Original subtitles

ln 1506 Leonardo Da Vinci left his native Florence

and took to the road in search for work and patronate

His travels would take him to Milan,

to Rome and finally to his exile in France.

And for the last 13 years of his life

everywhere he went

hi carried with him one painting

It was the portrait of a woman,

and it was to become the most famous image

in the history of art.

A good painter has to bring out 2 things,

the physical appearance of the subject he's painting,

but also what is in the mind,

the intentions of the soul.

Achieving the first is easy,

the second, very hard.

Mona Lisa.

Mona Lisa.

Yeah- she's a man.

She's ltaliana.

When l was 8 years old,

l saw it for the first time.

Leonardo da Vinci.

lt's beautiful, man. Wow.

Michelangelo, Michelangelo.

This is the story of the most famous work of art

ever created by human hand,

a painting so valuable it's impossible

to put a price on it.

ln the Louvre in Paris,

it's simply known as 'Painting No. 779'

lt's the portrait of an unknown ltalian lady,

who seems to be smiling.

Her name, Mona Lisa....

..simply means Madonna, Lady Lisa.

Yet from the moment she was painted, 500 years ago,

she has obsessed and intrigued the whole world.

But who was this mysterious lady

and how did she become the superstar she is today?

And what is the secret of her smile?

When I look at this woman,

gives the impression that she is looking at you.

I heard that she was pregnant at that time.

Because she was pregnant. She was having a baby,

expecting a baby.

I don't get it's a smile I think it's the way her face is formed.

Some people have smiles of that kind.

If I'm not smiling, which is probably why I always smile,

no idea that's not the end of the world.

And I think she's probably got an expression

that is at peace with the world around her.

l see a woman that's looking at someone

and saying you've got me on my worst day of the month!

What am l doing here?

And you're trying to get me to smile at you.

That's what l'm seeing.

She's trying her best,

but she's pretty annoyed about it...

and l don't blame her.

The Secret Life Of The MONA LISA

Today like a Hollywood star,

the Mona Lisa has her own bodyguards and special security.

She lives in a humidified air-conditioned concrete box,

protected by triple, bullet-proof glass,

but on the other hand it doesn't seem deter

over 6 million tourists every year.

So what's the secret of her fascination?

Why has this of all the images in the world,

gripped the imagination of so many people

for the past 500 years?

Kings, Emperors and Presidents

have all paid their respects to her.

On the Mona Lisa's American tour,

President Kennedy greeted her

as the ultimate symbol of western civilisation.

We citizens of nations unborn,

at the time of its creation,

are among the inheritors

and protectors of the ideals

which gave it birth.

For this painting is not only one

of the towering achievements

of the skill and the vision of art,

but its creator embodied the central purpose

of our civilisation.

She's been exploited and replicated in so many forms,

that it's easy to forget she was once a living breathing person,

her image and expression caught in one moment of time,

and immortalised by the hand of the artist.

This is how l think the Mona Lisa first looked

when Leonardo painted it in 1503.

lt's a very cleaned up version of the picture

that we're now familiar with,

but to get to this there have been a great deal of changes

and stages involved in making this picture.

l'll show you some of those stages.

This is a board of poplar wood,

and this is what the Mona Lisa was painted on.

Everybody thinks they would use canvas,

but in those days they didn't, they painted on wood.

ln the south of Europe it was generally poplar wood,

in the north of Europe it was generally oak.

lt was this nice solid wood

that became a masterpiece.

Chalk drawing,

now almost certainly Leonardo

would have done a chalk drawing

or some kind of an image perhaps in pen,

or silver point, or something,

to give an idea of the kind of look of the portrait,

to feel the portrait.

The drawing would be transferred to the panel

by a process called pricking and pouncing.

The little lines would have been effectively joined up

by some red- via the wet fluid paint.

This will surprise you, the green face,

brown dress, blue background.

What's happening here?

Well basically Leonardo's just roughing in

what goes where colour-wise.

And we're starting to rough

in the warm flesh tones over the green,

so it still comes through in some areas.

And of course the background and the sky now,

the marvellous blue,

deep sort of ultramarine type sky.

Mona Lisa.

Painting excels because it does not fade

as music does as soon as it is born.

lt endures,

and keeps all the appearance of being alive,

though in fact it's confined to one surface.

lt can preserve the transient beauty of mortals

and endow it with a permanence greater

than the works of nature,

for these are the slaves of time,

even when death has destroyed nature's original,

painting preserves the image of divine beauty.

