Original subtitles

This is the story of Leonardo Da Vinci,

one of the greatest artists who have ever lived.

500 years ago he set out to try

and find out all there was to know

l will do things no one in the past has dared to do,

l will think new thoughts, bring new things into being

He created works of astonishing beauty

including the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world.

At the same time he designed terrifying war machines

which spewed death and destruction,

he designed ways of taking man to the bottom of the sea.

He invented flying machines

400 years before man took to the skies,

but for centuries his vision has laid forgotten,

written off as fantasy

and never put to the test

until now.

Tonight we tell

the amazing true story of Leonardo

and make his dreams

come true by building and testing

for the first time some of his amazing inventions

Leonardo was born in 1 452

just outside the village of Vinci in ltaly.

His name means

Leonardo of Vinci.

He was born illegitimate

and this was to shape his life.

Being a bastard

he was barred from learning Greek and Latin languages

that all books at the time were written,

but he turned this to his advantage

Leonardo had no use for The Greeks and the Romans

and was very poorly educated as you know in their philosophies

and said that its only by observation that we can find out the truth

and the Greeks and the Romans my gosh may have been

in some of their formulations

so lets look at it afresh.

his is why we call him

the first Modern Mind ln History

His lack of formal education

had another effect

because it was never corrected

he wrote left handed

and rather mysteriously backwards,

this could be an early sign of just how secretive

he would turn out to be

Leonardo grew up exploring the countryside around Vinci,

he was endlessly curious about the natural world,

examining it,

studying it.

He became obsessed by the movement of water,

the cycles of growth in plants the behaviour of living creatures

and most of all the wonder of flight.

lt comes to me almost like a dream,

the very first recollection of my infancy.

l was in my cradle

and a great hawk flew down to me,

it opened my mouth with it's tail

and it's feathers struck me several times inside my lips.

His dreams certainly suggests he had a strong empathy with birds.

Throughout his life

he watched and obsessively drew birds in flight

and he began to establish the principles of aerodynamics

his obsession with birds led to one of the greatest obsessions of his life

to make a machine that would enable man to fly

We know what was in his mind thanks to his writings.

He left behind 6000 pages of

drawings and notes

some of which have been collected into notebooks

The Queen's library at Windsor Castle

is home to the World's largest collection of Leonardo's sketches and writings.

The 600 sheets of his work

that are held here are worth well over 5 billion dollars

Amongst pictures of cats,

plants and anatomical drawings

there are drawings and descriptions of

all sorts of wonderful machines

The best known of Leonardo's ideas for getting airborne

is the so called Aunithopter

which involves a man with flapping wings,

it looks frankly eccentric

but amongst his drawings are some

which might actually work.

This glider for example

and this parachute

As soon as skydiver Adrian Nicholas

saw the drawing

he was determined to try it out

As you can see Adrian's a man who's used to taking risks.

To assemble the parachute

Adrian and his team

have come to an airship hangar in Bedfordshire, England

l think its rather charming that

Leonardo says that if you build this parachute

just like l tell you,

l guarantee that it'll return a man safely to earth from any altitude.

Now maybe he felt safe in boast

because he thought no one's gonna be stupid enough to go and try it

Most people immediately thought oh well it was maybe one of er,

Da Vinci's fantastic ideas

but they didn't really think it was going to work

And most people had only seen this little drawing with just a little,

a man hanging under the pelmet.

We wanted to try as faithfully and as closely as possible

to build the parachute that Da Vinci would have built

Had he had the time or the inclination.

lf a man has a tent 1 2 brachia wide

and 1 2 high covered with cloth

he can throw himself down from any great height

without hurting himself.

To stay true to Leonardo's vision

we are using only traditional materials

We decided on cotton

and for the poles we used pinewood

that would definitely have been available for Da Vinci at this time

and ah, hand probe

Adrian has climbed to the roof of the hangar

to test a model of the parachute

Apparently swinging like a pendulum

is a good thing

lts interesting that

without all the support mechanisms of newtonian physics

and some of the tools and techniques that

we would use today that he still come up with a design

which as we can see from the scale model

looks there or there abouts and we'll have to see how that performs in real life

The parachute itself weighs about the same as the pilot

so you have an interesting effect

where the actual mass of the parachute and the mass of the pilot are roughly similar.

