet to come.
ETHEREAL CHORAL SINGING
The ancients described man as the world in miniature,
because inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air
and fire, his body resembles that of the planet.
And as man has in him bones,
the supports and framework of his flesh,
the world has its rocks, the supports of the Earth.
As man has in him a pool of blood, in which the lungs
rise and fall in breathing,
so the body of the Earth has its ocean tide, which likewise
rises and falls every six hours -
as if the world breathed.
- There is a very ancient idea, which he adopts and develops
very strongly, and that is the relationship
of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
The microcosm is our body,
the macrocosm is the whole system out there, including the body
of the Earth, as he put it.
What Leonardo does is to give it visual power.
He can draw bits of the body, he can draw bits of the Earth.
And as he draws them, the analogy is graphically illustrated.
So he gives the microcosm a completely new birth -
lease of life - and it's a visual lease of life.
- There are certain supreme figures in the life of our civilisation,
who fascinate us, in part because they seem to belong
to two worlds at once. Shakespeare's like that.
Bach among musicians is very much like that.
In many respects, a man of the past, in many other respects,
a visionary of the musical future.
And Leonardo is perhaps supreme amongst all of that kind.
He is someone who in many respects is a pre-scientific
and therefore pre-modern thinker.
So in lots of ways he still belongs to the world of antiquity.
At the same time, his intellectual freedom, his dissatisfaction
with received wisdom, that restlessness is very much part
of the modern spirit.
It's very much part of the scientific spirit.
- The governor of the castle, taken prisoner.
Visconti carried away and his son killed.
The Duke has lost his state, property and liberty,
and none of his projects have been completed.
- On April 10th, 1500,
Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci's patron
for more than a decade, was captured and imprisoned by the French Army
of Louis XII.
By then, Leonardo had already left for Venice with his friend,
the mathematician, Luca Pacioli.
Along the way, he had stopped in Mantua, where he made a drawing
of Isabella d'Este, a sophisticated and influential patron of the arts,
who wished to add a work by Leonardo to her collection.
She would hound him for years for a painting
that he would never make.
Leonardo stayed barely a month in Venice,
then headed south - to Tuscany.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
In the decades ahead, he would broaden his scientific inquiries,
secure the perfect patron,
and pour the sum of his knowledge into a masterpiece that would become
the most famous painting of all time.
In the years since Leonardo had left Florence, the city had turned away
from the openness that had made it the centre of the Renaissance.
Mired in a seemingly endless conflict with neighbouring Pisa
and facing an economic collapse,
Florentines had expelled their ruler, Piero de' Medici, in 1494
and embraced a fiery, silver-tongued Dominican friar and reformer
who believed that God spoke through him.
Girolamo Savonarola had excoriated the Vatican for its corruption
and warned the people of Florence
to cease their decadent ways or face the wrath of God.
Repent of Florence, he urged them, before it is too late.
- Savonarola was a powerful preacher
because he understood the power of the word,
and he knew how to use it to scare people,
to say, "You've gone too far."
The vanity, the costumes, the jewellery, the festivities,
the art representing human feelings instead of God.
And there is a moment when people follow him because they are afraid,
because superstition is still very strong.
- His followers had gathered paintings, carnival masks, perfumes,
dice games, mirrors and other items they considered vanities,
piled them in the Piazza della Signoria and set them ablaze.
But by 1498, Florence had grown weary of Savonarola's piety
and prophecies and condemned him as a heretic.
He was hanged and burned in the piazza.
- The Florence that Leonardo came back to was sadly a different one
from the one he had left in 1482,
not least because many of the people
that he had known, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio
and Verrocchio, were deceased by this point,
but also there had been a kind of brain drain in Florence
in the 1490s, largely because of Girolamo Savonarola.
- Leonardo's father, Ser Piero,
74 years old and still a practising notary,
lived with his fourth wife and their children
in Florence's San Pier Maggiore neighbourhood.
The artist took up residence nearby at the church
of Santissima Annunziata, whose monks, long-time clients
of Ser Piero, commissioned Leonardo to paint an altarpiece
depicting Mary, the baby Jesus and Mary's mother,
Saint Anne, for their chapel.
Once again, he seemed in no rush to satisfy his patrons.
"The life of Leonardo is unsettled and in disarray," one cleric said.
"His priority is geometry and he has very little patience for the brush."
Mathematics was hardly his only distraction.
In the hills south of town, he sketched the villa
of a wealthy Florentine merchant.
He advised one church on how to overhaul their drainage system,
and another on how to reconstruct their bell tower,
which had collapsed in an earthquake.
He also visited the remains of Emperor Hadrian's villa near Rome.
Leonardo eventually produced a full-scale preparatory drawing
of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which is now lost.
But when the cartoon, as it was called, was exhibited for two days
at Santissima Annunziata, it created an enormous sensation.
"Men and women, young and old,
"flocked in solemn procession
"to see the wonders of Leonardo,"
his biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote.
The entire population was astounded.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
Though he once again failed to deliver the finished painting,
Leonardo would continue to explore the theme of the Madonna and Christ,
with Saint Anne, producing a second cartoon
featuring John the Baptist as a child
and eventually, a painting.
On April 15th, 1502,
Leonardo turned 50 years old.
Again, in search of a patron, he attached himself
to another strong man in need
of a military engineer and cartographer.
Cesare Borgia, the ruthless son of Pope Alexander VI
and commander of the papal troops,
was planning a campaign to bring Romagna, an unruly territory
east of Florence, under his control.
- Borgia is the opportunist, almost gangster warlord
of the outlying territories of the Romagna.
He suddenly takes over this huge swathe of territory,
becomes a sort of a player in the power politics of the peninsula
almost overnight.
- While the rest of Florence fretted that Borgia would soon turn up
at the city's gates with his army,
Leonardo set out to join his new patron.
Travelling the countryside,
Leonardo sketched a sunlit copse of trees.
- A body illuminated by solar rays,
passing between the thick branches
of trees will produce as many shadows as there are branches
between the sun and itself.
Make a harmony from the different folds of water,
as you saw at the Fountain of Rimini
on the 8th of August, 1502.
This is how grapes are carried in Cesena.
- In the towns and villages seized by Borgia's army,
Leonardo surveyed the fortifications,
pacing off distances and using a compass
to determine the measurements.
He also gathered topographical data
and drew meticulous maps featuring the hills and mountains,
lakes and rivers of eastern Tuscany.
By fall, Leonardo had reached Imola,
a well-fortified town on the edge of the Apennine Mountains,
where Borgia had established his headquarters.
