All language subtitles for Leo2

Major funding

for "Leonardo da Vinci" was provided by

the better angels
society and its members:

The Paul and saundra montrone family,

Stephen a. Schwarzman,

Diane and hal brierley,
Carol and ned spieker,

and these additional members.

Funding was also provided
by Gilbert s. Omenn

and Martha darling,

the Alfred p. Sloan foundation,

the Robert and Mercedes
eichholz foundation,

the corporation for public broadcasting

and by contributions to your pbs station

from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Can looking back push us forward?

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The ancients described man

as the world in miniature

because, inasmuch
as man is composed of

earth, water, air, and fire,

his body resembles that of the planet;

and as man has in him bones,

the supports and framework of his flesh,

the world has its rocks,
the supports of the earth;

as man has in him a
pool of blood in which

the lungs rise and fall in breathing,

so the body of the
earth has its ocean tide,

which likewise rises
and falls every 6 hours,

as if the world breathed.

There is a very ancient
idea which he adopts

and develops very strongly,

and that is the relationship of
the microcosm and the macrocosm.

The microcosm is our body,

the macrocosm is the
whole system out there,

including the body of
the earth, as he put it.

What Leonardo does
is to give it visual power.

He can draw bits of the body;
He can draw bits of the earth.

And once he draws them, the analogy is

graphically illustrated.

So, he gives the microcosm
a completely new birth,

lease of life, and it's a visual lease of life.

There are certain supreme figures

in the life of our
civilization, who fascinate us

in part because they seem to
belong to two worlds at once.

Shakespeare's like that.
Bach, among musicians,

is very much like
that... in many respects,

a man of the past,

in many other respects, a visionary

of the musical future.

And Leonardo is perhaps
supreme amongst all of that kind.

He is someone who in many
respects is a pre-scientific

and, therefore, pre-modern thinker.

So, in lots of ways, he still belongs

to the world of antiquity.

At the same time, his
intellectual freedom,

his dissatisfaction with received wisdom,

that restlessness is very much part of

the modern spirit.

It's very much part of the scientific spirit.

The governor of the
castle taken prisoner.

Visconti carried away and his son killed.

The Duke has lost his
state, property, and Liberty,

and none of his projects
have been completed.

On April 10, 1500, ludovico sforza,

Leonardo da Vinci's patron
for more than a decade,

was captured and imprisoned
by the French army of Louis xii.

By then, Leonardo had
already left for venice

with his friend, the
mathematician Luca pacioli.

Along the way, he
had stopped in mantua,

where he made a
drawing of Isabella d'este,

a sophisticated and
influential patron of the arts

who wished to add a work
by Leonardo to her collection.

She would hound him
for years for a painting

that he would never make.

Leonardo stayed
barely a month in venice,

then headed south to Tuscany.

In the decades ahead, he would broaden

his scientific inquiries,
secure the perfect patron,

and pour the sum of his
knowledge into a masterpiece

that would become the most
famous painting of all time.

In the years since
Leonardo had left Florence,

the city had turned away from
the openness that had made it

the center of the renaissance.

Mired in a seemingly endless
conflict with neighboring pisa

and facing an economic collapse,

florentines had expelled their
ruler, piero de' medici, in 1494

and embraced a fiery, silver-tongued

Dominican friar and reformer,

who believed that
god spoke through him.

Girolamo savonarola
had excoriated the Vatican

for its corruption and
warned the people of Florence

to cease their decadent
ways or face the wrath of god.

"Repent, o Florence," he
urged them, "before it is too late."

Savonarola was a powerful preacher

because he understood
the power of the word.

And he knew how to
use it to scare people,

to say you've gone too far.

The vanity, the costumes,
the jewelry, the festivities,

the art representing human
feelings instead of god.

And there is a moment
where people follow him,

because they're afraid,
because superstition

is still very strong.

His followers had gathered paintings,

carnival masks, perfumes, dice games,

mirrors, and other items
they considered vanities,

piled them in the piazza della
signoria, and set them ablaze.

But by 1498, Florence
had grown weary of

savonarola's piety and prophecies

and condemned him as a heretic.