To find the first ever mention of the Mona Lisa

in any historical document,

we have to travel 150 miles from Paris

to Amboise in the Loire Valley.

Leonardo came to live and work here

near the end of his life,

at the invitation of King Francis l.

This is the fine house the King gave him to live in

On October 10th 1517

two travellers on the Grand Tour came to pay his respects

to the great painter.

They were cardinal Luigi of Aragon and his secretary De Beatis

This is what De Beatis recorded in his diary.

Leonardo showed the Cardinal three pictures.

One of them was of a certain Florentine lady,

painted from life at the request of Guliano de Medici.

lt was absolute perfection.

This l have seen with my own eyes.

By 1530,

the Mona Lisa found her way into the Royal Collection.

Unfortunately King Francis

decided she would look particularly good

on the walls of his suite of bathrooms.

She was kept there for many years,

and present day experts believe

that the crack allure on the surface of the picture

is partly due to the steam, from the royal ablutions.

And from the bathroom to the bedroom.

The King also possessed this curious striptease version

of the Mona Lisa, called the Mona Vanna.

What could possibly connect this

and Leonardo's masterpiece?

lts origins are obscure,

but it's clearly related to the portrait of the Mona Lisa

except she's not wearing anything!

Now there is a rather unusual taste

at the Court of Francis l,

for nude portraits of respectable women.

There's a great one of 2 women,

his mistress and her sister in the bath,

pinching each other's nipples.

Now this is actually a way of celebrating their fecundity,

because breast milk is a symbol

of the way that you create children.

So the Mona Vanna may fit in best

with the taste of the French Court.

The Mona Vanna was probably the work

of Leonardo's favourite pupil Salai.

The original Mona Lisa stayed locked away

in the Royal Collection,

until the people of France decided

they didn't want a monarchy any more.

When the French Revolution began in 1789,

the aristocracy was sent in the thousands to the Guillotine.

Soon King Louis XVl and his Queen, Marie Antoinette,

would themselves be executed.

The royal collections were plundered

and the Palace of the Louvre became a people's museum,

and it was there that the Mona Lisa was put on public view

for the first time.

When Napoleon came to power

and was crowned Emperor of France,

one of the first demands he made

was to have the Mona Lisa removed from the Louvre,

and placed in his private bedroom in the Tuileries,

thus reviving the tradition of the Royal Collection.

He kept her there for nearly a decade,

and called her Madam Lisa.

His fascination with Leonardo continued, as he invaded ltaly .

and there he found Leonardo's drawings and notebooks.

He took them back to France too.

He said all men of genius are French,

no matter what their country of birth.

After the fall of Napoleon,

the Mona Lisa returns to the Louvre,

and starts its life as a major tourist attraction

in the French capital.

Then 100 years on,

on August 21st 1911

in the early hours of the morning

she becomes the leading player

in a story of crime,

politics and extortion.

The thief had spent the Sunday night

hide in the building,

When the security guard was asleep,

he slipped out through a back door,

into the courtyard .

and then made his escape

along one of the quays of the River Seine.

Visitors to the Louvre were undeterred,

for some time afterwards they queued up

to contemplate the blanck space,

where the Mona Lisa had once hung.

The theft made headline news around the world,

a massive police hunt was launched

and among those suspects brought in for questioning

was a radical young Spanish artist,

called Pablo Picasso.

But by this time the Mona Lisa

was a long way away.

On November 11th, 1913,

Alfredo Gerri, a Florentine antiques dealer,

received a letter offering him the Mona Lisa.

The price would be half a million lira,

in today's money about a million pounds.

The letter was signed ''Leonardo''

Signore ecco l'hotel Gioconda.

A month later the mysterious Leonardo

instructed Signor Gerri

to meet him at this hotel in the Via Panzani.

Gerri took with him Giovanni Poggi,

a Leonardo expert and the Director of the Uffizi Museum.

The 2 men then made their way

to the man's room on 2nd floor of the hotel.

What happened next, Signor Gerri recalled

as the most exciting moment of his life.

At first all we could see was dirty,

festering old clothes,

but then we noticed the trunk had a false bottom.

As soon as it came into our view,

we had the conviction that this indeed

was the authentic work of Leonardo da Vinci.