He was joined there by a young diplomat,
whom the Republic of Florence had sent to assess
Borgia's intentions - Niccolo Machiavelli.
That winter, while Borgia brutally put down uprisings,
and Machiavelli kept Florence informed
with carefully-worded dispatches,
Leonardo produced a detailed overhead map of Imola.
- And Leonardo comes up with his best military invention,
which is not a machine,
it's an aerial view map,
because he knows that information
is the most important weapon you can have.
He didn't have a plane to do it,
but Leonardo paces around the town
and figures out how it would look from above.
- In early 1503, Borgia took Siena,
but when his father, Pope Alexander VI, died,
the new Pope had Borgia arrested.
He was expelled from Italy
and eventually murdered in an ambush in Spain.
Niccolo Machiavelli would one day compose an influential treatise
on political power,
informed in part by his astute observations of Borgia.
Though it is not known how much Leonardo had seen
while in Borgia's service,
he was certainly aware of war's violent toll.
"War is bestial madness," he wrote.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
In the spring of 1503, Leonardo returned again to Florence,
where he purchased a small farm in the hills above the city.
Later that year, he began a portrait
of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo,
a prosperous silk merchant.
He also pursued a new project
that allowed him to explore one of his lifelong passions -
water.
- So, his entire life of Leonardo,
he was compiling
seven different indices of a treatise -
a very ambitious treatise that he wanted to devote to water.
And he is so much intrigued by water
that he also strived to understand its molecular structure.
- Observe the motion of the water's surface,
which resembles that of air,
and has two motions -
one follows the flow of the surface,
the other forms the lines of the eddies.
- Water is also important as a field in which you can develop models
to control the energy of water.
Water can be disastrous for man.
Man cannot live without water,
but he has to keep control of that.
- At Machiavelli's behest,
the Republic of Florence hired Leonardo to draw military maps
and advise on a major engineering project involving the Arno River.
Florence was now plotting to retake the strategically-important city
of Pisa, which straddled the mouth of the Arno, 45 miles to the west.
Machiavelli hoped to divert the river
and deny Pisa access to the sea.
Leonardo calculated that it would take 1.3 million man hours
to dig a ditch large enough to change the Arno's course.
- He devised this idea of diverting the Arno,
and people went out and dug channels.
They actually implemented this
at great cost,
and it didn't work.
Leonardo was not the sole author of the scheme,
but it couldn't have done his reputation much good.
I think it heightened his sense that rather than trying to say
to the Arno, "I want you to go down there," you actually had to do
very subtle things to make it flow
in the direction that you wanted.
- The river, if it is to be diverted from one place to another,
must be coaxed and not treated roughly or with violence.
- Leonardo also designed a canal
that would bypass the Arno's unnavigable stretches
and give Florence access to the sea.
In 1502, Florentine-born navigator Amerigo Vespucci had returned
from a transatlantic voyage and declared that the land
he had reached was not Asia, but a separate continent.
Leonardo's canal would have allowed the Republic to directly participate
in explorations of the New World,
but work on the costly project never began.
Though neither of Leonardo's ambitious ideas
for taming the Arno River were realised,
he soon began compiling
his observations and conclusions on water dynamics, geology,
and astronomy for a treatise in which he would attempt
to understand the forces
that had shaped the Earth over many aeons.
That fall, the Republic hired him
to paint a monumental fresco
to adorn one wall in the city's enormous Grand Council Hall,
where members of the ruling Signoria met.
It would be three times larger than The Last Supper,
commemorating Florence's triumph over Milan on the plain of Anghiari
more than 60 years earlier.
- The Battle of Anghiari was a battle just within living memory,
in which a heavily-outnumbered Florentine troop
defeated the Milanese Army,
and Leonardo was presumably expected
to produce a stirring battle scene
with ranks of horsemen and bold captains.
- He was given a studio in a suite of rooms reserved for papal visits
at the church of Santa Maria Novella.
While labourers erected scaffolding and covered his windows
to diffuse the light so he could begin his cartoon,
Leonardo jotted down compositional ideas, created models of soldiers
in wax, and filled a notebook
with sketches of horses in various poses.
- Now, he also gives us a description of how to do a battle,
and he describes everything that's going on in the battle.
He then says, "You've got to calculate the dust in the air
"and how it's brighter above than below."
- First, you must represent the smoke of artillery mingling in the air
with the dust tossed up by the movement
of horses and combatants.
The dust, being a thing of earth, has weight.
It is the finest part that rises highest,
so that part will be least visible
and will seem almost the same colour as the air.
- This extraordinary description of how to do a battle,
and I've likened it to a visual layout of what you do in a film,
and even a film would find it hard to capture all that.
- Some might be shown disarmed
and beaten down by the enemy,
turning upon the foe with teeth and nails
to take an inhuman and bitter revenge.
You might see some riderless horse rushing among the enemy,
his mane flying in the wind
and wreaking destruction with his hooves.
And there must not be a single spot
of flat ground that is not trampled with gore.
- Leonardo was very keen on articulating
the "pazzia bestialissima", as he calls war.
It's really madness.
And so, the horses and the figures
begin to have similar expressions
of great fierceness.
And he works very closely at making these comparisons of physiognomy.
- BELL TOLLING
- On the 9th of July, 1504,
Wednesday, at 7 o'clock, died Ser Piero da Vinci,
notary at the Palazzo del Podesta - my father.
Aged 80 years, leaving behind ten sons and two daughters.
- Ser Piero had secured his son Leonardo's apprenticeship
in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio,
and later helped him to get some of his most important commissions.
But there's almost no evidence
of how Leonardo felt about his father.
There was no will.
Born out of wedlock, he was not entitled by law to any inheritance.
His half-siblings made sure he received nothing.
Leonardo returned to his epic battle scene.
In the late summer of 1504,
Florence's Signoria commissioned a second mural
for the council's meeting hall.
The new assignment went to a talented and prickly young artist
who, at 29 years old, had already carved several sculptures
that would become among the best known works of the Renaissance.
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti had briefly been apprenticed
to the great Florentine master Ghirlandaio, and had enjoyed
the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici before moving to Rome,
where he'd sculpted a breathtaking marble Virgin and Christ,
called The Pieta,
and signed it -
an audacious and nearly unheard of gesture in his day.
In a letter to his father, Michelangelo claimed
that he had made the impossible possible.
He had then returned to Florence,
only to find that it was Leonardo
whose homecoming was the talk of the town.
- Michelangelo had a pretty brutal personality.
He was very solitary, given to moods.
I mean, very passionate man, very secretive.
And so, it's the complete antithesis of Leonardo.