So the pendulum effect that you would normally get from a modern parachute

is not as pronounced as this type of structure

The weight of the parachute may mean

an uncomfortable ride,

but there's something far more worrying about this design.

Unlike modern parachutes

it doesn't haven't a vent or hole in the top to stabilise it.

ln the beginning

there was no doubt Da Vinci didn't have a hole in it

and so it didn't have a hole

Well you think its gonna be safe with a hole in it.

lts, you know what l mean 90 kilos

its a parachute designed 500 years ago

You could, l don't know

Adrian & Katarina decided to put their trust in Leonardo

they would go ahead without the addition of a hole to the parachute

Of course we're nervous about it,

if one of the... break in the middle of everything,

everything would just collapse

and Adrian would have

this huge really heavy thing right above him

and he could be entangled in the line

or if even if the parachute was staying inflated

it could maybe start oscillating and getting, going out of control as much

and he could maybe even land and ah, and end up in the middle of it.

lts, you never know

l would if he ever thought that someone would actually be stupid enough to try it

Adrian's decided to jump from a hot air balloon

at 1 0,000 feet over a remote part of Africa,

that way there's less chance that the parachute will kill someone

if it all goes wrong

The lack of the hole doesn't seem

to be causing any problems,

the porous material simply dimples

and allows the air to pass through.

Mr Da Vinci we kept a promise, thank you

Thankfully the parachute works,

it would be 300 years after Leonardo drew his that

Andre Jacque Garnalan would make the first successful parachute jump,

also from under a balloon

And this is just one of the many of the novel designs that

his fertile brain and intuitive understanding of

the laws of nature would produce

Leonardo's carefree childhood ended

in the early 1 460's,

when his father took him from his home in Vinci

and brought him to Florence

To a boy from the Tuscan Hills

it must have seemed an extraordinary place.

Florence was a vast construction site,

a hothouse of talent.

lt was one of the largest cities

in Europe the centre of the civilized world and at the heart of that

great revolution in culture and science known as the Renaissance.

During Leonardo's lifetime

the first book would be published

and Christopher Columbus would discover the new world.

But the Renaissance was

also a time of conflict and blood violence,

Life could be short and brutal

You can get a flavour of this heavy mix every year

on June 24th

when Florentines celebrate

their Renaissance past

The climax is a ball game

with no rules other than the survival of the fittest.

30 men from each rival camp attack each other

for the possession of the ball.

Originally a pig's bladder.

The game goes back to Roman Times

and in Leonardo's day

they let prisoners out early just to play.

Leonardo is said to have designed the costumes for this game,

but he himself had mixed feelings

about the violence of his age.

Such men like to be around affliction, terror death

Reflect how cruel it is to take a life.

l saw once a man in battle,

a man who poured out sweat mixed with blood,

his heart had burst as he fled from his enemies.

And yet he designed weapons and war machines

for some of the worst tyrants of the times.

Leonardo extolled the virtues of peace

but he would help promote the art of war.

But that all lies ahead,

Leonardo's father brought him to Florence

as a young boy to find work

because he was illegitimate

Leonardo was not able to become a lawyer or a doctor,

instead Leonardo's father hoped that

he'd become an artist

Painters are on the same scale lets say as tailors,

saddle makers,

not so much a dime a dozen but they're craftsmen in this period,

they're not the high status elite that

Leonardo would aspire to be later

Leonardo's father got him an apprenticeship

with Andre Verockio a leading sculpture

and craftsman of the period

Leonardo's apprenticeship lasted several years,

he grew up in the studio.

We know he was impatient from the start.

He wanted to create masterpieces

and in his early 20's

he finally got his big chance.

Verockio had won a major commission to paint

a picture of Christ being baptised.

He painted the main figures

and left the minor characters to his assistants.

Leonardo was given the figure of an angel in the left hand corner to paint.

