Leonardo da Vinci (2024) s01e02 Episode Script

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♪
Man as Leonardo: 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 6 hours,
as if the world breathed.
♪
Man: 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 once 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.
Man 2: There are
certain supreme figures
in the life of our
civilization, 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.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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.
♪
Narrator: On April 10,
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.
[Speaking French]
♪
Narrator: 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.
♪
[Bell ringing]
In the years since
Leonardo had left Florence,
the city had turned away from
the openness that had made it
the center of the Renaissance.
Mired in a seemingly endless
conflict with neighboring 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, O Florence," he
urged them, "before it is too late."
Woman: 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 jewelry, the festivities,
the art representing human
feelings instead of God.
And there is a moment
where people follow him,
because they're afraid,
because superstition
is still very strong.
♪
Narrator: 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.
[Sound of fire
crackling, excited chatter]
Narrator: 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.
♪
Man: 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.
♪
Narrator: Leonardo's
father, Ser Piero, 74 years old
and still a practicing notary,
lived with his fourth wife
and their children in Florence's
San Pier Maggiore neighborhood.
The artist took up
residence nearby
at the church of
Santissima Annunziata,
whose monks, longtime
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 belltower, 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."
[Bramly speaking French]
[Speaking Italian]
Narrator: 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 15, 1502,
Leonardo turned 50 years old.
Again in search of a
patron, he attached himself
to another strongman 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.
Man: 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.
Narrator: 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.
Traveling the countryside,
Leonardo sketched
a sunlit copse of trees.
Man as Leonardo: 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 falls of water,
as you saw at the
fountain of Rimini
on the 8th of August 1502.
This is how grapes
are carried in Cesena.
Narrator: 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.
Man: 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.
Narrator: 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.
[Horses neighing, men yelling]
Narrator: War is "bestial
madness," he wrote.
[Bramly speaking French]
Narrator: 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.
Man: So, his, entire
life of Leonardo,
he was compiling
7 different indices
of a treatise, a very
ambitious treatise,
that he wanted
to devote to water.
And he's so much
intrigued by water
that he also tried to understand
its molecular structure.
Man as Leonardo: Observe
the motion of the water's surface,
which resembles that of
hair, and has two motions:
one follows the
flow of the surface,
the other forms the
lines of the eddies.
Galluzzi: Water is also
important as a field in which
he can develop models to
control the energy of water.
Water can be disastrous for men.
Men cannot live without water,
but he has to
keep control of that.
Narrator: 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.
Kemp: 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.
Man as Leonardo: The
river, if it is to be diverted
from one place to another,
must be coaxed and not
treated roughly or with violence.
Narrator: 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
trans-Atlantic 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 realized,
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 eons.
♪
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 3 times larger
than "The Last Supper,"
commemorating Florence's
triumph over Milan
on the plain of Anghiari
more than 60 years earlier.
Nicholl: 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.
Narrator: He was given a
studio in a suite of rooms
reserved for papal visits
at the Church of
Santa Maria Novella.
While laborers
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."
Man as Leonardo: 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 color as the air.
♪
Kemp: This is
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.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
♪
Woman: 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.
♪
[Church bell ringing]
Man as Leonardo:
On the 9th of July 1504,
Wednesday, at 7:00,
died Ser Piero da Vinci,
notary at the
Palazzo del Podesta,
my father aged 80 years,
leaving behind 10
sons and two daughters.
Narrator: 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.
Michele Agnolo 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 "Pietà,"
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.
Bambach: 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.
Narrator: But
Michelangelo's next work,
a 17-foot-tall marble
colossus of David,
would become an enduring
symbol of civic pride for Florence.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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 the human form.
♪
Narrator: 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 committee, because
everyone else is really,
as they would be, impressed
by this huge, more than life-size
sculpture of the
muscular "David."
Bambach: 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.
Narrator: Concerned
by Leonardo's slow pace
on "The Battle of Anghiari,"
the Republic of
Florence demanded
that he begin
painting right away.
[Thunder]
Man as Leonardo: 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 men to judgment.
And immediately
it began raining,
and poured until evening.
And it was like night.
Kemp: 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.
[Thunder]
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.
[Thunder]
Narrator: 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.
[Borgo speaking Italian]
Narrator: 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.
♪
Nicholl: 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.
Gopnik: 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.
Narrator: One witness
who had seen it
praised Leonardo's
incomplete effort.