- But Michelangelo's next work,
a 17 foot tall marble colossus of David,
would become an enduring symbol of civic pride for Florence.
- Do not make all the muscles in your figures prominent,
because muscles are not visible unless the limbs
in which they are situated are exerting great force.
Otherwise, you will have depicted
a sack of walnuts rather than a human form.
- At a meeting to discuss where Michelangelo's statue
would be displayed, Leonardo suggested it should be placed
in the loggia behind a low wall.
The committee disagreed.
The David would go outside the main entrance to Florence's city hall.
- Leonardo not only wants to sideline Michelangelo's David, but he wants
to sideline Michelangelo as well.
And so he's a bit of a dissenting voice in that...in that committee,
because everyone else is really, as they would be, impressed
by this huge, more than life-sized sculpture of the muscular David.
- And so, Leonardo had had to cope with this great genius,
who is at the height of his powers
and really able to pull off the colossal.
And I do believe that Leonardo had a crisis of confidence.
- Concerned by Leonardo's slow pace on the Battle of Anghiari,
the Republic of Florence demanded that he begin painting right away.
- On Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour, I began painting.
As I made the first brushstroke,
the weather turned and the court bell rang, calling man to judgment.
And immediately, it began raining
and poured until evening.
And it was like night.
- Leonardo has to get things right.
He looks at nature and it's a complicated system.
Optically, it's complicated.
In terms of movement, it's complicated.
And he wants his painting to do everything.
But of course, to have this level of obeying natural law
in all its complexity - to have this ability to deal
with movement, the psychological movement and the physical movement,
ultimately, it's an impossible agenda.
- That fall, just as the central scene of Leonardo's mural
had begun to take shape on the west wall of the council hall,
he stopped painting, abandoning yet another commission.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
It's unlikely Michelangelo ever began the mural he had been assigned
to paint on the opposite wall.
Only another artist's copy of his cartoon survives.
Florence would eventually hire Giorgio Vasari to replace Leonardo's
incomplete painting, but not before other artists were inspired
to reproduce his battle scene.
- What it depicted was the bestiality of war, not the glory
and the victory, but this melee of terrified horses
and sort of snarling soldiers, hacking into each other.
And it's a frightening painting.
- And I think we feel that there's something almost nihilistic
in what survives, what we understand of the Battle of Anghiari,
where it seems in the famous image
of the two horsemen facing each other down,
that doesn't seem to be good versus evil,
it doesn't seem to be nobility versus nobility,
it just seems to be violence versus violence.
- One witness who had seen it praised Leonardo's incomplete effort.
"Having climbed the stairs of the Great Hall,
"looked closely at a group of horses and men, part of a battle scene
"by Leonardo da Vinci,
"it will strike you as a miraculous thing."
- The bird is a machine that functions according to mathematical law.
Man has the capacity to create this machine
and all its motions, but without as much power.
Such a machine lacks nothing except the bird's soul,
which must be counterfeited by man.
- Now Leonardo returned to a subject that had captivated him
for as long as he could remember.
- This writing about the kite seems to be my destiny,
because in my earliest childhood recollection, I was in my cradle
and a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail,
striking my lips several times.
- He has this idea of this kite, this bird of prey, flying down
and actually putting its tail in his mouth, as if kind of like
a shaman receiving the secrets of nature from an animal.
And this idea that it was his destiny, as he calls it -
we might call it his obsession -
to pursue the subject of birds from this moment on.
- My sense is that, as he was ageing, that he begins to fashion himself
more in the guise of the great philosopher, thinker, magician.
And so, the prophetic voice starts becoming more and more apparent
in his manuscripts of this mature and later period.
- He continued to design flying machines, but his focus
would now be more scientific.
He sketched the birds darting and diving above the hills north
of Florence, and noted how they beat their wings to compress the air
and rode the currents to climb and soar.
Later, in his studio, Leonardo refined his drawings
and reworked his analysis of wind patterns, aerodynamics and gravity.
- When the bird wants to lift off, it raises its shoulder bones
and beats its wings toward itself, compressing the air between the tips
of the wings and the bird's chest,
which causes the bird to rise up.
- And you can see how he draws the movement of air.
You need to use the drag of the body in order for the wind to do the work
for you, to lift you up.
These are delicate understandings of how aerodynamics work.
So, to me, is that somebody that had a complete understanding
of dynamic soaring and how birds use gravity to store the energy
and the wind itself to do the work.
- In time, he would gather his impressions in a compact manuscript,
or codex, dedicated to the flight of birds.
- All the principles that Leonardo is exploring about what makes
a bird fly are always based on geometrical proofs.
So it's this constant dialogue with geometry and mathematics.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
Though Leonardo would continue to study birds for years to come,
he would never realise his dream to build
a human-powered aircraft capable of flight.
It would be almost 500 years before anyone would succeed.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
- Vasari, the artist, really sums up something
that Leonardo often tried to do.
He waxes eloquent about Leonardo's capacity to suggest movement
and feeling, even with just a few strokes of the brush.
And he shows us something tra il vedi e non vedi,
something between what you see and what you don't see.
And of course, we all often have this experience -
we see out of the corner of our eye a gesture, a facial expression,
a twitch of the lips, and we see it and then it changes,
it's not there, we can't study it, we can't fix it.
Normally, it's something that an artist cannot capture,
and yet Leonardo does.
- The influence of his techniques and of his vision was enormous.
It's hard to think of one of the great glories of Western art,
the painting of Venice in the latter part of the 15th century,
beginning of the 16th century - the painting of Giorgione, Bellini
and Titian - without Leonardo's optical example.
While some of that came down from the north in the way of
oil painting techniques, it's quite clear that a lot of it exuded upward
from Florence and Rome, into Venice.
That idea, which is very distinctly Leonardesque, that we should see
the world as a beautiful passing pattern of light and colour,
rather than as a series of stock forms
set in a two-dimensional space.
- In the spring of 1506, Leonardo was ordered back
to French-occupied Milan by a judge who found that the artist
had failed to deliver the main panel of an altarpiece
that he and his collaborators had been commissioned to paint
more than two decades earlier.
Florence's city council, still expecting Leonardo to complete
the Battle of Anghiari, reluctantly granted him a three-month leave.
Milan's French overseers were all too happy to welcome
Leonardo back to the city where his Last Supper
had once so impressed King Louis XII.
Governor Charles d'Amboise authorised a raft of projects
for Leonardo, including plans
for an elaborate summer villa and garden,
and theatrical spectacles to keep the court entertained.
"We must confess, we loved him even before meeting him in person,"
wrote d'Amboise, who praised the extraordinary power
of Leonardo's gifts.