What he would do with it would stun his fellow students

and the great master Verockio himself.

The traditional method of painting at the time was to use egg tempera.

This is how Leonardo would have been taught.

All small-scale pictures, or nearly all of them,

were painted with tempera paint

and egg tempera paint is a very simple medium.

An egg

A free range egg.

ln fact there was a writer in the 1 5th century called Cenini

who said that the best eggs are country eggs,

especially for painting

country type people with ruddy complexions.

Now if l can get this right.

l just want the yolk. We don't want the yolk sack.

We mix it with some distilled water,

which of course in Leonardo's day would have been rain water,

and we've got a bit of white wine vinegar in here and this is,

this is gonna be enough for the day's painting.

Add a bit of the ultra marine blue.

A stiff brush. That's your paint.

This paint dries extremely quickly

and this is why it has to be applied in a rather special way, er,

it's a kind of shading known as hatching.

You build up tone gradually, you build up the darkness,

light and dark by um, criss crossing these lines.

So egg temperer is hard work

and the results can look dull and lifeless.

As he started on his angel figure

The young Leonardo made a momentous decision.

The painting has so far been done

the traditional way with egg temperer

but he decided to paint his figure in oils.

Oil paint had been invented some years before in the

but was virtually unknown in Southern Europe.

lt's a lovely medium this is, lt really is. lt's er, it is so gorgeous.

lt's so sort of um, rich and nice sort of buttery paint.

lt was an astonishing gamble

for the young Leonardo to take at the time but it paid off.

The whole effect of the,

the paint is totally different.

Much more richer colours in the oil version,

much duller in the temperer

and there's a subtlety been built into the the lights and the darks and the oils

you just can't do in the temperer basically

lf you look at the original painting which hangs in the...

Gallery in Florence

Leonardo's contribution the angel on the left really stands out.

And its not just the oil paint of course,

its the way that Leonardo used it.

You can really see his genius

in the angel's face.

The impact of this painting

on Leonardo's fellow artists was profound.

Legend has it has that his master Verockio was so moved that

he told the other apprentices,

that from now on

Leonardo would paint all the faces

and that he Verockio having been surpassed

would never paint again.

But just as Leonardo's career was taking off

he found himself embroiled in a sex scandal

one which would threaten his life.

Leonardo was probably homosexual

he was certainly obsessed by the male nude

and liked the company of beautiful young men

ln fact the city of Florence

was infamous for its homosexual culture,

but it was strictly speaking illegal.

And the penalty if you were caught was death.

On the walls of the city you could find a notorious bocka de veritin,

the mouths of truth.

Citizens who wanted to make anonymous accusations against

their fellows could post them here and one of these accusations,

in April 1 4 76

accused Leonardo of sodomy.

Well he was out on the town with three friends

and they were arrested for consorting with a teenage prostitute

And according to writings of the time

many people questioned whether they really were guilty at all.

Now sodomy er, was a crime in, in 1 5thcentury Florence and one for which,

were you convicted er,

you could even be burnt at the stake.

Leonardo endured weeks of anxiety

whilst the evidence against him was being collected.

We know just how desperate he was feeling

because he wrote on a piece of paper,

l am without any friends.

And on the other side of that same piece of paper he writes,

lf there is no love, what then.

By shear good fortune

one of Leonardo's companions

happened to be the son of a powerful noble man.

And this probably helped a great deal er,

in getting them off with a very light sentence which is recorded in each case.

Um, they were absolved with the condition of a slight beating.

This must have been

one of Leonardo's darkest moments.

Before he was open and trusting,

afterwards more suspicious and secretive.

And as we'll see Leonardo's unwillingness

to reveal to others

what he's up to would deprive

the world of many of his great discoveries

After his trial

Leonardo became increasingly restless

and in 1 482 at the age of 30

he suddenly packed his bags,

left Florence and headed for another major city Milan.

The ruler of Milan was Ludovico Sforza

and he was one of the most feared

and hated tyrants in all ltaly

Milan's the wannaby

Noveau Riche version of Florence

it doesn't have the same cultural

and civic tradition.

