Original subtitles

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

I can still see it.

CROWD SHOUTING

Easter Sunday, during Mass.

SHOUTING

LAUGHTER

My earliest memory...

..carved into my mind.

Our Lorenzo de' Medici

ordered the assassins be hunted down like dogs.

My father lifted me up

on his shoulders, so I could see.

CROWD CLAMOURING

What I saw was just what

de' Medici vengeance looked like.

SHE YELLS

I can still see that broken body

twitching on the end of his rope.

Even before I held

a chisel in my hand,

I knew that this world was not one of beauty and creation alone...

..but also, of blood and betrayal.

This was the world into which I was born.

The Renaissance is usually regarded as this beautiful period,

where everything is golden

and shiny,

but there is another side to it.

It's endlessly bloody and conflicted and violent,

and that's what the art responds to.

The art feeds off that.

Art is propaganda in the Renaissance.

Images are extraordinarily powerful.

In that respect, it's actually very modern.

This is really the age where patrons realise the power of art.

And once you start to mix art and money,

then it's a lethal cocktail.

Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael -

they are really the first superstar artists.

I am Michelangelo Buonarroti, artist and an old fool.

He lived for his art,

but it was almost like his vocation

was a sentence.

I've had so many paymasters -

bankers and princes,

cardinals and popes -

but what I did was always in the service of God

and in the pursuit of perfection.

Two things go hand-in-hand in the Renaissance -

a ruthlessness in politics and a true belief in the power of art.

But to really understand the Renaissance,

you have to tell the whole story.

BELLS CHIME

By God's providence, I was born a Florentine,

so that one of her own citizens could bring to absolute perfection

the achievements for which...

...she was already justly renowned.

15th-century Florence is famous for banking, trade

and, above all, the skill of its artists.

It's one of a multitude of

city-states which make up

the Italian Peninsula,

ruled by dukes, princes

and popes - all of them

in a near-constant state of war.

The Italian Peninsula's like

a massive chessboard,

with city-states all vying for power.

Different cities, at this time, are defined through

different things. So Venice is connected to trade with the East,

Milan very much a sort of powerhouse

of northern militarism. Florence is different.

Florence is the richest,

with a reputation as the cultural capital of Europe.

Florence is popping.

Art is flourishing, and art becomes

a synonym of the city

and an incredibly profitable trade.

It becomes the thing that everybody envies.

I love Florence.

Hmm.

We had more artists than butchers,

though some would have made better butchers, truth be told.

HE LAUGHS

The artists themselves

aren't exalted in the way that we exalt them now.

They were still, in fact, mostly treated as craftspeople

and were expected to act like tradesmen.

For Michelangelo's family, the job

of artist is a lowly ambition.

They come from an aristocratic family, so an artist is

at the very lowest social station

in a very hierarchical society.

There's a wonderful story about Michelangelo drawing on

his kitchen wall and his father beating him,

and this is probably true.

His father absolutely would not want him to become an artist.

This was my destiny.

God brought me into the world to show, with these hands,

how man might attain the perfection of art.

Stubborn and determined, the teenage Michelangelo defies his father

and lands a prestigious apprenticeship

in the San Marco sculpture garden in Florence.

When I entered that garden

and saw the works there and savoured their beauty,

I never wanted to leave.

I would stay all day there,

wrapped in my studies.

All artists learn by copying.

You start by copying sculpture.

You start by copying still things that aren't going to move.

Once he started drawing,

Michelangelo was an immensely talented draughtsman.

It's quite clear from early on that he was quite gifted.

It does show the shape of things to come.

As a boy, I could draw better than I do now.

There was little any teacher might have taught me.

Michelangelo has a very high regard

of his abilities

from a very, very early age.

He's also known to criticise other students about what they are doing

and how they could do it better.

This doesn't win him any friends.

I did nothing to warrant that boy's

violent outburst. Oh!

He could control neither his charcoal nor his fists.

Ignorant worm!

Competition among the young artists is fierce,

because of all the sculpture studios in Florence...