Leonardo's three-month leave came and went.
When Dubois wrote to request that he stay longer in Milan,
the head of Florence's city council, Piero Soderini,
called Leonardo a laggard.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
But when Leonardo's uncle Francesco died in 1507, leaving everything
to his beloved nephew, the artist was forced to return to Florence,
where his siblings, determined to again disinherit
their half-brother, had taken the matter to court.
- It is a moment of great difficulty.
Francesco basically had been the figure that had been most present
for Leonardo when he was growing up in Vinci.
- As the legal proceedings dragged on,
Leonardo immersed himself in refining what was now
nearly two decades of notes on the theory and practice of painting.
- If the painter wishes to see enchanting beauties,
he has the power to create them.
If he wants to see frightful monstrosities
or things that are funny, ridiculous or truly heart-rending,
he is their lord and master.
In fact, anything that exists in the universe, in essence,
presence or imagination, he has first in his mind,
then in his hands,
and they are so excellent that they can generate
a well-proportioned harmony in the same time as a single glance,
as real things do.
- He's always, in the Treatise On Painting, using "you",
the addressee is "you", the second-person address,
which I really, really like.
But I sometimes feel like he's talking to himself,
the way we talk to ourselves, like, "You've got to get this right."
So it seems like a conversation with himself in which he's trying
to work it out a little bit.
So, for instance, when he wants to talk about how shadows
don't all have the same colour, he says, "If you see a woman
"in a meadow dressed in white, that part of the woman
"that is turned toward the sun will be white in a way
"that reflects the sun's rays.
"That part of her that is next to the meadow
"will reflect the meadow."
It's so beautiful.
- One of the things he always emphasised was, look at form
in the world and try and see not what you expect to see -
a face, a shoulder, a torso - but see what's there.
So, Leonardo was acutely aware of the possibility of that kind
of imaginative projection into places where no-one would look
for representational form.
- When you look at a wall spotted with stains or with a mixture
of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you might notice
a resemblance to various landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers,
rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills variously arranged.
Or again, you may see battles and figures in action,
or strange faces and costumes,
and an endless variety of objects which you could reduce
to complete and well-drawn forms.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
Four centuries later, the German artist Max Ernst would recall
that Leonardo's advice to seek familiar forms
in unexpected places - walls, stains, clouds - had provoked
an unbearable visual obsession
and left him staring endlessly at floorboards.
- Leonardo was, more than any single artist, the one who emancipated
painters, visual artists, from their role essentially
as glorified artisans, craftsmen, into the role that they occupy
to this day as seers and philosophers
and sort of princes of the mind.
From very early on, people recognised that Leonardo
was another class of creature.
They saw that he had gifts that were discontinuous
with other people's gifts.
So when Leonardo's self-imagining and self-fashioning was as a poet,
a philosopher, someone who transcended the artisanal,
and in very real ways, he was the very first artist,
certainly in Western history, to play that role.
- One day, Leonardo visited the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova,
where for years he had stored drawings, manuscripts,
a collection of books and his savings.
On this day, he was there to see a patient.
- The old man, a few hours before his death,
told me he was over 100 years old
and that he felt nothing physically wrong with him except weakness.
Thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova
in Florence, with no other movement or sign of suffering,
he passed on from this life.
And I dissected his body to see the cause of this gentle death.
- It had been nearly two decades since Leonardo's initial attempt
to map the human body, an effort that had resulted in a revolutionary
study of the human skull and an illustration that would become
one of the best-known drawings ever made - The Vitruvian Man.
His preoccupation with the human figure, and insistence
that the painter know both its outer and inner form, had never waned.
But his concept of the nervous and circulatory systems
was still heavily influenced by the Greek physician Galen,
whose inaccurate theories on blood flow and respiration remained
widely accepted more than 1,500 years after his death.
- Galen was a second-century physician,
and he wrote widely on the subject.
These formed the basis of understanding of anatomy, physiology
for the next nearly 1,600 years.
And that was that the blood was made in the liver continuously,
and the heart basically was there to churn the blood
and to heat it, and it communicated with the airways directly
so it could get rid of the evil spirits and so forth.
- Doctors in Bologna had performed public dissections
on the bodies of condemned criminals for their students
since the early 1300s.
For Leonardo, the practice offered him an opportunity to merge
rigorous scientific exploration with expert artistry
and to challenge Galen's uncontested views.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
He depicted the blood vessels of the old man's neck, thorax
and upper torso, and the nerves and blood vessels of his head.
Then he moved through the abdominal organs, stomach,
liver, bladder and kidneys.
He made notes on the colon and intestines
and the heart's importance in heating the blood -
a theory of Galen's which would prove to be incorrect.
And once again, he looked to nature to help him make sense
of his discoveries, comparing the arteries and veins to tree branches,
and the heart to the seed from which the tree springs.
- Why the veins of old people become so long and become sinuous
when they used to be straight, and the walls become so thick
that it prevents the motion of the blood -
this causes the death of the elderly without disease.
- And what he got out of that dissection was astonishing.
He said, "I could see that the artery that surrounded the heart
"was silted up, and this is like a river."
And he knew, as a canal engineer and river engineer, if it silted up,
then it didn't flow properly and it caused all sorts of trouble.
So, the old man died from having a silted-up system of blood vessels.
- And from that, he makes the first description
of coronary atherosclerosis in the world.
And it isn't just a chance, you know, by the way,
this is what killed him - he goes on to describe
in several places the tortuosity of the vessels,
and I want to dissect the young and the old, the animals
and the birds, and try and understand what's
going on in these vessels.
- The scope of Leonardo's investigations grew.
He planned a book that would describe human anatomy
from the foetus to the fully grown man and woman,
their proportions, skeletal framework, muscular systems
and the nature of the senses.
- My way of depicting the human body
will be as clear to you as if a real man were standing before you.
And the reason is that, if you wish thoroughly to know the parts
of the human body anatomically, you or your eye must see it
from different aspects, considering it from below and from above
and from its sides, turning it about and seeking
the origin of each part.
And in this way, the natural anatomy is sufficient
for your comprehension.
- TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
In an ambitious study of the inner workings of the female torso,
Leonardo combined what he'd learned of both human and bovine anatomy
to create a detailed, three-dimensional drawing
of the main organs and vascular system.
Though it contained inaccuracies -
his rendering of the heart had two, not four, chambers -
it was Leonardo's most complete effort to capture what
he referred to as the cosmography of the lesser world.
- He's looking at the respiratory system,
he's looking at the blood system,
he's looking at the urogenital system.