Um, the Sforza are a very new er, team of mercenaries,

a family who are basically trying to drag the city into Renaissance.

The previous duke, the previous guy in charge

has been stabbed 3 7 times by his own courtiers.

This is not a city which loves its rulers.

The Shawsars were regarded

as jumped up sons of shoemakers.

So when Ludavico comes in

he's looking to boost his image.

Leonardo came to Shawsar's castle

hoping to ingratiate himself

but he had to tread very carefully.

Ludavico was a snob who surrounded himself

with genealogists and astrologers

as well as the usual mix of artists and engineers.

He was both dangerous and deluded.

He commissioned a family tree

which he insisted should show his family history going back,

not just to royalty but to the gods.

Splendid news your excellency, the astrologer confirms

That on your mothers side

your great uncle was related to a prince of Sicily.

Don't be ridculous, look again.

Yes, yes l'll see.

Er, this is Da Vinci the Florentine.

Like any Renaissance ruler

the Duke's greatest interest was

in war machines.

Leonardo now appealed

both to his vanity and his military needs

Excuse me my lord,

l am not only a musician

but l have studied the works of those

who claim to be engineers of warfare

and l believe l can surpass the best of them.

l can match any man in the design of buildings,

fine buildings both public and private.

l can create great aqueducts

to transport water throughout your land.

Do the Medaci have aqueducts?

l believe so your excellency.

Good. l'll have aqueducts

Also a covered vehicle of iron in

which soldiers can penetrate through enemy lines

and destroy them

replacing the need for elephants of the past.

Excellency we've also found a line here

to the brother in law of the king of Spain.

Not good enough, keep looking.

Go on

l can make bridges that are light and strong

that can be easily transported when you are pursuing or,

or God forbid, fleeing from an enemy.

Also l have devised a means for besieging a castle

by first of all drying up the water in the moat.

Leonardo was put to work

but not as a military engineer.

He was paid a low wage,

rather less than the court dwarf to design the drainage

for the Duchesses bathroom

and to install a form of central heating.

Draw up a plan to show the bath of the Duchess.

To warm the water add 3 parts of warm to 4 parts of cold.

How to release the water flow

He was given a number of odd jobs

to do around the castle including organising Sforza's parties.

For the Dukes famous parties

Leonardo was inventor,

stage manager and producer all in one.

He designed the elaborate costumes

and masks and the mechanical novelties

to delight the guests.

These events were about

prestige and power.

The more lavish the party the more

they enhanced Ludavico's glory.

This great spectacle the Duke has promised.

But Leonardo had far greater ambitions than merely satisfying

the trivial whims of the Duke.

Don't pity the humble painter.

He can be lord of all things,

whatever exists in the universe

he has first in his mind

and then in his hand

ln Milan and throughout his entire life

Leonardo worked also for himself.

Pushing the boundaries of science

and making discoveries over an astonishing range of subjects.

More than any other single person before or since.

ln his notebooks

he makes daily lists of things to do.

Construct glasses to see the moon magnified.

Find out how to install bombards and ramparts

by day and night.

How they built the tower of Ferara.

How to square the triangle.

Analyse the movement of the tongue of the woodpecker

and describe the jaw of a crocodile.

The French man has promised to tell me the dimensions of the sun.

And how do they run on the ice at Flanders.

The versatility that Leonardo demonstrated

during the years in Milan is astonishing.

He let his imagination run wild

and he made some remarkable discoveries

Do you see how the eye

embraces the beauty of the whole world?

lt is the window of the soul.

lt informs the arts. lt is the foundation of science.

lt measures the distance of the stars.

lt discovers the elements.

lt is the inventor of architecture and the divine art of painting.

Leonardo was one of the first

to investigate how our eyes see

and to do this had to invent a method for dissecting them.

ln his notes it reads like a recipe.

ln order to study the interior

without spilling its watery humour,

place the whole eye in the white of an egg and boil until solid.

Then slice both the egg and the eye transversely

and you will find that no part of it will drain away.

ln Leonardo's time

it was widely thought that the eye sent out rays of light to illuminate

what was in front of it.