..this one belonged to the wealthiest

and most powerful patron in the city.

Not just Florence, but all the arts

owe a great debt to one man,

who understood the virtue and the value of art

better than anybody else...

..Lorenzo de' Medici.

The Magnificent.

Il Magnifico, as he was known.

Lorenzo is head of the vastly wealthy Medici family,

who ruled Florence for decades.

They're one of the most powerful families in Europe.

They are the pre-eminent bankers in Europe.

They've made their money through innovations

in finance and commerce. They're developing bills of exchange,

which are our equivalent to paper money.

This is really the seeds of what we would call early capitalism.

The Medici wielding all this power

can be seen a little bit as

a mafioso family during the Renaissance.

Nothing moved in that city without Medici approval.

Lorenzo has amassed a vast private art collection.

He also commissions new work.

He himself talks about the way in which he's invested

the equivalent of tens of millions into the arts,

and he says, this is worth it, because all of the great patrons

in this period know you spin your politics through art.

Back then, they don't have the exposure to images

that we have today. So when you walk into a church

and you see this incredible painting, it stays with you.

And it's telling a story about

who holds the power in that society.

Lorenzo de' Medici really understands the power of images

and understands how to use them.

And art is one of the central ways in which he promotes

the greatness of Florence and the greatness of the Medici.

The Medici understand the value of art.

But not just that, they also have taste.

They love beauty and they love talent,

and so they foster it.

Now, here was a man unique in all qualities of excellence,

to whom I owe such a great debt of gratitude.

Lorenzo saw my ambitious nature

and he had high hopes for me.

He provided for me a room in his house

and treated me like a son.

Lorenzo falls in love with

Michelangelo's art and his talent.

All of a sudden, he is part of the family.

In the Medici household,

Michelangelo is schooled in radical new ideas.

For hundreds of years,

the Catholic Church has dominated

the way art is made and what it can represent...

..but Michelangelo is born at a moment

when all that is beginning to change.

Scholars from the East, fleeing war and persecution, arrive in Italy,

bringing with them ancient texts and new ideas.

The Renaissance is, in fact, the rebirth. That's what it means.

Or Rinascimento in Italian. It means rebirth,

and the rebirth is of the classical ancient world.

The rediscovery of the pagan, pre-Christian world

is liberating and shocking.

Statues of Greek and Roman gods,

idealised human forms, and ideas

that focus on the human over the divine.

Books are coming in - through Constantinople - of Plato,

of Aristotle, of Quintilian, of all these other Greco-Roman writers,

literally kind of flooding the market,

and Florence is one of the first places that they hit.

It's an immense period of excitement.

Florence is like the Silicon Valley of the Renaissance.

This is a moment where everything comes together -

money, power, new ideas -

and Lorenzo de' Medici is right at the heart of that.

Nowhere else in Europe at that time do you have that many people

with money, with aspirations, trying to achieve something cultural.

And I think those two things together explain

why the Renaissance grows out of Italy.

Powerful men like Lorenzo

collect rare texts, antiquities

and treasures to show off

their wealth and intellectual superiority,

to literally own ancient wisdom.

I was treated with great affection by Il Magnifico.

He would send for me several times a day, show me his jewels,

his carnelians, his medals and...

..similar things, all of great value.

And every day, I would study my art

and show him the results of my efforts.

Alongside collecting ancient art,

Lorenzo collects new talent.

He uses his stable of artists

to glorify himself

and to be exchanged as a powerful commodity.

He's sending works of art, and he's even sending artists off

to other city-states

for diplomatic purposes.

Artists are being used in a really astute way by Lorenzo

as sort of pawns in a wider geopolitical game,

and he's very good at it.

Lorenzo identifies a Florentine artist down on his luck

and looking for patronage.

He's 23 years older than Michelangelo,

and his name is Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo has his workshop in Florence,

and he has a few commissions.

He's trying to get traction,

but he's not quite able to.

He's kind of late in finishing

his commissions and, sometimes, doesn't finish them at all.

He doesn't have a formal training,

but he insists this is not

an obstacle to being a good artist.