Poggi had been told by the Louvre to look

for a tell-tale splinter mark on the back

of the wooden panel, it was there.

lt confirmed that this was the real Mona Lisa.

The smile of the Mona Lisa

was again alive in Florence!

Florentines were particularly proud that the picture.

was recovered here in Florence.

Because they thought that long last the Mona Lisa had come home.

This was after all Leonardo's native city.

The place where he first trained as an artist.

And where he first began to work on his most famous picture,

In 1503

Leonardo the thief was also a Florentine,

an unemployed house painter,

whose real name was Vincenzo Peruggia.

He claimed to be a patriot,

who stole the Mona Lisa simply

so she could be returned to her motherland.

He was tried, he got 6 months,

a very lenient sentence incidentally, and

in a way he became famous.

When he died he had an obituary

in the press.

As the man who stole the Mona Lisa.

The ltalian government was in a slightly embarrassing situation,

because there was a wave of nationalism

it was the moment where ltaly was trying

to build an empire in Africa.

so the government was under pressure,

this is after all our painting

Leonardo is ltalian,

Mona Lisa is an ltalian woman

Let's keep it.

So it was shown in Rome, in Florence, in Milan.

lt travelled and the crowds flocked.

Unfortunately the French wanted their painting back.

She's then taken back to Paris

in a train and welcomed by a huge crowd

at the train station.

And then for 3 days, there is a special exhibit with her

and again the crowds flocked.

So you can see that the interest piles on the interest

every little thing can be built up.

l mean one should also add that other paintings

had been stolen before,

and they did not receive such publicity.

So there was something about the Mona Lisa,

but particularly something about Leonardo.

By 1500

Leonardo da Vinci had returned to Florence.

He spent 17 years in Milan,

but it was no longer safe for him there.

His patron had been deposed

and imprisoned by the invading French Army.

By now he was totally absorbed

with his inventions and scientific experiments.

He wasn't painting any more.

When he came to live here at the Servite Monastery

the monks clearly expected some paintings

in return for his board and lodging,

but as one of the priests Father Pietro noted,

Leonardo was by now weary of the brush.

Then in 1503,

something happened to rekindle Leonardo's interest in painting.

A woman arrived in his studio for him

to paint her likeness, and Leonardo agreed.

He begins to work on the portrait,

that would obsess him to the rest of his life.

So what happened then, to make him change his mind?

Part of the reason may simply have been money.

This is the Santa Maria Nuovo

A monastery in a hospital. Which also served as a bank.

It was here that Leonardo kept his savings.

And quite remarkably,

his bank statements from those crucial months in 1503 still survive.

They reveal that he was withdrawing 50 florins every few months,

and not paying anything back in.

Now, we know that he had an expensive household to maintain.

So it's quite possible that he

took on the commission of the Mona Lisa,

simply to get some quick and ready cash.

But even if he was short of money,

why would he take on this particular commission,

while turning down work for some of the richest

and most influential patrons of the day?

l think what is remarkable about Leonardo

is that more than anybody else at his time,

and indeed more than anybody else for decades thereafter,

he worked for himself,

he did what interested him.

And it's not that he didn't need

to make a living as an artist, he did,

he needed that income,

but he more than- he wanted to satisfy

his patrons whoever they were,

wanted to satisfy himself .

his own intellectual curiosity,

his own aesthetic needs.

The patrons for him were, shall we say enablers?

And inconveniences, sometimes at worst.

From patrons you first get flattery,

then hard work,

then ingratitude and recriminations.

The most obvious thing patrons wanted

in their portraits

was to establish their identity,

but in the case of the Mona Lisa,

Leonardo deliberately avoided

even this basic requirement.

ln his other portraits Leonardo usually left some clue or symbol,

so that people could easily identify the sitter.

This is the earliest of them.

He places the subject in front of a juniper bush,

because in ltalian juniper, or Ginepro,

is a play on her name,

Ginevra da Benci.

And in his exquisite portrait of Cecilia Gallerani,

the ermine she's holding is a mascot of her lover,

the Duke of Sforza.

But in the Mona Lisa,

he left no clue on the picture at all,

and there is no mention of her in any of his writings.

She is simply a mysterious woman,

sitting in a landscape.

Leonardo may not have wanted to reveal her name,

but his secret has inspired

one of the greatest quests in the history of art,

to discover the Mona Lisa's true identity.

One person who would have loved

to have had her portrait painted in oil

by Leonardo da Vinci,

is lsabella d'Este.

