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[mysterious captivating music]

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[narrator] Let us take you on a journey.

A journey into the life of an extraordinary man.

Talking about Leonardo da Vinci means confronting a mystery.

We know a lot about his work.

We know a lot about his life.

But the mystery remains.

How could a single person, a single mind,

have imagined and achieved so many different things?

What makes Leonardo

the top of the bright guys of the Renaissance,

compared to Raffaello, to Michelangelo,

to many other remarkable figures,

is that he was not simply an artist.

In Leonardo, everything was interrelated:

science, painting, all the arts, let's say like that.

Probably, for him painting was the top of his activities.

Leonardo invented himself. That's clear already

in his letter to Ludovico il Moro.

He's saying things that he cannot yet do,

but he will learn to do, in order to fulfil the promise.

[narrator] To share the full extent of his work,

we need an approach,

an imaginary space.

An immense gallery that would allow us to travel,

to see,

to make everything he studied concrete.

The works and machines he imagined,

and sometimes designed.

To begin our journey of discovery

into such a unique mind,

we have to understand, and to reconstruct the path

of the child, the apprentice,

and the man who would develop work methods

that would lead into astonishing universality.

[birds chirping]

Our first destination is the village of Vinci,

located in Tuscany, in Italy, where Leonardo was born.

-[birds singing] -[insects chirping]

-[stream flowing] -[bird cooing]

-[mysterious music] -[engine revs]

[birds shrieking]

Leonardo arrives in Florence as a teenager,

coming from a small village,

a ''nowhere place'' we would say today, at the time.

But he was the natural son of a notary, with a housing,

pretty beautiful housing in Florence,

and excellent relations

with the powerful authorities of Florence.

So, he was not coming from nothing.

Plus, he was absolutely impressed,

as everybody would have been, coming to the...

possibly wealthiest city in the planet at that moment.

[bells toll]

A city which was weak, on military grounds,

because it was a small city, with no army.

But very powerful on economy.

Florence has been a city of intense building activity

since the eleventh century.

And so, we must try to imagine the moment when

the young Leonardo arrived in this thriving

and extremely modern and ambitious city,

from a much more sleepy place.

Nonetheless, he would have found a city

that was an open chantier, an open work site,

with churches, palaces rising.

And so, he would have seen Florence

as a place that was always in activity,

always changing, always getting bigger,

more beautiful, more modern.

He would have absorbed the Florentine passion

for modernity and excellence.

He was certainly impressed by the beauty of the buildings,

by the richness of the collections

of the private families.

And also, and not the least, by the workshop

in which he was taught to work.

Verrochio's workshop is generally portrayed in movies

as a very elegant place, where people are using brushes,

and painting or sculpturing in a very elegant way.

Verrochio's workshop was a new scene,

it was something where you had hammers, you had tools.

He was building sculptures. He was creating gunpowder.

He was having furnaces to cast bronze and other things.

So, the impact must have been very strong,

and certainly, it must have been an enormous surprise.

[spade clanks]

[loud hammering]

[tools pounding]

[soft dramatic music]

The ball atop the lantern of the dome

would be more than 110 meters from the ground.

It was very heavy.

We don't know the exact weight

because it was struck with lightning,

and fell in 1600.

We do know that the large ball exactly reproducing the shape,

that was made to replace it, weighs 6000 kilos.

Six thousand kilos

is a great deal to lift 110 meters.

We believe that Verrochio's original ball

was much heavier.

[priests chanting]

And so, you are talking about a problem

that is positively... mind-boggling.

One cannot imagine how to do it.

Bear in mind that the ball is at the center

of a dome that has a 43-meter diameter.

So, the great crane that has to be put in place

to lift the ball up,

has to have an arm that extends at least 25 meters.

Half the width of the dome. And then, beyond that,

to allow the ball to be lifted from the ground,

without actually touching the dome.

And it's almost unbelievable

that they could have constructed scaffolding, and the crane

in those dimensions.

How they did it? We do not know.

That they did it, we know.

[narrator] Like all apprentices, Leonardo started very modestly

at Verrocchio's workshop.

Then, he became a workman: a better position.

And as such, he started participating more

in the activities of the workshop.

During all that time, he drew from nature

whenever he could.

Like all the students, he made draperies,

and learned to work with light and reflections

in order to give volume to his drawings.

When he did those paintings,

imagine, he was only in his early twenties.