"Having climbed the
stairs of the Great Hall,
"look 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."
Man as Leonardo: 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.
Narrator: Now Leonardo
returned to a subject
that had captivated him for
as long as he could remember.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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.
[Bird squawking]
Nicholl: 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.
Bambach: My sense
is that as he was aging,
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.
Narrator: 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.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
Man: And you can
see how he draws
the movement of air.
You need to use
the drag of the body
in order for the wing to do
the work for you, to lift you up.
♪
These are delicate
understandings
of how aerodynamics work.
So, to me, is 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.
♪
Narrator: 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.
[Speaking French]
[Bird chirping]
Narrator: Though Leonardo
would continue to study birds
for years to come, he
would never realize his dream
to build a human-powered
aircraft capable of flight.
It would be almost 500 years
before anyone would succeed.
[Speaking Italian]
♪
Man: 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 il 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.
Gopnik: The influence
of his techniques
and of his vision
was--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
and 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 color,
rather than as a
series of stock forms
set in a two-dimensional space.
Narrator: 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 3-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
authorized 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 3-month
leave came and went.
When d'Amboise
wrote to request that he
stay longer in Milan,
the head of Florence's
city council, Piero Soderini,
called Leonardo a "laggard."
[Bramly speaking French]
[Ringing]
Narrator: 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.
[Birds chirping]
Bambach: 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.
Narrator: 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.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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
gotta 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 color, 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.
♪
Gopnik: One of the things
he always emphasized 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.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
♪
[Man speaking French]
Narrator: 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.
Gopnik: 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
recognized that Leonardo
was another class of creature.
They saw that he
had gifts that were
discontinuous with
other people's gifts.
So, 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.
Narrator: 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.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
Narrator: 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.
♪
Man: Galen was a
second-century physician,
and he wrote
widely on the subject.
These form 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'd get rid of the
evil spirits and so forth.
Narrator: 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.
♪
[Bramly speaking French]
Narrator: 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 to
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.
Man as Leonardo: 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, a river engineer,
if it silted up, then it
didn't flow properly,
and it causes all
sorts of trouble.
So, the old man died
from having a silted-up
system of blood vessels.
Wells: And from that, he
makes the first description
of coronary
atherosclerosis in the world.
And it isn't just the
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, the birds,
and try and understand what's
going on in these vessels."
Narrator: The
scope of Leonardo's
investigations grew.
He planned a book that
would describe human anatomy
from the fetus to the fully
grown man and woman--
their proportions,
skeletal framework,
muscular systems, and
the nature of the senses.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
[Speaking Italian]
♪
Narrator: 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
3-dimensional drawing
of the main organs
and vascular system.
Though it contained
inaccuracies--
his rendering of the heart
had two, not 4, chambers--
it was Leonardo's most
complete effort to capture
what he referred to
as "the cosmography
of the lesser world."
♪
Kemp: And he's looking
at the respiratory system,
he's looking at
the blood system,
he's looking at the
urinogenital 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.
♪
Narrator: 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.
Bambach: He really develops
a methodical approach
to how to visualize dissection,
and also how to
communicate it in a drawing.
Man as Leonardo: On
the cause of breathing
causa dell'alitare
causa del moto del core
on the cause of the motion
Bambach: 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.
Man as Leonardo: On the
cause of losing feeling causa
Bambach: And we can see
this unpacking, say, in layers.
Man as Leonardo:
Tears come from the heart
and not from the brain.
Bambach: 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.
[Heartbeat]
Narrator: His fetus in utero,
drawn in brown
ink and red chalk,
would one day be understood
as a groundbreaking study
of embryonic anatomy
as well as a
breathtaking work of art.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
Narrator: 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 fiber 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.
♪
Wells: 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 muscles,
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,
what's in the mind,
and what's in the heart.
♪
Narrator: By April of
1508, the legal dispute
with his half-brothers had been
resolved in Leonardo's favor,
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 parish 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.
Nicholl: Francesco Melzi is
more like Leonardo's secretary,
amanuensis,
more of an intellectual
companion than Salai.
Melzi is more aristocratic.
Salai is pretty
working class in origin.
Perhaps there was a bit
of friction between Salai
and Melzi because
they fulfill different roles
in Leonardo's entourage.
Narrator: In time, Melzi
would ensure the survival
of many of Leonardo's
manuscripts.
Man as Leonardo:
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.
Narrator: 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.