And it's a supreme mapping of all these things,
all in one drawing.
An awesome drawing.
This vision of the body of the woman as the body of the Earth,
as the microcosm/macrocosm.
It's a great statement of the unity of all things in nature.
- Later, Leonardo would befriend a young physician who taught anatomy
at the University of Pavia, Marcantonio della Torre.
As Della Torre dissected cadavers for his students,
Leonardo would make drawings.
- He really develops a methodical approach to how to visualise
dissection, and also how to communicate it in a drawing.
- On The Cause Of Breathing...
Causa De La Litare...
Causa Del Moto...
On The Cause Of The Motion Of...
- We see him lifting, pointing out what is skin layer,
then lifting and pointing out what is muscle,
and then showing us what the bone structure is.
- On The Cause Of Losing Feeling In Any Limb...
- And we can see this unpacking, say, in layers.
- Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.
- We have an artist who has completely figured out, broken down
the nuts and bolts of how the body functions,
but also how one presents it in a way that communicates
all the scientific information.
This is completely new, and what we have is the artist
leading the scientific discoveries.
It's the most amazingly sequential way of thinking about anatomy
that we will ever see.
- His foetus in utero, drawn in brown ink and red chalk, would one day
be understood as a ground-breaking study of embryonic anatomy,
as well as a breathtaking work of art.
- The child does not breathe because he is constantly in water,
and he has no need to breathe because he is kept alive
and nourished by the life and food of the mother.
It thus follows that the same soul governs and nourishes both bodies.
- Over the years, Leonardo would compile a massive trove
of anatomical drawings informed by dozens
of human and animal dissections.
Even though he would never publish any of them in his lifetime,
his illustrations are to this day
admired for their astonishing accuracy.
Still, his devotion to mastering every fibre of the human body
is evident in each painting,
including his incomplete Saint Jerome Praying In The Wilderness.
Other artists often portrayed Saint Jerome as a penitent hermit
who beat his chest with a stone while wilting
under a merciless desert sun.
According to legend, he had earned the devotion of a lion
by removing a thorn from its paw.
Leonardo had precisely depicted the bones and muscles
beneath the skin of Jerome's shoulder and neck to illustrate
the saint's deep anguish.
- If you look at the anatomy of what we call the anterior triangle
of the neck, with Saint Jerome's head turned to one side,
it shows the sternomastoid muscle,
the scalene muscles very, very clearly.
It's the poise of the body,
it's the movements of the head, the control, the muscles
that are working, informs you so much about what's in the head
and what's in the mind and what's in the heart.
- By April of 1508, the legal dispute with his half-brothers
had been resolved in Leonardo's favour, and he had left Florence
and returned to Milan.
Later that year, he finally delivered a new version
of the altarpiece, known today as The Virgin Of The Rocks,
bringing a nearly two-decades-old disagreement to a close.
When he and his entourage found a new home in a Paris church,
they were joined by Francesco Melzi, the well-educated 14-year-old son
of a Milanese engineer and military captain.
Melzi had come to apprentice as a painter,
but it was as Leonardo's personal assistant that he would become
indispensable and perhaps closer to Leonardo than anyone,
including his companion and lover, Salai.
- Francesco Melzi was more like
Leonardo's secretary, amanuensis,
more of an intellectual companion than Salai.
Melzi was more aristocratic,
Salai is pretty working class in origin.
Perhaps there was a bit of friction between Salai and Melzi
because they fulfilled different roles in Leonardo's entourage.
- In time, Melzi would ensure the survival
of many of Leonardo's manuscripts.
- Before going any further, I shall do some experiments,
because I intend to first produce the experience and then use reason
to prove why the experience is forced to act that way.
And this is the true rule whereby
those who investigate natural effects must proceed.
And although nature begins with the cause and ends
in experience, we must proceed in the opposite sense.
In other words, starting from experience
and using that to investigate the cause.
- Though Muslim scientists in the Middle East
had long been testing their theories with experiments,
most natural philosophers in Europe continued to follow the example
of Aristotle, whose scientific conclusions had relied
solely on observation.
- Leonardo comes of age at a time when the first stirrings
of scientific revolution was just being felt.
It progressed by narrowing the problems
that it was asking itself.
Leonardo's mind is still elsewhere.
He's trying to think, what if you looked at it all at once,
how would you solve it?
But he has the kind of restless curiosity of intellect
and the perpetual dissatisfaction with the received solution,
which are core, kind of the Promethean fire
of the scientific revolution.
So if we see Leonardo helping to set alight that great adventure,
I don't think we're wrong.
- His early work, definitely his writings,
are influenced by Aristotle.
But as he aged, he became more of a scientist.
You could see that his approach was more of an analytical approach,
a combination, a hybrid of experiments and theory.
- Force arises from dearth or abundance.
It is the child of physical motion and the grandchild
of spiritual motion, and the mother and origin of gravity.
Gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth,
but this force is unlimited
and it could be used to move infinite worlds
if instruments could be made by which
the force could be generated.
- He realised that every object at the given height
takes the same time to reach the ground.
Very quickly, he realises there's something called acceleration.
- Leonardo understood that gravity
caused falling objects to accelerate.
Seeking to measure this force, he designed an experiment.
He filled a jar with sand and then emptied it while moving
the tilted jar horizontally, increasing his speed as he went.
When the falling sand formed an isosceles right triangle,
he knew that the acceleration of his lateral motion
matched the acceleration of the falling sand, due to gravity.
- And in his experiments, he tried different accelerations
and he shows the patterns of the sand and then shows
that exactly at the moment that he has achieved that degree,
9.81 metres per second per second, that we know today,
he gets exactly the triangle that is here.
- Leonardo called it the equalisation of motion, and it allowed him
to roughly calculate Earth's gravitational constant.
It would be a century before Galileo's experiments
proved gravity's universal effect on objects, and far longer
before Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would use calculus,
not yet invented in Leonardo's time, to define and explain gravity.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- It shows clearly that he had the imagination,
he had the power of putting an experiment together in order
to look at a theory that he had.
And that is not something that you find
in every, even normal scientist.
For him, it was a burning question to answer, a puzzle that he wanted
to understand for himself.
And that's what I think is the character of a genius.
- In a manuscript dedicated to the physical world
and its mechanics, Leonardo compiled his scientific observations
and theories on geology, astronomy and especially water.
- So, water was mobile and visible,
you could see what was going on,
and he enhanced his ability to see it.
He set up experimental tanks.
Water poured out of a rectangular mouth into this tank,
and he used millet seeds to see what's going on in the water
and to try to understand these things.
So water epitomised the movement of nature, but it had the advantage
of being mobile, visible and could be subject to experiment.