The Marchioness of Manchua.

When he visited her in Manchua,

he obviously did at least 2 charcoal sketches,

brief, rapid, bravura performances there.

left one behind with her,

and took the other on his travel down to Florence.

Now for the next 2 years

she's in constant negotiation,

pleading with him to finish the portrait

or send the sketch back,

or send her something from his hand.

She was so desperately keen,

she even pleased with Cecilia Gallerani

to borrow her portrait by Leonardo,

so that she could work out

her own instructions to the painter.

lsabella was a bit of pain,

she would actually send artists lengths of string

telling them how big the figures should be.

Now even for people who are being used to told

what to paint, that's-

this was going a bit far!

I think Leonardo probably found her rather oppressive.

But there's no shortage of other possibilities.

The visitors to Leonardo's house in 1517

thought the model was lsabella Gualanda

the exotic mistress

of his old patron Giuliano de Medici.

And as a further possibility the august figure of Costanza d'Avalos

from a war mongering dinasty, she was a military commander

in her own right.

There's an ltalian poem of the time

which named Costanza as the veiled lady

in a portrait by an artist called Vinci.

Finally there's the Florentine housewife,

Lisa Gherardini,

named by Leonardo's biographer,

Vasari.

The best way to clear up this confusion,

is by going to Milan.

I must look at some documents,

which relate the history of the painting,

and may have identified the most likely sitter.

There are problems with all 4 candidates.

Medici mistresses tended to flaunt their status with expensive jewels

Not for them the restrained taste of the Mona Lisa.

And the well in doubt Grand Duchess who was well under 40

and a widow when Mona Lisa was painted.

So she is unlikely.

As for the vain and imperious Isabella d'Este,

If she really had persuaded Leonardo to paint her portrait,

wouldn't she have made absolutely sure the whole world knew about it?

There are also doubts about Lisa Gherardini.

Italian scholars find it particularly hard to believe

Leonardo would have chosen to paint

a middle-class house wife.

After centuries of uncertainty,

a vitally important piece of evidence

has only just come to light

in the Milan State Archive.

It's a probate document.

detailing the estate of one Gian

Giacomo Caprotti,

who was murdered in 1525.

And we know Gian Giacomo

as Salai, the Little Devil.

Leonardo's lifetime companion

The original is too delicate to handle,

but from this fotocopy it's absolutely clear

why Leonardo's scholars regard it as a crucial piece of the Mona Lisa jigsaw

It's a list of all Salai possessions.

And one entry in particular is absolutely fascinating.

It refers to a picture "quadro ditto la honda", called "la honda",

and it's valued at 505 lira A small fortune at the time.

And the price which could only get cashed to a masterpiece.

A Leonardo's masterpiece that he left to Salai.

Now the plot thickens Because it's a second document,

and in this document, the abbreviation "la honda",

has been scratched out and replaced with the word "la Gioconda".

Now we know that the married name of one of Leonardo's sitters,

Lisa Gherardini, was in fact Lisa dal Giocondo.

So, after 500 years, the mistery of the Mona Lisa's identity,

has finally been resolved.

Salai's inventory confirms

Lisa dal Giocondo

The Florentine housewife was indeed the Mona Lisa.

This is one of the most amazing discoveries.

l mean you sit in the Milan Archives,

day after day after day,

it's a freezing cold place,

and you're reading all of this Latin,

and then suddenly you've got it!

You've got a document

which tells you finally something you didn't know before.

So who was Lisa dal Giocondo?

By tracking down marriage and birth certificates,

we managed to discover some tantalizing details.

She lived here in the Via della Stufa,

with her husband Francesco,

a prosperous silk merchant.

She was the daughter of a middle class landowner,

got married at 16,

and was Francesco's 3rd wife.

His two other wives died tragically in childbirth.

Lisa herself lost a daughter.

But she did have 2 other children who managed to survive.

What she meant to Leonardo we'll probably never know.

But if this was meant to be a portrait of a respectable,

middle-class housewife,

then it's a very odd one indeed.

Quite unlike any other picture of it's time.

It's here at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence

that you can get a clear idea of how radical the Mona Lisa

must have seemed in those days.

Just 3 decades earlier

Even masters like Piero della Francesca

was forced to abide by strict social conventions.

The whole point of this portrait was to show up your status.

So they had to of course wear their best clothes, the jewels, the finery

so they could be seen in all their glory.