And 500 years on,

you can still admire those paintings.

We know the studies of draperies were very important and relevant

for the activity of the artist at the time.

Especially, they were a kind of exercise.

They were studying, probably all together,

drawing and painting from reality.

Studying real draperies.

These kind of drawing studies, then, will eventually be useful

for paintings, but also for sculpture.

Unfortunately, we don't have surely any sculpture

attributed to Leonardo.

This is a big problem because we know that Leonardo

was also a sculptor.

[mellow music]

The Madonna with Child is a terracotta sculpture,

and the style of this statue is really unique.

And the only possible candidate is the young Leonardo da Vinci

in the studio of Verrocchio.

[gentle classical music]

[Dramatic strings playing]

[narrator] Why did he abandon his paintings?

Including a large format that seemed very promising,

and for which he had done many studies:

perspective, characters, composition.

What's more, if you look closely,

you can see some of his future masterpieces:

Saint Anne.

Saint John the Baptist.

The Battle of Anghiari.

Some of the expressions inThe Last Supper.

The Equestrian Monument.

So, why did he abandon it?

Why did he leave?

[strings crescendo]

In The Virgin of the Rocks, Leonardo shows us Mary who,

on the one hand, tries to protect her son.

Her left hand descends as if to protect her son.

Her right hand tries to restrain,

to hold back little John the Baptist

because he is the prophet of her son's future death.

Her left hand can never fully descend

because there is the finger of an angel

pointing back to John the Baptist.

Leonardo is exploring a psychodrama

in the mind of this woman.

He knows that, in religious terms,

she is the servant of God, and she accepts God's will.

But he says, in human terms,

it must have been terribly difficult for her

to accept her son's death.

And so, he shows her trying to prevent

God's will from happening.

But, ultimately, he has to allow it to happen.

[birds shrieking]

It is in Milan that he emerges as his own man,

as a fully acclaimed artist.

But it is also in Milan that, at a certain point,

we see Leonardo trying to learn Latin.

His notes, where he's trying to memorize

the form of Latin verbs, are moving

because this brilliant man, this spontaneous genius,

does not have the most simple and basic credential

of intellectual life of the period.

Someone who could not speak and read Latin, was simply out.

[dramatic music]

[narrator] Leonardo wanted to seduce.

He wanted to convince.

And his best weapon was his pencil.

He knew that an engineer would be more highly respected

than an artist.

And so, he designed machines for the Duke.

Starting with military machines.

Leonardo was particularly interested in civil engineering.

The machines useful for everyday life.

His winch, for example.

It is designed with a ratchet

to prevent human effort from being wasted.

This was the first drawing in exploded view,

something that would later become a reference.

He also designed machines for the theater.

This automobile, for instance, would be useless in the street,

but could produce magical effects on the stage.

[narrator] There were floating machines as well,

like this pedal-activated paddle-wheel boat,

that leaves the user's hands free.

And finally, later on,

he also pursued herculean projects,

like this giant excavator for digging canals.

The Duke was intending to make a new Milan,

a new modern city.

And he was very ambitious, Ludovico Sforza.

And so, there was ground for Leonardo

to taste the possibility

of getting approval by the patron,

proposing something that was responding to his ambitions.

And so, he made this fantastic idea

of a clean city where water was removing all the rubbish.

Where all the buildings were connected to one another.

Where carriages and horses could have

their independent roads, and so on.

This is a beautiful project which introduced a new vision.

[people chattering indistinctly]

[classical music]

Christ has just said: ''One of you will betray me.''

And as the apostles remonstrate and gesticulate

and ask what he means,

he then begins to institute the Eucharist.

One hand reaches to a cup of wine,

another to the bread,

and on his face you see a deep sadness.

You see the sadness

because he is thinking of his future death.

In that same room, the dining hall

of the Dominicans in Santa Maria delle Grazie,

on the opposite wall, there is a crucifixion scene.

If Leonardo's Christ lifted his eyes,

he would see himself the next day on the cross.

And so, Leonardo is trying to capture the moment

when he has said: ''One of you will betray me.''

And then, he gives them the great sign, the gift,

that he's willing to die: ''This bread is my body,

this wine is my blood.''

The impact of the new works by Leonardo

at the time was probably something incredible,

because for the first time ever, the figures painted were living.

The Last Supperin Milan, in this fresco,

unfortunately very damaged,

we know that Leonardo was able to give life to these figures.