- Natural philosophers as far back as Aristotle had believed that rain
could not be the only source of water
feeding mountain springs and streams.
In seeking to test their theories, Leonardo turned again
to the ancient analogy of the microcosm and macrocosm.
- Just as the blood surges upward and pours through the broken veins
of the forehead, so from the lowest depths of the sea, the water rises
to the mountain tops, where, finding its veins broken,
it flows downwards and returns to the sea.
- When he tries to form a pattern about how water gets to the top
of the mountain, and he makes an analogy with our blood,
he realises, oh, that's not correct, because he tests it out
by showing how heated water can move up and down.
- The water of the ocean cannot make its way from the roots
to the tops of the mountains.
- So he went through a lot of different solutions
that had been proposed, and he did experiments.
Some of them real experiments, we're quite sure,
some copied from other places, like the siphoning.
Leonardo made a lot of different sketches, and he thought
about what happens in gravity as he thought
about it in those times, and it just didn't add up.
So he kept on going.
- Eventually, he concluded correctly that precipitation alone
supplied the water that flowed down from mountain peaks.
While studying a valley, Leonardo noticed marine fossils embedded
in layers of rock that had been carved by a river over the ages.
For many, the fossils were evidence of the great biblical flood
which had inundated the entire planet.
- He accepts the Bible as a book of revelation
and the books of the saints and so on.
He says, "I let be the sacred writings,
"for they are the supreme truth."
But that then frees him, as it were, to describe nature.
And he can see that there's evidence that these creatures
were living there, actual living colonies,
they weren't just left there by floods, as it were.
- You must first inquire whether the deluge was caused by rain
or by the swelling of the sea.
And then you must show how neither rain nor flooding rivers
nor overflowing seas could have caused the shells,
being heavy objects, to have floated up the mountains.
- TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
- He concludes that the Earth must be very ancient.
And that, of course, is a rather challenging idea,
because it's saying that the Earth, if we look at it analytically,
isn't something which is made in seven days, seven nights.
- Leonardo carries with him all the questions in the world.
The notebooks are a dialogue with the world
and a dialogue with yourself.
And it doesn't matter if the empirical observation
leads to confirmation.
There are many errors, and not all of them are original ideas.
Of course, he is reworking ideas that come from the past, but I think
that the progress of knowledge and the human mind is not a line,
it's not linear, it's little revolutions.
- One of the things that was very important to Renaissance artists,
Leonardo included, was the idea of a demonstration,
that you would add something to this extraordinary,
NASA-like project of conquering the world of visual appearances.
And one of the things that Leonardo adds very strongly is this idea
of aerial perspective, that the atmosphere with which
things are seen changes the way that they're seen.
And Leonardo, the beautiful blur, enters the world
and he distinguishes between - and he deliberately blurs -
makes optical, makes suggestive,
invites what's called the beholder's share into the picture,
in effect, to complete and deepen, enrich, sweeten the form
that we can't entirely see.
That's a Leonardesque contribution.
- Above Lake Como, toward Germany, is the valley of Chiavenna,
where the River Mera flows into this lake.
Here are barren and very high mountains with huge rocks.
They are impossible to climb, except on foot.
- On a trip to the mountains north of Milan, Leonardo observed
how atmospheric phenomena - light, haze, vapour, as well as altitude
and distance - affected the appearance of the landscape,
the intensity of colours, the sharpness of details.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- He is really thinking about
what the atmosphere does to colour
and to light in the distance.
It is the way in which he creates infinity.
- I say that the blueness we see in the atmosphere
is not intrinsic colour, but is caused by warm vapour
evaporating into minute and imperceptible atoms
on which the solar rays fall,
rendering them luminous against the infinite darkness
of the fiery sphere which lies beyond.
- He becomes quite obsessed by the idea that you have
infinite gradations in tone in a colour.
You also get these indivisible, ethereal qualities.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
Back in his studio in Milan, Leonardo returned to a theme
he had been exploring on and off for years -
the Madonna and Child with Mary's mother, Saint Anne.
In the years since his cartoon depicting the three figures
had caused a stir in Florence, he had made studies of an infant
holding a lamb and created another full-scale cartoon
that also featured Saint John as an infant.
Now he began work on a painting.
In a preparatory drawing of the Madonna,
Leonardo explored her features using the sfumato technique,
blending shadows in ways so subtle
that her contours practically vanished.
- The line itself has neither matter nor substance,
and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object.
And this being its nature, it occupies no space.
- He made it his business, his whole life,
is how can you account for the way things appear without
any drawn lines, which are not visible in nature?
So the sfumato comes in there because sfumato refers
to the modelling of figures and how they turn in space.
And then the most difficult of all,
of how to make it look like it's surrounded by air.
- Leonardo is very insistent that there are no lines in nature.
There are edges, so if you're drawing, you draw the edge.
But this is not a natural thing.
He says there are no lines in nature,
you simply have a surface which hits another surface and that's it.
There's no line that runs down that point.
And as things get a little way away from the eye, so you don't see
these edges precisely.
And he said at one point, the eye does not know the edge of any body.
- All bodies exist in space
and all bodies are dimensional.
And space is all about relationships between things.
When you're drawing a figure, you have to draw the back side
of it and the front side of it.
You have to account for the proximity between things
by being able to draw the side that you can't see, and then extend
the drawing from that part you can't see to the place where the image
you can see actually is.
You look at the world as if you have X-ray eyes.
- The rocky outcrops and distant vertical peaks he'd sketched in
fine detail would inform the outdoor space he intended for his subjects.
On a 5.5ft tall by 3.5ft wide poplar panel, Leonardo probed both
the psychological states of Saint Anne, Mary and Jesus
and their natural surroundings.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- We really do see all the sum of all of Leonardo's scientific
knowledge, artistic knowledge make their appearance
in the painting.
If we look at the foreground especially and see
the stratification of the rocks, he's going to create the continuum
of the atmospheric perspective from the foreground
to the deep distance.
His objective is to suggest an infinity of space.
- Leonardo would continue to refine the painting for years.
But like so many of his previous works, it too would go unfinished.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
In December 1511, an alliance of city states attacked Milan
in an attempt to drive the French Army off the Italian peninsula.
Amidst the upheaval and a devastating outbreak
of the plague, Leonardo and his retinue decamped
to his apprentice Francesco Melzi's family villa along the Adda River,
about 20 miles northeast of Milan.
There, he explored the valley and its surrounding hills,
and drew plans for improving the Villa Melzi.
At night, he continued his studies of the motion of candle flames.