He was hanged and
burned in the piazza.

The Florence that
Leonardo came back to

was, sadly, a different one
from the one he had left in 1482,

not least because many of
the people that he had known,

such as domenico
ghirlandaio and verrocchio,

were deceased by this
point, but also there had been

a kind of brain drain
in Florence in the 1490s

largely because of girolamo savonarola.

Leonardo's father, ser piero, 74 years old

and still a practicing notary,
lived with his fourth wife

and their children in Florence's

San pier maggiore neighborhood.

The artist took up residence nearby

at the church of santissima annunziata,

whose monks, longtime
clients of ser piero,

commissioned Leonardo
to paint an altarpiece

depicting Mary, the baby Jesus,

and Mary's mother, Saint
Anne, for their chapel.

Once again, he seemed in
no rush to satisfy his patrons.

"The life of Leonardo is
unsettled and in disarray,"

one cleric said.

"His priority is geometry and he has

very little Patience for the brush."

Mathematics was
hardly his only distraction.

In the hills south of town, he sketched

the villa of a wealthy florentine merchant.

He advised one church
on how to overhaul

their drainage system

and another on how to reconstruct

their bell tower, which had
collapsed in an earthquake.

He also visited the remains

of emperor hadrian's villa near Rome.

Leonardo eventually produced
a full-scale preparatory drawing

of the virgin and child with
Saint Anne, which is now lost.

But when the cartoon, as it was called,

was exhibited for two days
at santissima annunziata,

it created an enormous sensation.

"Men and women, young and
old, flocked in solemn procession

to see the wonders of Leonardo,"

his biographer Giorgio vasari wrote.

"The entire population was astounded."

Though he once again failed to deliver

the finished painting,
Leonardo would continue

to explore the theme

of the Madonna and
Christ with Saint Anne,

producing a second cartoon

featuring John the baptist as a child,

and eventually a painting.

On April 15, 1502,
Leonardo turned 50 years old.

Again in search of a
patron, he attached himself

to another strongman in need

of a military engineer and cartographer.

Cesare borgia, the ruthless
son of pope Alexander vi

and commander of the papal troops,

was planning a campaign
to bring romagna,

an unruly territory east of
Florence, under his control.

Borgia is the opportunist,

almost gangster warlord,

of the outlying territories of the romagna.

He suddenly takes over
this huge swathe of territory,

becomes a sort of a player

in the power politics of the
peninsula almost overnight.

While the rest of Florence fretted

that borgia would soon
turn up at the city's gates

with his army,

Leonardo set out to join his new patron.

Traveling the countryside,
Leonardo sketched

a sunlit copse of trees.

A body illuminated by solar rays

passing between the
thick branches of trees

will produce as many shadows

as there are branches
between the sun and itself.

Make a Harmony from
the different falls of water,

as you saw at the fountain of rimini

on the 8th of August 1502.

This is how grapes are carried in cesena.

In the towns and villages seized by

borgia's army, Leonardo
surveyed the fortifications,

pacing off distances
and using a compass

to determine the measurements.

He also gathered topographical
data and drew meticulous maps

featuring the hills and mountains,

lakes and rivers of eastern Tuscany.

By fall, Leonardo had reached imola,

a well-fortified town on the edge

of the a pen nine
mountains, where borgia

had established his headquarters.

He was joined there by a young diplomat

whom the republic of
Florence had sent to assess

borgia's intentions... niccolo machiavelli.

That winter, while borgia
brutally put down uprisings

and machiavelli kept Florence informed

with carefully worded dispatches,

Leonardo produced a
detailed overhead map of imola.

And Leonardo comes up with his

best military invention,
which is not a machine,

it's an aerial view map.

Because he knows that information

is the most important
weapon you can have.

He didn't have a plane to do it,

but Leonardo paces around the town

and figures out how it
would look from above.

In early 1503, borgia took Siena,

but when his father,
pope Alexander vi, died,

the new pope had borgia arrested.

He was expelled from Italy
and eventually murdered

in an ambush in Spain.

Niccolo machiavelli
would one day compose

an influential treatise on political power

informed in part by his
astute observations of borgia.