As you can see in this picture, it was very much a man's world,

and here you have the man,

the owner really, essentially,

of the wife who is his possession.

She has to be modest chaste and virtuous.

That was expected of her

Loose hair was a sign of eroticism

So it was something which was frowned upon.

Constantly you could see

that her hair was thrust up and decorated.

Certainly not allow to flow in any way at all

In the very materialistic culture

of the early 16th century in Florence,

everything was about keeping up the apparencies

By comparison,

Leonardo decides to throw away the rule book,

far from being the height of fashion,

her dress is utterly plain and timeless.

Lisa is a married woman, but she wears no wedding ring.

lndeed there's no jewellery, no adornment of any kind,

apart from a simple gold braid on her neckline.

That will tell nothing about her family's wealth or social position.

Her loose hair would even have been seen

at the time as implying loose morals,

the curls falling sensually over her shoulders,

and there's another radical innovation, her pose.

Traditionally, Renaissance paintings

would be in profile.

lt would be like me standing like this,

and you'd only see the profile.

But what Leonardo does, it is as

he's calling Lisa.

He calls Lisa, Lisa turns towards him,

looks at him, looks at you,

and she has the upper part of her body looking somewhere else.

So it's a snapshot,

it is in the middle of a movement,

and he's been able to do that and thus

introducing into portrait painting something

which existed of course in sculpture,

in a single portrait.

This was a- such an achievement,

that Raphael and others started imitating it.

lndeed nowadays when a photographer

takes a picture of you,

he'll always say

please don't look at the camera, look slightly away and so on.

They will try to disturb the staticity

of the- of the pose,

and in so doing, whether they know it or not,

they are reproducing Leonardo's great discovery.

And then there's her gaze

But is she looking directly at us or through us?

ls she even looking past us,

over our shoulder at something we can't see?

Leonardo understood the compulsion

we all feel when we first meet someone,

to try to read the character from the face.

He challenges us to interprete her thoughts.

To capture, in his words,

the emotions of her mind and the passions of her soul.

But he teases us,

he draws a veil of ambiguity across her features,

and then of course,

there's the riddle of that smile.

It's one of the reasons,

the smile so endlessly fascinates people,

it's because they can't quite make it out.

But I think that something of this is to do with the fact that

it's lopsided, the smile.

Now look at this. If I cover this side of the picture,

now that is quite severe,

If I turn around the cover,

this side of the face,

Now she looks like she's smiling

And you see that the smile is also mirrowed in a way by the landscape,

because the landscape seems both sided too.

On the left hand side here, you see the water level in the frame,

and on the right hand side it seems to be higher than the frame,

protruding from that right hand side of the picture

And of course Leonardo did nothing by accident.

He was fascinated by optical effects

Something must be intentional on it.

It gives you a real sense of unease about the picture.

What is she smiling at?

What does she have that we don't have?

What does she know about our thoughts,

that we don't know?

Leonardo was a man listening to voices unheard

by other people.

The smile to me is essentially saying

l know things that you will never know.

l understand you and the world in ways

that you will never conceive of.

lt's his message to the world,

it's essentially his message to himself at the same time.

That's why l think in this portrait,

he's painting biography

and autobiography at the same time.

Leonardo's mother was a peasant girl

Caterina,

who had a brief liaison with his father Ser Piero.

She was later married off to a man

in the next village,

but she's said to have wet-nursed Leonardo

for at least 18 months.

Then he was brought up by his step-mother Donna Albiera.

Both women are said to have been deeply affectionate and loving,

but the separation from his birth mother

suggested another interpretation of the Mona Lisa,

to the founding father of psycho-analysis,

Sigmund Freud.

We begin to suspect the possibility

that it was his mother

who possessed the mysterious smile,

the smile that he had lost

and that fascinated him so much,

when he found it again in the Florentine lady.

ln Leonardo's later painting,

''The Virgin and St Anne''

Freud saw the same smile,

the Mona Lisa smile, on both women,

as he saw it, both mother figures.

Both of these women adored him,

which becomes in the classical Freudian sense,

the perfect situation in which a child,

a male child, is likely to become homosexual.

Leonardo probably was in the sense

of we talk about being gay,

l think he was gay

l think he probably slept with men,

l think that all the evidence in terms

of what we know about his life, and also his art.

Most of the drawings are of men

and it's centred really round the midriff.