- I can imagine Leonardo is working at night on his table.
Of course, the light is candlelight.
And he stopped a minute and looking how the candle started to form
this little globe of light at the beginning,
and it goes on for two pages to describe
the dynamics, again, process, and then the way
in which from the round initial shape it comes to become pyramidal
and why it get pointed,
and what is happening to the air which is warmed up
that create vortices like air.
He could find all the laws of nature in the candlelight.
They were at work all together.
- At Villa Melzi, Leonardo had also returned to his anatomical studies,
dissecting ox hearts to determine how blood flows
through their chambers and valves.
He now recognised that rather than having two chambers, as anatomists
had believed since the second century, the human heart had four.
"Marvellous instrument invented by the Supreme Master,"
he had written below a drawing.
- He came up with this totally accurate idea that the valves begin
to close while the blood's still flowing through them.
And he translates that along with other knowledge to say,
well, look, that's what must happen to the blood.
It must form these vortices.
And the vortex which is forming as the blood is still flowing
out of the heart is actually unfurling the leaflets,
so they can close in perfect harmony.
And then he challenges himself -
well, what if I'm wrong, what happens then?
He then designed an experiment to demonstrate how this happens.
- He writes notes to himself
that how to actually pour hot wax
inside the calf heart, and then use
that wax model to make a glass model out of it,
and buy some silk fabrics and cut it to the shape
of the leaflets of the heart of the calf, and sew it together
and then put together perhaps the first synthetic heart valve ever.
Then he uses water and a hand pump and use grass seeds to do
visualisation, basically watching how the flow pattern forms
every time the heart valve opened or closed.
- The first-ever drawing of a synthetic heart valve,
which is exactly like heart valves we use today, tissue valves.
But he didn't stop there.
He went on, and he described why the aortic valve, pulmonary valve,
had to have three leaflets - not two, not four -
through geometric proof. Beautiful geometric proof.
- It would be more than 450 years before scientists,
using modern imaging techniques, proved Leonardo's theory correct.
- Why? Why did he do this?
First of all, there was no use for it. There's no cardiac surgery,
there's no cardiology, you couldn't do anything with it.
So it wasn't of any use to anybody.
It was purely understanding for understanding's sake.
- Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age.
And if you understand that old age is nurtured by wisdom,
you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age
will not lack for nourishment.
- Leonardo was now 60 years old.
Francesco Melzi drew the master in red chalk.
- One of the most beautiful observations in his writing is,
"Behold how, when we're away, we long to return to our home country
"and to our former state,
"how like it is to the moth with the flame.
"But the man who desires each new day and each new hour, thinking
"that they are too slow in coming, does not realise that he is longing
"for his own destruction."
- By March 1513, Leonardo was back in Milan, where Swiss mercenaries
had ousted the French and Sforza's son now claimed the title of Duke.
The political landscape was shifting all over the Italian peninsula.
The previous year, after almost two decades in exile, the Medici family,
now led by Giovanni and Giuliano,
had regained power in Florence.
When Pope Julius II died in March of 1513,
the conclave of cardinals chose Giovanni to replace him.
He took the name Leo X.
Giuliano followed his brother to the Vatican
and soon invited Leonardo to join them.
Many of Italy's greatest artists
had already joined the Vatican court,
including Michelangelo, who had recently completed a fresco
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,
and Raphael Sanzio, a 30-year-old painter from Urbino,
who had been heavily influenced by Leonardo.
Raphael had quickly become a star in Rome and a favourite of the Pope.
In his recently completed masterpiece for the papal palace,
the School Of Athens,
Raphael had modelled the ancient Greek philosophers on himself
and his contemporaries.
Plato, one of the central figures,
was based on Leonardo.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
That fall, Giuliano de Medici installed Leonardo in his entourage
at the Vatican's Villa Belvedere
and paid him a monthly stipend.
Pope Leo commissioned a painting from Leonardo
but soon became frustrated.
"Alas, this man will never do anything," the Pope complained.
"He is already thinking of the end before he has even begun to work."
The stipend left Leonardo free to study botany, mathematics
and architecture, and to create amusements for the court.
Once, when a gardener at the villa found a strange lizard,
Leonardo gave it wings, horns and a beard,
and kept it in a box so he could frighten his friends.
But Leonardo grew unhappy in Rome.
He complained that a new assistant was rude and lazy,
that authorities prevented him from performing dissections,
and he began writing in code,
paranoid that a German mirror maker was spying on him.
- Tenebre. Darkness.
Vento. Wind.
Tempest at sea. Fortuna di mare.
Forests on fire. Silva in focate.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- The air was dark because of the dense rain which fell
in a bleak descent.
All around may be seen venerable trees uprooted and stripped
by the fury of the winds.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- Bolts from heaven. Saette del cielo.
Earthquakes and crumbling mountains.
And above these judgments, dark clouds split by the forked flashes
lighting up on all sides the depth of the gloom.
- I wonder if those deluge drawings are, in part, self-portrait.
They're mysterious.
The flare-up of his mind towards the end of his life,
the agitation of all of that idea.
- In 1516, Giuliano de' Medici died of tuberculosis.
With his patron gone, Leonardo accepted an invitation
that would take him beyond Italy for the first time in his life.
Francis I, the charismatic 21-year-old King of France,
was building a court at his chateau in Amboise to enhance his reputation
as an enlightened and cultured monarch.
Leonardo, now 64 years old, packed all his belongings
and travelling by mule with Francesco Melzi, Salai
and a new servant named Battista de Villanis,
headed north over the Alps toward the Loire River valley of France.
He did not expect to return.
The King installed Leonardo at the Chateau du Cloux,
an elegant manor house down the road from his castle at Amboise.
He paid Leonardo a generous salary
and provided him with a housekeeper who prepared his meals.
- Francis I is very ambitious in military terms,
but also in cultural terms.
He knows the Renaissance,
what the Italians are doing, is the hot thing,
and he wants to buy into that Italianate, Renaissance culture.
And Leonardo was clearly a kind of tourist attraction
for Francis's court.
He could say, "I've got the greatest artist in the world down here."
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
The Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini said that Francis
was besotted with those great virtues of Leonardo's.
The King could never believe there was another man born
in this world who knew as much.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
Leonardo had finally found the perfect patron.
He staged spectacles, as he had in Milan, and sketched designs
for a new royal palace at Romorantin that was never built.
What may have been a small stroke made painting difficult,
but he continued to draw and to teach.
TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
In October 1517, Leonardo received a visit from an acquaintance
he had met in Rome, Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona.