To... show the internal psychology.

[bells toll]

There is no evidence that Leonardo

was a personally devout person.

On the other hand, he was a man of his time,

and would have had great religious information.

As an artist, he had to use that.

And it was really his passionate interest in human nature,

his scientific interest in the body and, above all,

in what he calls the moti della mente,

the movements of the mind, the emotions,

the movements of the spirit,

that allowed him to become

the great interpreter of Christian art that we know,

because Christianity believes that God became man.

And so, in the measure in which an artist can penetrate

the depths of the human mind and spirit

and system of choices, that artist becomes

a potential interpreter of Christianity.

And Leonardo certainly succeeded in doing that.

-[bells toll] -[pigeons flap]

Leonardo is mainly known as a painter,

but we know that he was a sculptor,

and if we think about his Milanese period,

we know that about a decade of this time

was completely dedicated to the sculpture of the horse.

It took many hours of work designing the shape.

Then finding the system

to arrive at the only casting process for the whole structure.

Huge structure.

You need 40 tons of metal to fill that.

The problem is it's many aspects.

The first one is the size of the horse,

it's an unheard size.

Seven meters high, just the horse.

And the amount of material

that you need to get for the casting process.

The third one is the machines that you have to elaborate.

Nothing existed before to move such a heavy object

from the place where is prepared to the casting pit.

And making all the accessories necessary to produce this work.

It took years to go ahead in that direction.

Leonardo, luckily, has recorded in his manuscripts

many of the data on which we base our conclusions.

So there we find the drawings of the machines he's considered.

We find remarks about the alloy that he has intended to use.

We find the tales on the casting of the head

and the legs, separated from the rest of the body.

We have plenty of information, which is precious information,

and beautiful information

because the red chalk drawings are spectacular.

And when he arrived not far from being close

to producing the horse,

a French army arrived in Milan and put an end to the duchy

of the Sforza domination on the city.

[dramatic music]

The tradition in portraying or imagining men flying

is based on no mechanism at all.

It's wax wings, or things like that.

Leonardo introduced a revolution in the field.

He tries to create a machine.

That is, conceiving precise tools

to transmit and empower the force of the man,

and to emulate the mechanics of the birds flying.

So it's quite a revolution.

There was nothing similar before.

This is what is new in his imagination.

A mechanical system to fly.

[wings flapping]

[narrator] Leonardo quickly comprehended aerial dynamic lift

and using a machine, he tested our resistance.

He studied the flight of birds, especially that of bats,

which are, like us, mammals.

And if bats can fly, humans should also be able to fly.

Leonardo, therefore, pursued the idea

of a machine that flies by beating it's wings.

But he soon understood that the materials:

wood, metal, rope, fabric,

were too heavy for human strength alone.

So he turned his attention to a sort of glider.

Obviously, the limit of the planes by Leonardo

is the materials.

He didn't have the light materials

that we can have today.

Inevitably, his flying gliders were heavy.

Possibly too heavy to produce some output.

In a way, Leonardo was going in the direction of God.

So to understand the secret of nature.

And we can feel it when we are in front of his paintings.

And the perfection that Leonardo wanted to give to his creations.

It's quite evident if we are in front of The Mona Lisa.

When we see the landscape.

When we see this...

inner psychology of the sitter, and so on.

Everything is interrelated in Leonardo.

And probably the acting of painting

is the pinnacle of his activity.

[gentle guitar playing]

[narrator] When he died, five centuries ago,

on May 2nd, 1519,

Leonardo da Vinci left behind the exemplar image of a man

who was not only able to free himself from his condition,

and shine forever in the pantheon of the arts,

but also, that of a tireless researcher,

who wanted to understand everything.

And who said: ''It is simple to become universal.''

It is said thatThe Mona Lisa is the most famous painting

in the history of art.

Perhaps, the very symbol of painting itself.

We now understand a little bit why.

In this painting, Leonardo didn't limit himself

to creating a portrait.

He wanted, with a mysterious smile,

and a twilight landscape,

to express the wonder and fear he felt before creation.

The Mona Lisa is smiling,

and behind her is a tragic background.

But she smiles despite the tragedy.

And that was Leonardo's vision of the mystery of life.

Terrifying. Unfathomable. And yet, a source of wonder.

The Mona Lisa,

likeJohn the Baptist,

likeSaint Anne,

conveys everything that Leonardo wanted to express.

And that wonder is now ours.