Though it is not known how
much Leonardo had seen

while in borgia's service,

he was certainly aware
of war's violent toll.

War is "bestial madness," he wrote.

In the spring of 1503,

Leonardo returned again to Florence,

where he purchased a small
farm in the hills above the city.

Later that year, he began a portrait

of the wife of francesco del giocondo,

a prosperous silk merchant.

He also pursued a new project
that allowed him to explore

one of his lifelong passions... water.

So, his, entire life of Leonardo,

he was compiling 7 different indices

of a treatise, a very ambitious treatise,

that he wanted to devote to water.

And he's so much intrigued by water

that he also tried to understand
its molecular structure.

Observe the motion
of the water's surface,

which resembles that of
hair, and has two motions:

One follows the flow of the surface,

the other forms the lines of the Eddies.

Water is also important
as a field in which

he can develop models to
control the energy of water.

Water can be disastrous for men.

Men cannot live without water,

but he has to keep control of that.

At machiavelli's behest,

the republic of Florence hired
Leonardo to draw military maps

and advise on a major
engineering project

involving the arno river.

Florence was now plotting to retake

the strategically important city of pisa,

which straddled the mouth of
the arno 45 miles to the west.

Machiavelli hoped to divert the river

and deny pisa access to the sea.

Leonardo calculated that it would take

1.3 million man-hours to
dig a ditch large enough

to change the arno's course.

He devised this idea
of diverting the arno,

and people went out and dug channels.

They actually implemented
this at great cost.

And it didn't work.

Leonardo was not the
sole author of the scheme,

but it couldn't have done
his reputation much good.

I think it heightened his
sense that rather than

trying to say to the arno, "I
want you to go down there,"

you actually had to do very subtle things

to make it flow in the
direction that you wanted.

The river, if it is to be diverted

from one place to another,

must be coaxed and not
treated roughly or with violence.

Leonardo also designed a canal

that would bypass the
arno's unnavigable stretches

and give Florence access to the sea.

In 1502, florentine-born
navigator amerigo vespucci

had returned from a
trans-Atlantic voyage

and declared that the land
he had reached was not Asia

but a separate continent.

Leonardo's canal would
have allowed the republic

to directly participate

in explorations of the new world,

but work on the costly
project never began.

Though neither of
Leonardo's ambitious ideas

for taming the arno river were realized,

he soon began compiling his
observations and conclusions

on water dynamics,
geology, and astronomy

for a treatise in which he would
attempt to understand the forces

that had shaped the
earth over many eons.

That fall, the republic hired him to paint

a monumental fresco to adorn one wall

in the city's enormous grand council hall,

where members of
the ruling signoria met.

It would be 3 times larger
than "the last supper,"

commemorating Florence's
triumph over Milan

on the plain of anghiari
more than 60 years earlier.

The battle of anghiari was a battle

just within living memory in
which a heavily outnumbered

florentine troop defeated
the milanese army.

And Leonardo was
presumably expected to produce

a stirring battle scene

with ranks of horsemen
and bold captains.

He was given a studio in a suite of rooms

reserved for papal visits

at the church of Santa Maria novella.

While laborers erected scaffolding

and covered his
windows to diffuse the light

so he could begin his cartoon,

Leonardo jotted down
compositional ideas,

created models of soldiers in wax,

and filled a notebook

with sketches of horses in various poses.

Now, he also gives us a description

of how to do a battle.

And he describes everything
that's going on in the battle.

He then says, "you've got to calculate

the dust in the air and how
it's brighter above than below."

First you must represent the smoke

of artillery mingling in the air

with the dust tossed up by the movement

of horses and combatants.

The dust, being a thing
of earth, has weight;

it is the finest part that rises highest;

so that part will be least visible

and will seem almost
the same color as the air.

This is extraordinary description

of how to do a battle, and I've likened it

to a visual layout of what you do in a film.

And even a film would find
it hard to capture all that.

Some might be shown disarmed

and beaten down by the enemy,

turning upon the foe,
with teeth and nails,

to take an inhuman and bitter revenge.

You might see some riderless
horse rushing among the enemy,

his mane flying in the wind,

and wreaking destruction
with his hooves.