He thinks of himself as someone who studies nature first.

He calls himself "a disciple of experience".

He's part of a crowded market.

There are a lot of artists vying

for attention. He's by no means

seen as somebody who is the great genius.

Lorenzo sees an opportunity.

He introduces Leonardo to the Duke of Milan

and, in the process, makes a useful alliance for himself.

Leonardo was restless.

No wonder money was hard to come by!

But to turn, of all places, to Milan

and that Milanese barbarian, Ludovico Sforza - ha!

Ludovico Sforza rules the state

of Milan with an iron fist,

but his position is tenuous.

He is the regent, so will only stay in power until his nephew,

the rightful heir, comes of age.

Quite a lot of these city-states have kind of bully-boy families

that have clubbed and stabbed their way into power.

Those families were walking a precipice a lot of the time.

Sforza has built a reputation as a ruthless ruler,

but he has enemies on all sides.

As the northernmost Italian state,

Milan faces a threat from the

Kingdom of France to the north-west

and constant aggression

from rival states to the south.

Leonardo knows that the

Duke of Milan is always in battle,

fighting the other Italian city-states,

and so he realises that the best way to get a job

is not to say, "I can paint Madonnas"

but, instead, say, "I can make weapons of war".

He ends up writing what may be

the best job application letter in history.

It's, "Hey, I'm a really good engineer,

"so if you want somebody

"who understands warfare,

"if you want somebody who can

"build you a cannon, I'm your man."

He only mentions the fact that

"Yeah, I can decorate all your palaces too"

at the end of the letter.

I think Sforza gets exactly what he wants,

and especially at that point when it's looking like

the whole peninsula is just going to explode into war.

Leonardo joins Sforza's court

in Milan and pleases his patron

with everything from war machines to theatrical stage sets.

He's also given free rein to immerse himself in study and invention,

and to enjoy the intellectual freedom of Renaissance ideas.

Like many other Renaissance artists,

Leonardo really is starting to look at things with new eyes.

People like Leonardo are reading text which is saying,

"Look at the world around you. Look at the natural world.

"Look at the body that we are given.

"Look at the heavens around you.

"Study them, analyse them." Now, for an artist,

this is just...this is catnip. This is brilliant.

He's doing experiments,

studying mathematics,

then applying it to art.

He's understanding perspective.

He studied how the wings of birds

move up and down.

He's dissecting human corpses.

His curiosity and his talents

are so broad.

He has the mind of a kind of magpie on speed.

Of course, a court artist has

small commissions that he has to do,

in order to please the Duke,

and one of them is the portrait of Ludovico's lover.

Leonardo takes the opportunity

of painting this portrait

to show what he has learned.

Leonardo has this theory that

the body reacts to the emotions

and moves accordingly.

It is the portrait of a reaction -

not an action, but a reaction.

You feel that Ludovico Sforza

has just opened the door to see his mistress,

and you see her twisting.

You see the mind moving, and you can

almost feel the body moving,

so you can almost feel

what she's thinking.

The ermine represents Ludovico.

He sits on her lap and is stroked by her, this beautiful animal.

This is an act of intimacy between the two lovers.

Lady with an Ermine is an absolute

breakthrough in art.

Suddenly, paintings aren't just

two-dimensional, flat things.

He's making it into a narrative.

Suddenly, the artist is not just

somebody turning out a commission

as a tradesperson would.

It's an artist expressing himself.

There's a magical aura, I think,

which is starting to build up around the artist.

So, "We have Leonardo. He will make extraordinary things for us."

Word reaches Florence of Leonardo's success in Milan.

For the young Michelangelo,

this sets the bar for what an artist can achieve.

Leonardo da Vinci. Huh!

A man to admire, yes.

When I first saw his work, I was astonished.

He could capture beauty and grace like no other.

He had a mind for innovation.

My path was very different to his.

Not to remake the world,

but to capture the essence of God's creation.

But the young Michelangelo

is yet to make anything for a paying patron.