During a tour of his studio, Leonardo proudly shared
his manuscripts, which the cardinal's assistant
described as an infinity of volumes, as well as several unfinished
paintings that he'd carried with him from Rome.
They included a mysterious and sensual likeness
of Saint John the Baptist,
and his depiction of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
Leonardo also showed them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo,
the wife of a well-to-do Florentine silk merchant,
which he had been commissioned to paint 14 years earlier.
At the time, she had been 24 years old
and was the mother of five children.
Leonardo had carried the painting from Florence to Milan,
then to Rome, and finally over the Alps to France.
Like many of his works, it had, over time,
become something more than a commission.
- He's poured into that painting his knowledge of the microcosm,
the body of the woman, the body of nature.
The movement of hair,
light on surfaces,
atmospheric perspective in the landscape.
So he's taken this straightforward subject and turned it
into something wonderful.
It ceases to become a functional likeness and it becomes a statement
about the woman in nature.
It becomes a statement about the beloved woman,
equivalent to Italian poetry.
The woman who is idealised into some sublimated form,
who's completely unbelievable, in a way.
- The Earth has a living soul
and its flesh is the soil.
Its bones are the strata and structures of the rocks
which form the mountains.
Its blood is its veins of water.
The pool of blood around the heart is the ocean.
Its breathing by the rise and fall of blood through the pulses
is likewise, in the Earth, the ebb and flow of the sea.
- TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
- The soul leaves the body with such reluctance.
And I do believe that its pain and sorrows are not without cause.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
Over the years, Leonardo had filled many thousands of notebook pages
with an astonishing array of observations and fables,
grocery lists and instructions for painters,
sketches of faces and studies of nature.
Now, in quiet moments, he returned to the geometric problems
that had perplexed and delighted him for decades.
He drew circles and arcs in boxes, trying, as he had for many years,
to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle.
On a page dedicated to an 1,800-year-old
Euclidean geometry problem, he trailed off -
it was time to eat.
"Et cetera," he wrote, "because the soup is getting cold."
It was among his last notebook entries.
As his health began to fail, Leonardo put his estate in order.
On April 23rd 1519, in Amboise,
before a royal notary and seven witnesses,
Leonardo signed his last will and testament.
To the brothers who had battled him for an inheritance,
he left a generous sum of money.
He divided his property in Milan between his servant
Battista de Villanis and Salai, who had already built a house there.
The most significant bequest would go to Francesco Melzi,
who would also serve as executor.
He was to inherit Leonardo's pension and clothes,
as well as his intellectual and artistic legacy -
all of the books, manuscripts and paintings in his possession.
Leonardo da Vinci died nine days later, on May 2nd 1519,
at the age of 67.
He was buried in the Church of Saint-Florentin, in Amboise.
"On account of his many divine qualities,"
Giorgio Vasari said,
"his name and his renown shall never be extinguished."
"It is impossible for me to express the pain his death has caused me,"
Francesco Melzi wrote.
"It is beyond nature's power to reproduce such a man."
- The one act an artist brings to the world
is to give you a way of gazing into it.
Can you look at it through my eyes?
That's the greatest gift an artist brings.
And Leonardo does that.
Very few artists have given us their soul or their mind.
Leonardo gives us both.
- Leonardo dies as a kind of legend.
But if you'd asked, say, in the 1600s,
what did they think Leonardo's paintings looked like,
it's deeply problematic.
There are not many of them, they're not publicly available,
so the picture of what Leonardo actually looked like
and what he really did was pretty cloudy.
- Though few of Leonardo's works could be seen, his writings
on the theory of art began circulating among artists
in the mid-1500s,
first as handwritten manuscripts abridged from his book On Painting,
and later in a print edition published in Italian and French.
The complete book, compiled by Francesco Melzi, was eventually
rediscovered in the Vatican Libraries and published in 1817.
In the 1800s, a handful of writers began to probe more deeply, offering
new insight and lavishing Leonardo's masterpieces with lyrical praise.
"She is older than the rocks among which she sits,"
wrote Walter Pater of the Mona Lisa.
He called her "the symbol of the modern idea".
Historians turned up new documents, letters, contracts, wills
containing more facts and providing more nuance to his life and times.
As academic interest in Leonardo grew,
so did his cultural importance.
In a slim volume published in 1910,
the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud offered his analysis
of Leonardo's memory of a bird visiting him in his cradle.
The bird, Freud decided, represented Caterina, Leonardo's mother.
In 1911, an Italian handyman wrapped the Mona Lisa in his smock
and smuggled it out of the Louvre in Paris,
where it had hung since 1804.
28 months after the heist, authorities caught the thief
when he attempted to sell the painting to
an antiques dealer in Florence.
Leonardo's masterpiece had never been more famous.
- And then we get into the surrealist Marcel Duchamp,
who does this painting that's a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa
with a moustache and beard graffitied onto it.
You get the poster of Mona Lisa smoking a joint.
The wonderful Andy Warhol 30 silkscreen Giocondas in one.
Nat King Cole's Mona Lisa.
Cole Porter, You're The Top.
Bob Dylan, Visions Of Johanna -
"The Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues,
"you can tell by the way she smiled."
- # You can tell by the way she smiled... #
JFK: - Mr Minister, we in the United States are grateful for this loan
from the leading artistic power in the world.
- # When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
# Hear the one with the moustache say
# "Jeez, I can't find my knees..." #
The Last Supper had barely survived an Allied air strike
during the Second World War, as well
as numerous ill-conceived attempts at restoration.
But recent, more sophisticated efforts to repair the mural,
which had begun to flake off the wall within Leonardo's lifetime,
have secured the fragile work for visitors who come
to the former monastery in droves.
In recent decades, engineers, surgeons, pilots, playwrights,
architects and artists everywhere have found wisdom and inspiration
in the unmatched trove of notebook pages and drawings
that encompass Leonardo's life of boundless seeking.
TRANSLATION FROM ITALIAN:
- Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo!
- At $400 million.
Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, selling here at Christie's,
$400 million is the bid.
And the piece is...sold.
- APPLAUSE
- Sir Kenneth Clark called him the most curious man in history.
He was always interested, he was always wanting to know.
And I think, more than even the paintings,
more than the mysterious Lisa, more than the Last Supper,
is this sense of Leonardo, the man who never took no for an answer
in terms of finding things out.
- TRANSLATION FROM FRENCH:
- He has a love of the world.
Nothing was dull or boring or quotidian to him,
it was all a marvel.
That's the blessed state I feel he was sort of in,
because the world is that abundant, it is that rich.
It is there for us, like he saw,
and the more you attend, the richer it is,
and the more you find your own place in it
as part of the marvellous machine.