Leonardo realized it was the other way round.

We see because light penetrates the eye

and informs the brain.

Time and time again he would test his own ingenuity against the method

and materials of his age.

He invented epic schemes of engineering and mechanics.

Machines to dredge and excavate huge tracks of land.

He investigated new methods of agriculture and irrigation

and a whole range of military machines.

But the trouble was he hadn't been paid for much of his work,

there was one project

however that really appealed to Swarzar's enormous vanity.

Leonardo proposed building him

the largest statue of a horse ever to be cast in bronze.

This offer would haunt Leonardo

for the next 1 6 years.

Meantime his notebooks reveal that

his constant researches went on.

He worked out that light reflecting from tiny particles

in the atmosphere is why the sky is blue.

He studied the human body

and in time would be the first to discover

how hardening of the arteries causes heart disease and death

During this time in Milan Leonardo took on a young boy as apprentice,

Giacomo Caprotti.

Giacomo had come to live with me on St. Mary Magdelin's day, the 22nd July 1 490.

The second day he was here l'd had some clothes made for him and

when l put aside the money l had to pay for them he stole the money.

The first night he'd eaten enough for two people,

broken his glass, spilt the wine

and smashed a cruet.

You will be the cause of my early death.

l decided from that day to call him Salai.

The demon.

He was completely indulgent of the boy and again

l think that's the way in which the relationship worked,

so they clearly row, they clearly have huge fights.

Leonardo forgives him.

He loves his fecklessness,

that's part of the attraction.

That he is a disreputable

but eminently forgivable loveable young man.

Salai, l want to make peace with you, not war.

No more war.

l give in.

That relationship is the most constant relationship

in Leonardo's life.

Culminating in Salai's inheritance of

many of Leonardo's pictures.

Salai seems to occupy this most critical emotional space

in Leonardo's life.

Doesn't have a wife, doesn't have children,

doesn't want them but he's got to put his emotions somewhere

and this curly haired mischievous little boy

is where they end up.

Leonardo's household was increasing.

Salai was an expensive addition.

The Duke occasionally paying the bills

but by now he must have seen his Florentine

genius as something of a liability.

Leonardo had managed to complete a couple of major paintings.

The hauntingly

beautiful Virgin of the Rocks

and a painting Sforza's mistress, Chechillia Gallorani.

lt is one of the great portraits

of the Renaissance.

But there was a better way of

winning the Duke's approval,

by building him a great statue of bronze.

lt's as if she lives and breathes. You've done well Da Vinci.

To other matters, you wrote this 6 years ago.

A great horse of bronze,

to the immortal glory of the house of Sforza,

6 years. Yes your excellency,

the work is underway,

l have here the plans for the horse.

23 feet from the height of the horses head to the base.

The drawings are impressive.

But it cannot be done.

No one ever made a horse on that scale.

Even a master craftsmen of antiquity never managed it.

lt can it can.

l will create one huge cast

very deep beneath the earth,

but first l will make a clay cast your excellency

l want to see the clay model, but no more delays

He's studying like crazy.

He's talking to bronze casters,

he's talking to bell makers and to cannon makers

because those are the people in Milan

who are familiar with large-scale pourings.

lt dovetails perfectly with Leonardo's ambitions

because it's an extraordinary civic project to work on something

which has always fascinated him.

The figure of the horse,

how to represent a realistic horse.

ln his notebooks he made hundreds of beautiful studies of wild horses

and of those in the Duke's stables.

Leonardo finally produced

the full size clay model for Sforza,

it was regarded as a masterpiece in its own right

and a technical miracle.

But it would never cast in bronze

Leonardo writes again and again of his hatred of violence

but in his notebooks there are plans for inventive

and fearsome war machines.

Like this giant crossbow

Here's what he writes in his notebooks

About man's inhumanity to man

lf you think destroying the wonderful works of nature

is criminal consider

how much worse it is to kill a man.