And there must not be a
single spot of flat ground

that is not trampled with Gore.

Leonardo was very keen on articulating

the pazzia bestialissima, as he calls war.

It's really madness.

And so, the horses and the figures

begin to have similar expressions

of great fierceness.

And he works very closely

at making these
comparisons of physiognomy.

On the 9th of July 1504,
Wednesday, at 7:00,

died ser piero Da Vinci,

notary at the palazzo del podesta,

my father aged 80 years,

leaving behind 10
sons and two daughters.

Ser piero had secured

his son Leonardo's apprenticeship

in the workshop of Andrea del verrocchio

and, later, helped him to get

some of his most
important commissions,

but there's almost no evidence

of how Leonardo felt about his father.

There was no will. Born out of wedlock,

he was not entitled by
law to any inheritance.

His half-siblings made
sure he received nothing.

Leonardo returned to
his epic battle scene.

In the late summer of
1504, Florence's signoria

commissioned a second mural
for the council's meeting hall.

The new assignment went
to a talented and prickly

young artist, who, at 29 years old,

had already carved several sculptures

that would become among
the best-known works

of the renaissance.

Michele agnolo di lodovico buonarroti

had briefly been apprenticed

to the great florentine master ghirlandaio

and had enjoyed the
patronage of Lorenzo de' medici

before moving to Rome, where
he'd sculpted a breathtaking

marble virgin and
Christ called the "pietà,"

and signed it, an audacious and nearly

unheard-of gesture in his day.

In a letter to his father,
Michelangelo claimed

that he had made the
"impossible, possible."

He had then returned
to Florence only to find

that it was Leonardo whose homecoming

was the talk of the town.

Michelangelo had a
pretty brutal personality;

he was very solitary, given to moods.

I mean, very passionate
man, very secretive.

And so, it's the complete
antithesis of Leonardo.

But Michelangelo's next work,

a 17-foot-tall marble colossus of David,

would become an enduring
symbol of civic pride for Florence.

Do not make all the muscles

in your figures prominent,

because muscles are
not visible unless the limbs

in which they are situated
are exerting great force.

Otherwise, you will have
depicted a sack of walnuts

rather than the human form.

At a meeting to discuss where.

Michelangelo's statue
would be displayed,

Leonardo suggested, "it should be placed

in the loggia... Behind a low wall."

The committee disagreed.

The "David" would go
outside the main entrance

to Florence's city hall.

Leonardo not only wants to sideline.

Michelangelo's "David,"
but he wants to sideline

Michelangelo as well.

And so, he's a bit of a dissenting voice

in that committee, because
everyone else is really,

as they would be, impressed
by this huge, more than life-size

sculpture of the muscular "David."

And so, Leonardo had had to cope

with this great genius who
is at the height of his powers

and really able to pull off the colossal.

And I do believe that Leonardo
had a crisis of confidence.

Concerned by Leonardo's slow pace

on "the battle of anghiari,"

the republic of Florence demanded

that he begin painting right away.

On Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour,

I began painting.

As I made the first brushstroke,

the weather turned
and the court bell rang,

calling men to judgment.

And immediately it began raining,

and poured until evening.

And it was like night.

Leonardo has to get things right.

He looks at nature, and
it's a complicated system.

Optically it's complicated,

in terms of movement it's complicated,

and he wants his
painting to do everything.

But, of course, to have this level

of obeying natural
law in all its complexity,

to have this ability to
deal with movement,

the psychological movement
and the physical movement,

ultimately, it's an impossible agenda.

That fall, just as the central scene

of Leonardo's mural
had begun to take shape

on the west wall of the council hall,

he stopped painting, abandoning
yet another commission.

It's unlikely Michelangelo ever began

the mural he had been assigned
to paint on the opposite wall;

only another artist's copy
of his cartoon survives.

Florence would eventually
hire Giorgio vasari

to replace Leonardo's
incomplete painting,

but not before other artists

were inspired to
reproduce his battle scene.

What it depicted was
the bestiality of war,

not the glory and the victory

but this melee of terrified horses

and sort of snarling soldiers
hacking into each other.