For now, he's the favourite apprentice in Lorenzo's household

and mixing with some of the greatest thinkers of the day.

This is another thing Lorenzo de' Medici is collecting.

He's collecting intellectuals.

These are the most brilliant people

of their time. They knew they were

doing something new and exciting,

and they were liberating their minds and liberating their ideas.

I would say that two years in the Medici household

is something like an entire Oxford education.

I grew up in Lorenzo's household.

I joined his table, at which, as befits such a man,

personages of the highest nobility were seated every day.

Around the table is Poliziano.

Agnolo Poliziano is THE pre-eminent scholar of his day.

So, therefore, you're getting in with the big boys, as it were.

It's more than likely that Poliziano

was, in fact, homosexual.

Living in the Medici household and being surrounded by these people

was probably allowing Michelangelo the freedom and the liberation

to explore his own sexuality, which is probably confused at this moment,

but nonetheless, he has a proclivity

to an interest in homosexual relations.

Michelangelo is gay.

I'll just say it!

Historical records tell us that same-sex relationships,

homosexuality, was very widespread in Florence at the time.

If you really venerate Greek culture and Roman culture

and you've noticed that they also think that men and boys

are incredibly beautiful, it does give you that legitimacy

that it's more highbrow than people might like

to think it is, because the Ancient Greeks were doing it.

But Michelangelo is

deeply conflicted, because he was

deeply devout, as most people were.

Sodomy was one of the great sins of the Church.

People were actually executed for this.

There was a whole office called Officers of the Night,

who would condemn these people.

The Office for the Night gets some really big names to their tally.

Leonardo da Vinci is accused.

No charges are brought.

Up to half of all Florentine men

are being accused of homosexuality

throughout the 15th century.

So I imagine Michelangelo not really understanding what on earth

was going on there - understanding the beauty and appreciating it,

but also being really scared for his soul.

While in the Medici household, Michelangelo is given

his first chance to carve the male body in stone.

The scholar Poliziano is the one that suggests this theme

of the Battle of the Centaurs to Michelangelo,

and this is one of Michelangelo's earliest works.

I've never tried anything like it before.

It was the greatest thrill of my young life.

HE CHUCKLES

What Michelangelo is doing

is thinking about the male form.

What we see is bodies writhing

and enmeshed together.

They're all entangled in a bit of a mess.

It's hard to unpick which one's legs

belong to which one's arms.

Michelangelo is fascinated by

the structure of men's bodies

and how to reproduce them in a classical way.

For me, the Battle of the Centaurs,

and those rippling muscles under the skin, but also,

in the interlocking of bodies, one to the other,

is this energetic flow,

and he manages to make the body

into a vehicle of God's work.

God made man in his image.

Not woman. Woman was made from a bit of man.

But man was made in God's image.

God must have a body like a man.

Therefore, the male body is also holy and spiritual

and beautiful and deserving of worship.

Renaissance artists returned to it again and again and again -

this beautifully-sculptured, buffed body, all beautifully in proportion,

the face in proportion -

because to be perfect

brings you closer to God.

Now, I don't say this to boast, I'm a modest man...

..but I did do it well.

This was my destiny.

In Milan, Leonardo's patron,

Ludovico Sforza, is tightening his grip on power.

He has the rightful heir,

his own nephew, poisoned,

and takes permanent control.

He has to justify his power.

He has to solidify his power.

He's gotten there by all sorts of

nefarious means. It's not

some great hereditary dukedom.

Sforza knows an effective ruler

needs not just brute force,

but propaganda.

He wants art that shows Milan, and the rest of the world,

he's a ruler to be reckoned with.

So he commissions his in-house artist, Leonardo, to make him

a magnificent public statue to glorify the Sforza name.

For the Sforza, it's about a big, commanding display.

To have an iconic image

of an imperial figure on a big rearing horse,

that's very Greco-Roman, it's very in-your-face.

It says, "I'm going to trample all over you."

Sforza wanted more than flattery.

He wanted art to rival a Roman emperor.

HE CHUCKLES

What a piece of work it could have been, a colossus!