And yet he designed this giant syth intended

to chop off men's legs

Perhaps the most intriguing of all his designs

is what appears to be a forerunner of a tank

which wasn't invented

until the 1 st world war,

400 years after Leonard

We asked a team from the British Army

to build and test Leonardo's design.

Was it truly an ancestor of the modern tank

or just a cumbersome medieval chariot

This is a picture of Leonardo Da Vinci's 1 5th century armoured vehicle. Here it is

Before building the tank

the team seek the advice of Tank Historian David Fletcher

David got any thoughts on that?

Yes the first thought is its not gonna work,

you've got human beings in here turning cranks by hand

to activate wheels to make them go round

and to carry a thing of heaven knows what weight across the ground.

l would say the thing was almost physically impossible.

You're going to need a battlefield

like a billiard table for it to move at all.

A stone will stop it, a molehill will stop it.

The other side is gonna die laughing before this thing gets anywhere near it

This is an initial drawing

and of course when he had designed it and developed it, he will,

it would have evolved because you've gotta do a bit of development on it.

This is an initial design, you can't expect it to be perfect.

The man wasn't Jesus Christ for goodness sake.

The Army sets to work

building the tank out of wood and metal.

The first challenge is to see

if Leonardo's gearing system

is up to the job of

getting the tank moving

The engine of this machine is pulled by 3 men on each of these bars,

2 on your side there and there and 1 on my side over here in the middle here.

And they then rotate this round and this rotates this gear wheel here

is rather like the crankshaft inside an engine.

But of course its only pushing it a very small amount,

so you've got to push that round lots of times

to get this to go once round.

Hopefully that is gonna give us enough power

to move this things along

Right fella's the moment of truth have come,

we've built this thing and we're now gonna give it a go

So lets get cracking straight away.

Are you all ready, 1 2 3. Go

Hold it there, hold it there.

We've built the thing as by the plan

but its not quite right, there's a small detail wrong somewhere l suspect

How could Leonardo have got it so wrong,

perhaps his grasp of mechanics

was not quite so good after all.

Right where dad he get it wrong?

He's got the gears in the wrong place on, on the wheels.

How do you mean by that?

Ok if we take this as the rear of the vehicle,

he's got the gears on the front end of these wheels.

We take this as the front end

he's got them on the rear end of the vehicle.

Right so we've got the front wheel going backwards

and we've got the back wheel going frontward's.

Right how do we solve it?

Well we need to move one of the gears.

So we get both the wheels going in the same direction at the same time.

That sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Now Leonardo of course was no fool

and in those days you didn't have court lawyers

policemen and all the rest of it to protect your ideas,

so what they often did was to put a design flaw in it knowing

that it was slightly wrong,

so that anyone who was a thief and go and nicked it em,

it wouldn't work, but he knew how to make it work

Leonardo's main source of inspiration was nature

the tank is no exception,

as it takes shape

it resembles a tortoise on wheels

The tank is completed with its fire power.

Leonardo's design for 20 cannon around its

circumference would have given it

the potential to wreak total havoc at close range

l want you to know the note of angle of slope on this

because that would cause the enemy projectiles to glance off.

And of course what have we got on our challenger today

Ok, so he had actually thought this problem through.

Well l'm amazed l really am,

l never thought l'd see this thing move at all

Well its going

at good walking pace at the moment

But just how would the tank have performed

on 1 5th century ltalian battlefields,

our experts think

it would have terrified the enemy.

We've got these massive groups of pipe...,

if these things fired into their ranks

and started taking off at the knee

then you would get the break up of the lengths of...

Then it would work

You've got to think that

nothing like this has ever been seen in that time period,

its the equivalent of a flying saucer

just appearing out of nowhere

Absolutely l think you're very right.

This man was a genius David.

We've taken his concept drawings

and this is the first time its ever been built,

we've had problems,

we've solved them

and l think if we were allow to develop his idea,

there's no doubt about it that

he'd have a war winning tool

By 1 495 Leonardo had been working for Ludavico Sforza

for 1 3 years.