♪
Gopnik: Leonardo comes of age
at a time when the first stirrings
of the 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 and 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.
Gharib: 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 a
analytical approach,
combination of a
hybrid of experiments
and, you know, the theory.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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 realized that every
object at the given height
takes the same time
to reach the ground.
Very quickly, he realizes
there's something
called acceleration.
Narrator: 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.
Gharib: 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 G, that degree,
9.81 meters per second per
second that we know today,
he gets exactly the
triangle that is here.
Narrator: Leonardo called it
the "equalization 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.
[Speaking French]
It shows clearly that
he had the imagination.
He had the power of, you know,
putting an experiment together
in order to look at
a theory that he had,
and that is not something
that, you know, you find it
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.
Narrator: In a manuscript
dedicated to the physical world
and its mechanics,
Leonardo compiled
his scientific observations
and theories on geology,
astronomy, and especially water.
Kemp: So water was
mobile and visible.
You could see what was going on,
and he enhanced
his abilities to see it.
He set up experimental tanks,
and water poured out
of a rectangular mouth
into this tank,
and he used millet seeds
to see what's going on
in the water to try to
understand these things,
so water epitomized
the movement of nature,
but it had the advantage
of being mobile, visible,
and could be
subject to experiment.
Narrator: 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.
Man as Leonardo: 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 mountaintops,
where, finding its veins broken,
it flows downwards
and returns to the sea.
Isaacson: 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 realizes,
"Well, that's not correct,"
because he tests
it out by showing
how heated water
can move up and down.
Man as Leonardo: 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
and gravity as he thought
about it in those times,
and it just didn't add
up, so he kept on going.
Narrator: 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.
Kemp: 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're the supreme truth,"
but that then frees him, as
it were, to describe nature,
and he can see that these--
there's evidence that these
creatures were living there,
actual living colonies.
They weren't just left
there by floods, as it were.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
[Vecce speaking Italian]
Kemp: 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
7 days, 7 nights.
♪
Guillermo del Toro:
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 there,
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, is not linear.
It's little revolutions.
Gopnik: 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.
In 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.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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.
♪
Narrator: On a trip to the
mountains north of Milan,
Leonardo observed how
atmospheric phenomena--
light, haze, vapor--
as well as altitude and distance
affected the appearance
of the landscape,
the intensity of colors,
the sharpness of details.
♪
[Speaking French]
Bambach: He is really thinking
about what the atmosphere
does to color and to
light in the distance.
It is the way in which
he creates infinity.
Man as Leonardo: I say
that the blueness we see
in the atmosphere
is not intrinsic color
but is caused by warm
vapor 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.
Bambach: He becomes
quite obsessed by the idea
that you have infinite
gradations in tone, in a color.
You also get these
indivisible ethereal qualities.
[Bramly speaking French]
Narrator: 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 3 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.
Man as Leonardo: 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.
Farago: 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 modeling 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
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.
♪
Narrator: 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 1/2-foot-tall-by- 3
1/2-foot-wide poplar panel,
Leonardo probed both
the psychological states
of Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus
and their natural surroundings.
[Speaking French]
♪
Bambach: 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 gonna create the continuum
of the atmospheric perspective
from the foreground
to the deep distance.
His objective is to
suggest an infinity of space.
♪
Narrator: Leonardo would
continue to refine the painting
for years,
but like so many of
his previous works,
it, too, would go unfinished.
[Speaking Italian]
[Men shouting]
Narrator: 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.
Galluzzi: I can imagine
Leonardo is working
at night on his table.
Of course, the
light is candlelight,
and he stopped a
minute, and looking out,
the candle started to
form this little globe of light
at the beginning, and
he 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.
Narrator: 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 recognized that rather
than having two chambers,
as anatomists had believed
since the second century,
the human heart had four.
"Marvelous instrument
invented by the supreme master,"
he had written below a drawing.
Wells: 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.
Gharib: 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, you know, sew it
together and then put together
perhaps the first, you know,
synthetic heart valve ever.
Then he uses water
and a hand pump
and use grass seeds
to do visualization,
basically watching how
the flow pattern forms
every time the heart
valve opened or closed.
Wells: 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 3 leaflets,
not two, not 4, through
geometric proof,
beautiful geometric proof.
Narrator: It would be more
than 450 years before scientists,
using modern imaging techniques,
proved Leonardo's
theory correct.
Wells: Why? Why did he do this?
First of all, there
was no use for it.