He wants it to be eight metres tall,

and it's 70 tons of bronze.

It's a monster.

Leonardo does incredible drawings

that show the legs,

the faces of each horse.

He even dissects some horses,

so he can see the muscles

underneath the skin.

How you cast that in bronze is

an unbelievably difficult challenge.

Nobody's done it before.

You start by making a clay model.

This is what Leonardo creates. People talk about it

and say it's the most amazing thing that they've ever seen.

And it's exciting for the Sforza because Ludovico

can think, "I'm going to get something that nobody else has got."

But politics intervenes.

For years, France has been

eyeing Italy's wealth,

and tensions are escalating.

Milan sits at the gateway to Italy,

and Sforza sees an opportunity.

He makes a power play.

Sforza thinks he can do a deal with the French

which would make the Milanese basically power brokers in Italy,

but it's an incredibly dangerous game.

He invites the French to effectively invade,

and it wreaks havoc.

The French basically just push their way right through central Italy

and the Sforza just can't control it.

Ludovico needs the bronze that he's allocated

for the statue for munitions,

so Leonardo has it literally snatched out of his hand.

Leonardo's just then left with the clay cast.

And eventually, when the French get to town, they use it

for target practice with their arrows, so it gets destroyed.

Poor Leonardo.

It must have crushed him to realise

his horse would never be cast in bronze. Hmm.

Still, it brought him even greater fame.

I hoped, one day, it might be MY name that everyone spoke of.

It was God who showed me the way.

To emulate Leonardo, Michelangelo befriends the prior

of a local church hospital in Florence

and is initiated into an area of study still seen as taboo.

The prior there was a good friend to me.

He provided me with a room

and with corpses...

..for the study of anatomy.

Nothing could have given me greater pleasure.

He is given free rein, quietly, to dissect.

He writes about it later and says

he's sort of physically sickened by it,

but he's also compelled by it.

He's not the first to do this.

Leonardo had done this years earlier.

But Michelangelo takes this opportunity,

I suppose, in many ways, to try to prove he, too, could do dissections.

Leonardo's truly interested in how

the body works on the interior.

Michelangelo's interested in understanding how muscles

and bones react on the surface,

so he can reproduce it

in a more beautiful way.

What both artists are doing

is trying to get closer to God.

Anybody looks at Michelangelo

and you can see the impact, clearly,

of him slicing into a cadaver

and working out literally how muscles work.

And that, I think, must have been

a very transformative moment for him. He's still very young,

and it clearly stays with him throughout the rest of his work.

And he's a sculptor. You know, that's what he's doing.

You know, he's turning...

To put it bluntly, he's turning stone into flesh.

BELL CHIMES

But then my chance of making something of myself

was suddenly diminished.

Lorenzo the Magnificent departed this life.

Michelangelo is bereft

at the death of Lorenzo, his patron, his benefactor, his friend.

At the end of the day, he became part of the family.

He was living with them, and Lorenzo was the person that took care of him

and discovered him and fostered his career.

I returned first to my father's house.

But I suffered such anguish over Lorenzo's death

that for many days, I...

..I was unable to do anything at all.

Lorenzo's son Piero succeeds him,

but he is a hopeless ruler,

and it becomes clear that beneath the glittering facade,

the city's coffers are empty.

There's a sense in which Florence has had this amazing sort of

flowering of art, of culture, of conspicuous consumption,

and suddenly, it really comes to an end with Lorenzo's death.

For decades, the Medici had been lending

to increasingly profligate European rulers and princes and emperors.

Well, those people aren't going to repay you,

and that's what's happened. It's all become

sort of completely out of control.

What you're left with is a political vacuum,

and also, a sort of moral vacuum.

It was only a matter of time

before the people turned against the Medici.

And Piero had his father's name, but...

..none of his charisma,

none of his virtue. He just was not

capable of...guiding Florence

through the gathering storm.

Into the vacuum steps a religious zealot,

Girolamo Savonarola.

He's come to Florence to take a stand against sin and excess,

and his sermons are hypnotising large crowds.