Despite Leonardo's unreliability

the Duke now decided to entrust him with a major commission

ln the monastery of St. Maria De La Graci

he asked Leonardo to depict the last supper,

Christ's last meal before a rest a crucifixion

lt had had been painted many times.

But Leonardo would do something very different.

His idea was to capture

the reaction of the Disciples to the moment

when Christ says one of you will betray me.

lt's a hugely ambitious idea

and though Leonardo clearly had the vision to pull it off

it required a practical expertise in fresco painting

that he simply didn't have.

l mean there's a very complicated process

and basically you've got several layers of um, of er,

plaster and er, they're built up over the course of a few weeks and the last one,

called the internarco is the er,

the wet surface of the plaster is where you paint into.

l would say um, a constant and experienced fresco painter

would have probably have been able to do it in 2 or 3 months,

maybe even less than that but um,

of course Leonardo was not very experienced

The normal approach would have been to copy preparatory drawings

onto the damp plaster using a technique called pricking,

tracing the sketch onto the plaster.

You had to lay in enough plaster for one days work

and then the clock starts ticking.

You had to paint the wet pigment into that plaster

while you're um, while it's still active.

lt's completely wrong for

what we understand of Leonardo's psychology actually.

This, this technique must have maddened him l think.

l mean the idea with proper fresco is you plan it all in advance.

You can't fuss with this kind of stuff you've just gotta get on with it.

As we know, getting on with it is not Leonardo's strength at the best of times

but he found the solution.

He decided not to do the fresco the usual way.

lnstead he invented the kind of plaster

he could paint on when dry.

This allowed him to take his time.

Unfortunately the Duke had insisted on regular progress reports

Many a time Excellency l've seen him arrive early in the morning

and spend the entire day on the platform.

From sunrise to sunset, never laying down his brush.

Continuing to paint without eating or drinking.

Then 3 or 4 days

would pass without him even touching the work,

yet every day he'd spend several hours

just looking, considering

and suddenly leave and go elsewhere.

lt is as the fancy takes him.

But Leonardo was hard at work.

He was out in the streets sketching, seeking out the right faces,

the right gestures to bring alive each individual disciple.

One twists the finger of his hands,

another with his hands spread shows his palms.

Another turns with stern brows to his friend.

How can you be so slow?

l devote 2,3 hours a day

to this work.

How can that be if you never go there?

For one whole year

l have gone every day, morning, noon and night

to the Balgato to try to find a face

that will express the villainy of Judas.

l have yet to find it.

But if all else fails l could take as a model the face of the Abbot here

who spends his time complaining about me to your Excellency.

For 36 months l have had 6 mouths to feed.

My pupils, my serving girl.

l have received 50 duckets for a sketch.

We will see to it that you receive more money

but the painting must be finished.

ln spite of Ludavico's warnings

the Last Supper was to take another year of work

and of constant complaints from Leonardo begging

for his back salary.

But he eventually found his Judas and at last,

early in 1 498

the Last Supper was finished.

You paint nothing Da Vinci other than the demands of your own imagination.

And you're right

you have surpassed yourself

A great success

Tragically the experimental technique of painting on dry plaster,

which had allowed him the time to get the painting just right,

almost lead to this masterpiece being lost forever.

A few years after the work was finished a tiny,

almost imperceptible cracks appeared

under the surface of the paint.

Deep in the plaster moisture was rising and doing damage.

Since then there have been numerous attempts at restoration,

some of which did more harm than good.

But something of the power of the original still remains.

lt is a ghost

but it's a magnificent ghost

But as Leonardo and Sforza gazed at the work in 1 498

they could not have guessed

it's fate or their own.

Massing on the border were the thousands of French troops

preparing to invade Milan

And as for the dream of that fabulous bronze horse,

the 60 tons of bronze that Sforza had set aside for it was melted down

and forged into cannon.

And the great clay model was used

as target practice by the invading French troops.

Within months Leonardo would flee Milan,

he would be forced to work for patrons

who made Sforza look like an angel.

There would be conflict too with a new Pope in Rome

and he would find his position

as the most famous painter in ltaly challenged by a rival

who hated and despised him.

A rival called Michelangelo.

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