You look at the care and the detail

and the obsession with the ideal male form.

lt is repeated and drawn over again and again and again,

which doesn't compare to anything like the way

in which the female form is represented.

Leonardo's faces often seem

to have some kind of sexual ambiguity.

And here is that smile again

on his most androgynous figure,

the Portrait of St John.

He too seems to have some secret knowledge,

some understanding of what lies hidden in the darkness.

What of Lisa dal Giacondo herself?

While she sat for Leonardo,

did she too have a secret?

One that might explain the mystery of her smile?

lt's my personal thought

that she is indeed pregnant.

ln the first place if you look at her hands,

here she is, she's supposed to be a relatively young woman

in her early 20's, there's no question

that she has swollen fingers

As you look carefully at the picture,

there's no question

that she's holding her hands in a particular attitude,

that we're accustomed to seeing

on the upper abdomens of women far advanced in pregnancy.

In 1502, 1503,

Lisa dal Giacondo was expecting a child,

2nd child.

They're moving into a new house the next year,

so it may well be quite prosaic

that this was to celebrate her pregnancy.

Although it's perfectly obvious, of course,

that Leonardo wasn't physically atracted to women,

he was fascinated by them both as an artist and a scientist

Most men of this time for instance really believed

that the male was responsible uniquely for the act of procreation.

But Leonardo realized that the man's role was quick and easy.

Was the woman's which was complex and full of mistery.

He was convinced that women

were key to the process of procreation.

While he painted the Mona Lisa during the day,

he would come here to the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova

and spend the night cutting up female corpses.

He was determined to learn everything about females.

Not just about the surface of the body,

but what lay underneath.

Leonardo was the very first anatomist,

to document the female body.

This astonishing drawing is called The Great Lady

in the margins are some of

Leonardo's characteristic notes to himself,

ideas that will become the foundation

for a new science, Embryology.

Begins with the formation of the infant,

put in such parts as our successively composed

according to the duration of the pregnancy

and how it is nourished until birth.

Leonardo da Vinci makes the first ever drawings

of the human foetus in the womb.

He was making this, he'd obviously been doing the disection at the time

that he was painting the Mona Lisa.

That seems so extraordinary to me.

This disection, which is really not a dissection,

It's a great synthesis of everything that he was learning

about the human body.

Is, I think, almost the most remarkable, anatomical drawing ever made

It's a drawing about what makes a living body, a living body.

And one of the things

he's most interested in his anatomy,

is this cycle of life, death and maturity.

And think he's doing Leda at the same time,

this painting about generation.

Here is this wonderful image of a bird -

we know Leonardo's obsession with flight -

mating with a woman,

and producing babies from eggs.

What a subject for Leonardo!

You know she is absolutely perfect.

lt's all the mysteries of generation,

all in one package.

I think if you put,

as we've done literally, this together

and think that

Leonardo, with his great culture and things in his mind,

in a sense, saw this inside her body.

And I think, you start to think, well that is how Leonardo looked at it.

He thinks he's really getting to the mystery of life.

The cyclical nature of the death of things

and the birth of things.

Of course this then refracts back beautifully

into the landscape and the notion of -

of the cyclical change of things,

and how landscape changes over vast periods of time.

When you see a scene of the primeval

or primordial world behind the person being portrayed,

it immediately puts you in mind of creation

of early forms that will evolve

into what we are today.

Now in the foreground, you are looking

at a woman who represents

exactly the same thing.

lt strikes me as it's a very unstable picture.

You have these towering mountains behind,

they're overhanging,

they look like they might fall down,

tumble down any time.

The lakes are very full,

it looks like they might come

tumbling over the dam and wash away the bridge.

And l do wonder whether what he's depicting here

is how he imagined the Arno Valley

would have looked, in previous times.

There is some very clear evidence

in the notebooks that he thought

there used to be a lake where Florence stood,

and there was a lake lower down the valley as well,

and maybe this is what he's seeing

with these 2 lakes.

He's imagining what the landscape used to look like.

So what's going on here?

How does the Mona Lisa connect

with the strange primeval landscape behind her?

lt's time to get out of the city,

and go back to where it all began,

the Tuscan landscape,

where Leonardo spent his childhood and formative years.

The Valley of the River Arno

wasn't just his playground,

it was his laboratory.

Here he studied the principles of flight,

the dynamics of water, light and perspective.