There was no cardiac surgery.
There was 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.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
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.
Narrator: Leonardo
was now 60 years old.
Francesco Melzi drew
the master in red chalk.
Zimmerman: 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 realize
that he is longing
for his own destruction."
Narrator: 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 favorite of the Pope.
In his recently
completed masterpiece
for the Papal Palace,
"The School of Athens,"
Raphael had modeled the
ancient Greek philosophers
on himself and
his contemporaries.
Plato, one of the
central figures,
was based on Leonardo.
♪
[Speaking French]
Narrator: That fall,
Giuliano de' Medici
installed Leonardo and 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.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
Tenebre, darkness,
vento, wind,
tempest at sea, fortuna di mare,
forests on fire,
selve infoccate.
[Bramly speaking French]
Man as Leonardo: The air was
dark because of the dense rain
which fell in oblique descent.
All around may be
seen venerable trees,
uprooted and stripped
by the fury of the winds.
[Bramly speaking French]
♪
♪
Man as Leonardo:
Bolts from heaven
Saette del cielo
earthquakes and
crumbling mountains
terremoti e ruina di monti
and above these
judgments, dark clouds
split by the forked flashes
lighting up on all sides
the depth of the gloom.
E sopra queste
maladitioni, oscuri nuvoli,
vento, cielo alluminande
or qua, fortuna di mare
Zimmerman: I wonder
if those deluge drawings
are, in part, self-portrait.
They're mysterious,
the flareup of his mind
towards the end of his life,
the agitation of
all of that idea.
♪
[Church bells ringing]
Narrator: 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--traveling by mule
with Francesco Melzi, Salai,
and a new servant
named Battista de Vilanis--
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 de 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.
Kemp: 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' court.
He could say, "I've
got the greatest artist
in the world down here."
[Bramly speaking French]
♪
Narrator: 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."
♪
[Vecce speaking Italian]
Narrator: 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.
[Bramly speaking French]
Narrator: In October 1517,
Leonardo received a
visit from an acquaintance
he'd 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 5 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.
Kemp: 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
the Italian poetry,
the woman who is idealized
into some sublimated form
who's completely
unbelievable in a way.
♪
Man as Leonardo: 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.
[Birds chirping]
♪
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;
♪
[Speaking Italian]
♪
[Insects chirping]
Man as Leonardo: The soul
leaves the body with such reluctance,
and I do believe that
its pain and sorrows
are not without cause.
[Bramly speaking French]
♪
Narrator: 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 23, 1519, in Amboise,
before a royal notary
and 7 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 Vilanis 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 9 days later
on May 2, 1519,
at the age of 67.
♪
He was buried in the Church
of Saint-Florentin in Amboise.
[Thunder]
"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."
♪
Del Toro: 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.
♪
Kemp: Leonardo dies
as a kind of legend,
but if you'd asked,
say, in the 1600s,
what did they think
Leonardo 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.
♪
Narrator: 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.
Enrico Caruso: ♪
La donna e mobile
Qual piuma al vento
Narrator: 28 months
after the heist,
authorities caught the
thief when he attempted
to sell the painting to an
antiques dealer in Florence.
Caruso: Sempre un amabile
Narrator: Leonardo's masterpiece
had never been more famous.
Nicholl: And then we get into
the surrealist Marcel Duchamp,
who does this painting
that's of a cheap
postcard of the "Mona Lisa"
with a mustache 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 Tops,"
Bob Dylan, "Visions
of Johanna"--
Dylan: But Mona
Lisa must've had
"Mona Lisa must've
had the highway blues.
You can tell by the
way she smiles."
Dylan: The way she smiles
John F. Kennedy: Mr. Minister,
we in the United States
are grateful for this loan
from the leading artistic
power in the world.
Dylan: When the
jelly-faced women all sneeze ♪
Hear the one with
the mustache say ♪
"Jeez, I can't
find my knees" ♪
♪
Narrator: "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.
♪
[Vecce speaking Italian]
♪
♪
♪
Woman: Leonardo,
Leonardo, Leonardo!
Vive la Leonardo! Vive
Man: At 400 million,
Leonardo's "Salvator Mundi"
selling here at Christie's.
$400 million is the bid,
and the piece is sold.
[Applause]
Nicholl: 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.
♪
[Delieuvin speaking French]
♪
♪
♪
Zimmerman: 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
marvelous machine.
[Wind blowing]
♪