I've seen him preach.

Phwoah-ho-ho! He...

He was a...a powerful, frightening speaker.

After all these years, the memory

of that vivid voice remains in my mind.

He has a high-pitched voice.

His accent, from Ferrara, annoys the people who listen to him,

and yet, he manages to rise to the top.

And the reason is simple -

the people understand what he's saying.

Florence appears to be the wealthy city,

but the people don't see much of that wealth.

People feel that they've been betrayed, and Savonarola says that

that is through the dishonesty of the bankers

and through the corruption of the Church.

He's the classic populist. What he's actually doing is saying,

"There's something wrong with Florence.

"She is no longer a godlike city.

"Believe in me, and I can get you out of this mess."

It's an absolutely extraordinary shift from Lorenzo

and all the art and all the luxury

to this real ground-zero religious zealotry of Savonarola.

But it speaks to the people,

many of whom, of course, have not had a Renaissance.

They have not been having a wonderful time.

They've been dealing with failing harvests and perpetual warfare.

So somebody who says, "I can lead you to a new Jerusalem,"

you can see why people are seduced by it and go with it.

Savonarola seizes a chance

to turn popularity into power.

Thanks to Ludovico Sforza in Milan,

the French Army has been marching

south through Italy and are at

the gates of Florence.

Savonarola rides out to meet them.

He persuades the pious French King to spare the city,

and promises to cleanse it of its sins.

He expels the remaining Medici and takes control.

The city belonged to Savonarola.

Perhaps Florence is being punished for all of her sins.

What Lorenzo had built was no more.

It's not a good time for artists any more.

Savonarola is really a great example of cancel culture.

He just decides that all the art done beforehand represents

the lasciviousness of the previous Florence, the Florence before him.

The only type of art that he would permit would be religious art.

Michelangelo, up until that moment,

has been a favourite of the Medici.

You know, his career is looking really good.

He's doing dissections on human bodies.

This is exactly the kind of thing

that Savonarola thinks is the devil's work.

This is the moment in time when Michelangelo realises

that this is not the city for him.

I had no choice. If I was to pursue my destiny, I had to leave Florence.

I had to imagine

making my way elsewhere...

..just as Leonardo had done.

Desperate for work and money,

Michelangelo agrees to take part in a deception.

He carves a statue that will be passed off as an antiquity.

You'll have to trust me.

It was entirely convincing, of course.

The statue was bought by

Cardinal Riario in Rome.

He realises it's a fake,

but is so impressed, he tracks the artist down.

He promised me that if I went with him to Rome,

he would offer me the widest

possible field in which

to demonstrate my abilities.

Thus, I left Florence

and made my way, for the first time in my life...

..to Rome.

Rome has a new Pope.

Alexander VI, from the ruthless and ambitious family the Borgias,

has a reputation for extravagance and debauchery.

Rome is as corrupt as Florence may have been, in Savonarola's mind.

Alexander VI had a notoriously wild reputation,

an interest in classical antiquity too,

but as an excuse to indulge in the excesses

of classical antiquity - parties and orgies.

Without Lorenzo to guide him,

Michelangelo must navigate

the treacherous world of patronage.

He's taken on by the Cardinal, who is close to the Pope,

to make a marble sculpture for the grounds of his new palace.

It's Michelangelo's first full-scale commission.

He's been asked to imitate the classical past,

but to innovate as well and do something new.

This is an immense opportunity for Michelangelo,

and he just suddenly comes up with one of the masterpieces

of the world and carves a Bacchus.

Bacchus is the god of wine,

and what Michelangelo does

is produce this...

It's a sort of woozily erotic image.

The Bacchus, he's stumbling.

He's about to spill the cup of wine.

His eyes are sort of almost crossed,

and he has in his hair grape leaves.

It's very sexy, but it's not

classically muscly sexy.

The Bacchus figure has got a little bit of a tummy.

It's all so homoerotic.

The Bacchus is precisely the proper figure for Michelangelo

to carve for this worldly Cardinal,

who's putting on these kinds of parties in Rome,

but it comes at the wrong moment.