So is the apparently fantastic landscape

behing the Mona Lisa real or imagined?

Here 30 miles from Florence

the River Arno is crossed by the Buriano Bridge.

Is this the bridge behind the Mona Lisa?

What we do know for sure

is that Leonardo knew the bridge

and the surrounding area intimately.

The Buriano had a vital strategic importance to the city of Arezzo.

And just a year before beginning work on the Mona Lisa,

Leonardo was sent here,

as a Military Engineer,

to the infamous warlord Cesare Borgia.

And only minutes away from the Buriano Bridge

there is another connection

with the Mona Lisa.

This epic landscape is known to locals

as The Valley of Hell.

These primeval rock formations

rise hundreds of feet out of nowhere

to form a ridge running some 30 miles along the Arno river.

The rocks appear frequently in his notebooks,

and there are similar forms in the backgrounds of other paintings.

The Virgin of the Rocks.

The Virgin and St Anne.

Little rivulet streams have carved their way

down through these rocks and formed

the amazing shapes that you see today.

And that's l'm sure

what Leonardo understood had happened.

The Mona Lisa gives a very clear sense of time passing,

l think particularly in the landscape in the background.

There you have a clear depiction

of the geological cycle.

You have the river starting up in the mountains,

these very jagged, unstable mountains.

lt wends its way down bringing the sediment with it,

until it eventually gets to the sea

and Leonardo had this idea that it

then was taken back up to the mountains again,

and would start again.

So you have this continuity, this continual cycle

of geological time forever really.

ln Leonardo's time, the natural world

was regarded as a heathen wilderness,

best avoided by God-fearing people.

But Leonardo was not God-fear.

Like his contemporary Christopher Columbus,

Leonardo was an explorer.

He had an insatiable curiosity

to observe and chart the unknown world.

l came one day to the mouth of a great cavern.

l had never been here before,

never been aware of its existence.

l stood for a time peering in to see

what forms had been created there by nature,

but the darkness of the cave was deep.

l felt fear, and desire.

Fear of the mysterious cavern,

desire to see whether there might be

any marvellous thing within its walls.

Look!

What is it?

lt's a whale!

Think how many years this beast

has ploughed its way through the oceans,

chasing the tuna fish, buffeting the ships,

creating great storms in its wake.

Oh time! swift destroyer of all things living,

how many Kings,

how many peoples have you brought low

since this creature was flung here to die?

lts bare bones become the columns

to support a mountain.

He's at the mouth of the cave

and he's afraid to go in,

but his curiosity is pulling him in.

And ironically what does he find,

when he gets in there?

he finds the fossil of a great fish, very likely

a whale, and the beginnings therefore, of the earth.

Everything is tied in, in his work.

The search for the maternal power of generation,

and then the perpetuation of the species.

Here's another sea creature.

A thousand more.

These shellfish once lived underneath the ocean,

so how do you think they got up here,

on the top of a mountain?

The Great Flood? Noah?

According to the Bible,

fossils were carried onto the top of mountains

by Noah's Flood,

but to Leonardo this was nonsense,

because fossils were not just found in one,

but many different layers of rock.

Did the Great Flood sweep them up in one mass

and line them up in neat little rows?

So what he realises is,

that it actually it was just a coming

and a going of the sea.

The sea would come and wash over the land at some point

and deposit these fossils,

and then it would wash away again,

and the fossils wouldn't be deposited.

And therefore you would gradually

build up these layers,

and this was incredibly important

because it was another 150 years,

really, before this theory was-

we call it the law of Superposition

before people realised that that's what actually happened.

Such heretical observations were unpublishable,

but they provided Leonardo

with a new theory of creation.

Only observation he said,

is the key to understanding,

and his observations told him that the earth

could not have been created in 6 days,

that it took thousands, if not millions of years,

of geological changes

of atmospheric changes, of biological changes.

So to him the evidence was everywhere.

There was no question about the way

the earth had evolved

and evolved the same way a human being evolves.

Drawing together all these threads,

lt seems to me that the Mona Lisa provides us with a snapshot,

of the mature Leonardo's mind,

a distillation of all that he had discovered,

through a lifetime's observation,

into the secrets of nature.

All his life Leonardo had wanted to control nature.

He mapped town and countryside,

planned to subdue and divert great rivers.

He cut through mountains, built bridges

all to re-arrange and order God's creation.

But order had its flipside in disorder and chaos.