Alexander VI's son is found murdered.

His body is pulled from the River Tiber,

and the Pope is stricken with grief.

Alexander thinks the death of his favourite son is a punishment

for his sins, and now he has to not only reform his own life,

but that of the whole papal court.

Cardinals shouldn't have lavish parties.

Cardinals shouldn't keep bawdy company.

This is very awkward for Cardinal Riario.

By the time that Michelangelo finishes the Bacchus,

it's suddenly not acceptable

for Cardinal Riario to place this

in the centre of his beautiful palace.

Michelangelo's captured

that decadent world of Rome,

of, you know, parties, of drunkenness.

He's almost rent the veil of what's happening.

But he goes too far, and the Cardinal rejects it,

says he doesn't want it, and this is a disaster.

It's an absolute disaster for Michelangelo.

That the Cardinal had little understanding or enjoyment

of sculpture was abundantly clear.

Michelangelo's furious. And of course, he's going to tell

this story that the Cardinal had no taste,

that he didn't understand Michelangelo.

With the Bacchus, Michelangelo must learn quite an important lesson.

Rome is a place of great opportunity,

but it's an environment that's fickle.

You've not only got the taste of the day, what people are interested in,

but you've also got the mood of the papal court.

The commission that might have launched Michelangelo's career

now threatens to poison it.

The Cardinal abandons him

and Michelangelo is out of work once again.

Rome is much more cut-throat even than Florence, in a way,

so he's got to tread really carefully from now on.

He does not have autonomy over how he makes his work.

If he wants to get more work, he has to please the patron.

My father demanded I return to Florence.

There's nothing left for me there.

I had news from Milan.

HE SIGHS

Leonardo had gone from

strength to strength. He'd won a commission from

the Sforza greater than ever before.

Ludovico Sforza was double-crossed by the French

in his last bid for power.

Now, he switches sides.

He forges an alliance

with other city-states

to drive the French out of Italy.

But his strategic blunder

has cost him.

He needs to repair his reputation.

He wants a big statement about his authority

and a sense of almost his divine authority as ruler of Milan.

An obvious way of doing this is a large,

almost like a sort of billboard poster

for a mausoleum for his family -

in this case, of The Last Supper, an iconic religious image.

Leonardo uses

every one of his talents -

the mathematics of perspective,

the brilliance of stagecraft,

how people's faces

reflect their emotions,

and how you can put a narrative into a painting.

As Jesus says, "One of you shall betray me,"

and you see it ripple outward.

You see each one of the people

performing this narrative scene.

The Last Supper measures over

four metres high

and almost nine metres wide.

This is an example of Leonardo's

incredible control of geometry,

incredible control of the composition.

The head of Christ is the point

where all the perspective lines converge,

and the composition is an interlocking

of pyramids and triangles.

There is this geometric repetition

that makes the whole composition balanced and beautiful.

As Leonardo's doing the painting,

it's clear it's going to be sensational,

and people start coming to just

stand there and watch him paint.

And when it's finished...

..it's obviously gorgeous,

and Leonardo moves to a new level of fame.

Uh...

After all these years away from Florence,

Leonardo had found his own way.

His fame spread across all of Italy.

My name was barely even a whisper.

HE SIGHS

I was nothing.

Then Michelangelo gets

a second chance to make his name.

The French have withdrawn from Italy,

but their ambassador stays in Rome,

and he's spotted Michelangelo's potential.

Even though the Bacchus is rejected by the Cardinal

and put into a garden and sort of becomes a public figure, in a way,

so there's a French Cardinal who recognised that this is a carver

of talent, and he commissions Michelangelo to carve a Pieta.

There have been previous Pietas

in the past, so the subject matter

is not a new one.

Pieta means "pity" or "sorrow".

It's an image of the dead Christ

in the lap of the Virgin.

I think this piece is make or break for Michelangelo,

because you can't fail twice.

Written into my contract with the French ambassador

were these very words,

my Pieta would be

"the most beautiful work of marble

"in Rome, one that

"no living artist could better."