Leonardo knew that nature

could be both unpredictable and terrifying.

lt strikes me it's a very unstable picture,

towering mountains

and they look like they might fall down,

tumble down in time.

Unease about the picture.

was undergoing big, deepest cataclysmic changes imaginable

The River Arno has always been unpredictable

and subject to often devastating floods.

As recently as the 1960's,

it caused terrible destruction to buildings

and works of art in Florence.

Leonardo himself had witnessed

as a child one of the worst of all deluges,

one he recalls years later.

The air was darkened by the heavy rain

driven aslant by the crosswinds.

The fire rent and tore the clouds asunder,

what fearful noises were heard through the dark air

as thunder violently shot through to strike anything

that lay in its course.

What weeping and wailing

as terrified beings flung themselves into the waters

How many mothers wept for their dead children?

their arms raised to heaven as the hills collapsed

into the depths of the flooded valley.

Leonardo even produces a record of the aftermath,

furniture, books, the detritus of everyday life,

heaped up after the terrible flood subsided.

The deluge drawings are in a sense

the ultimate reflection of this idea

that there is a superior force,

and these are vast forces

and what happens in the human heart,

what happens in the mind are all little microcosmic

reflections of these vast forces,

so it's a complete spectrum.

And towards the end of his life,

there are these amazing visions where

there is an insight that however much you understand the forces,

there is an awesome dimension

which is outside human ability to control.

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters,

is expressive of what in the ways

of 1000 years, men have come to desire.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits,

like the Vampire she's been dead many times,

and learned the secrets of the grave.

What was the relationship of a living Florentine

to this creature of his thought?

By what strange affinities

had the dream and the person grown up thus apart,

and yet so closely together?

Leonardo never delivered the portrait

of Lisa dal Giacondo.

He carried it with him

wherever he went for the last 16 years of his life

even into exile.

At the age of 61,

Leonardo left ltaly never to return.

Younger and more fashionable artists

like Raphael and Michelangelo,

were now flavour of the month and regularly gaining

the most glamorous commissions.

This is where his journey ended,

at the French town of Amboise in the Loire Valley.

lf Leonardo was under appreciated in his homeland,

he was certainly welcomed by the French King.

Francis l was determined to import the glories

of the Renaissance.

ln recognition of Leonardo's unique status,

he gave him a large manor house,

right next door to the royal castle.

Leonardo's last years were not easy.

He suffered a stroke which meant he lost the use of his right hand.

But his increasing infirmity didn't seem to matter

to the young French King,

who treasured every moment he was able to spend

with such a wise old man.

Many believe that this tunnel in Leonardo's house

was directly connected to the royal castle in Amboise

and that king Francis I used it to visit Leonardo at nights.

They would talk through the night,

the old man and the young king.

So at last, towards the end of his life

Leonardo as so often misundertood

in taking to granted, he'd found a patron,

who really undertood the nature of his genius.

In his last years,

Leonardo tried to put together

thousands of pages of notes and drawings,

into a grand encyclopaedia.

But the task of compiling the observations of a lifetime,

like so many of his ambitious schemes,

remained unfinished.

While l thought l was learning how to live,

l've really been learning how to die.

As a day well spent brings happy sleep,

so a life well used brings contented death.

Leonardo died here in his room

in Clos-Luc� on 2nd May, 1519.

He was 67 years old.

It's to have died in the arms

of the French King.

This is how the painter Ingres

imagined the scene 300 years later.

The great architect Benvenuto Cellini,

who also served Francis I, wrote this:

l have to record the words the King spoke to me,

that he believed

there had never been another man born in the world,

who knew as much as Leonardo.

Not so much about painting,

sculpture, and architecture,

as that he was a very great philosopher.

It has taken 500 years

for many of Leonardo's ideas to become a reality.

Even now, we can only begin to understand

the sheer scale of his achievements.

When he began his restless journey through life

the painter was regarded as a little more than a lowly craftsman

Leonardo changed all that.

And in this one painting, the Mona Lisa,

all the passions and preoccupations of a lifetime,

come together.

The Mona Lisa is the first great psicological portrait.

It's Leonardo's attempt to capture the energy,

the essence of life itself.

Is not a mistery that is easily resolved.

But he has caught an an instant and an eternity.

Like a magician he's made the invisible, visible.

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.

By his art he may be called the Grandchild of God.

Subtitles by J. C. Germi

BBC 2003