Michelangelo selects the finest marble from

a quarry in Tuscany for his Pieta.

On his way back to Rome, he stops in his home town of Florence

and is appalled by what he sees.

MAN SHOUTS THUMPING

His beloved Florence has gone from being

the cradle of the Renaissance

to being a really austere and forbidding place.

Savonarola is becoming increasingly puritan and strident.

Homosexuality is condemned

and punishable by imprisonment,

torture and even death.

SHOUTING

Savonarola employed a gang of thugs.

They go around Florence, arresting people.

Anyone committing sodomy is in danger, but also,

anybody who is immodestly dressed,

anybody who is blaspheming. There's a couple of examples of them

having their tongues cut out for that.

It must be absolutely terrifying to be in Florence at this time.

Savonarola believes that many of the works of art that were produced

in this period were against God and should, in fact, be destroyed.

And of course, this is what leads to what we now know as

the Bonfire of the Vanities.

Savonarola gets together a little army of about 6,000 boys,

who run from house to house, asking the people to give them furniture,

paintings, works of art,

anything which would detract them from the Christian life.

He invites the people to bring them to the public square,

where they can be burned.

From being the most cultured,

in the forefront of the Italian Renaissance,

suddenly, Florence is like a fundamentalist theocracy,

and it is a really terrifying period of time.

I think Savonarola produces a great crisis for Michelangelo

because he's devout. His religious beliefs are very sincere.

What Savonarola stood for resonated with me.

I, too, sought an honest relationship with God,

to be true to Him in all I did

and to honour the talent He had given me.

He does indeed wonder,

has God, in fact, been erased from the picture,

in terms of the reason why he's creating the art in the first place?

What I'd seen in Florence strengthened my resolve.

My Pieta must be true to the emotion...

..of a mother

cradling her dying son.

I knew that God had intended for me to do this work.

I was emboldened and clear-sighted.

I would make something

of such great and rare beauty

that no-one who saw it...

..would not be moved to pity.

Why is it that the Pieta

is such a powerful vehicle for him?

Well, I think it's to do with the fundamental challenge of sculpture.

How do you make inert matter live?

Michelangelo produces, for me,

one of the most extraordinary

and moving pieces of art

in the entire Renaissance.

I remember first going to Rome and seeing it myself

and I...I could not believe it,

the power of that image could be created through marble.

I just... I was completely stunned by it.

There's not a chisel mark

to be seen.

It's absolutely beautiful.

It's like Christ isn't even dead

because his veins are still up.

It looks like he's asleep.

Michelangelo is the most

unbelievable technician in the world.

I mean, look at her hand,

projecting into the air.

This is the most difficult thing

in the world to carve.

Every single finger is at a different angle,

separated. And that hand

offers us the body of her son.

And she's so serene.

The grief that I can associate with losing your son

isn't on her face at all.

Maybe it's more about that quiet

moment of being with her son.

It's not Christ. It's not anybody else. It's her son.

In that quiet moment, is she somehow

saying to God,

"This is my everything,

"and I'm giving him to you"?

So touching.

It's impossible not to be touched by the...by the work.

I merely liberated my Pieta from that block of stone.

Through this work, I acquired great fame and reputation,

so much that already,

in the opinion of the world,

I had not only surpassed every man

of my time and of the time before,

but I had even rivalled the ancients.

This is the actual moment

that Michelangelo makes it.

This is the arrival on the big stage,

the moment when he realises just how powerful art can be.

The fact that he carves his name

into this piece

I think says something about his belief in how powerful it is.

I think he knows he's done something

truly exceptional, even for him.

He's saying, "This is me. Nobody else can do this."

He's saying, "I am the artist. I've arrived.

"The artist known as Michelangelo is here."

Michelangelo's rivalry with Leonardo boils over,

a young upstart threatens to eclipse him,

and he takes on a monumental

challenge that could make

or break him.

No-one had the courage

to lay a hand to it.

I had the courage,

and I wanted it.