And it's a frightening painting.

And I think we feel
that there's something

almost nihilistic in what survives,

what we understand of
"the battle of anghiari,"

where it seems in the famous

image of the two horsemen
facing each other down,

that doesn't seem to be good versus evil.

It doesn't seem to be
nobility versus nobility.

It just seems to be
violence versus violence.

One witness who had seen it

praised Leonardo's incomplete effort.

"Having climbed the
stairs of the great hall,

"look closely at a group
of horses and men,

"part of a battle scene
by Leonardo da Vinci;

it will strike you as a miraculous thing."

The bird is a machine that functions

according to mathematical law;

man has the capacity to create

this machine and all its motions,

but without as much power;

such a machine lacks
nothing except the bird's soul,

which must be counterfeited by man.

Now Leonardo returned to a subject

that had captivated him for
as long as he could remember.

This writing about the kite

seems to be my destiny,

because in my earliest
childhood recollection,

I was in my cradle,

and a kite came to me and
opened my mouth with its tail,

striking my lips several times.

He has this idea of this kite,

this bird of prey flying down

and actually putting its tail in his mouth

as if kind of like a shaman

receiving the secrets
of nature from an animal

and this idea that it was
his destiny, as he calls it

we might call it his obsession

to pursue the subject of
birds from this moment on.

My sense is that as he was aging,

that he begins to fashion himself

more in the guise of the great
philosopher, thinker, magician.

And so, the prophetic voice

starts becoming more and
more apparent in his manuscripts

of this mature and later period.

He continued to design flying machines,

but his focus would
now be more scientific.

He sketched the birds darting and diving

above the hills north of Florence

and noted how they beat
their wings to compress the air

and rode the currents to climb and soar.

Later, in his studio,
Leonardo refined his drawings

and reworked his
analysis of wind patterns,

aerodynamics, and gravity.

When the bird wants to lift off,

it raises its shoulder bones

and beats its wings toward itself,

compressing the air
between the tips of the wings

and the bird's chest,

which causes the bird to rise up.

And you can see how he
draws the movement of air.

You need to use the drag of the body

in order for the wing to do
the work for you, to lift you up.

These are delicate understandings

of how aerodynamics work.

So, to me, is somebody that
had a complete understanding

of dynamic soaring and
how birds use gravity,

to store the energy,

and the wind itself to do the work.

In time, he would gather his impressions

in a compact manuscript... or codex

dedicated to the flight of birds.

All the principles that
Leonardo is exploring

about what makes a bird fly

are always based on geometrical proofs.

So, it's this constant dialogue

with geometry and mathematics.

Though Leonardo would
continue to study birds

for years to come, he
would never realize his dream

to build a human-powered
aircraft capable of flight.

It would be almost 500 years
before anyone would succeed.

Vasari, the artist,

really sums up something
that Leonardo often tried to do.

He waxes eloquent
about Leonardo's capacity

to suggest movement and feeling,

even with just a few strokes of the brush.

And he shows us something,
tra il vedi e il non vedi,

something between what you
see and what you don't see.

And, of course, we all
often have this experience.

We see out of the corner
of our eye a gesture,

a facial expression, a twitch of the lips.

And we see it, and then
it changes, it's not there.

We can't study it, we can't fix it.

Normally it's something
that an artist cannot capture.

And yet Leonardo does.

The influence of his techniques

and of his vision was... was enormous.

It's hard to think of
one of the great glories

of western art, the painting of venice

in the latter part of the 15th century,

beginning of the 16th century,
the painting of giorgione

and bellini and titian, without
Leonardo's optical example.

While some of that
came down from the north

in the way of oil painting techniques,

it's quite clear that a
lot of it exuded upward

from Florence and Rome into venice.

That idea, which is very
distinctly leonardesque,

that we should see
the world as a beautiful

passing pattern of light and color,

rather than as a series of stock forms

set in a two-dimensional space.

In the spring of 1506,

Leonardo was ordered back
to French-occupied Milan

by a judge who found that
the artist had failed to deliver

the main panel of an altarpiece

that he and his collaborators
had been commissioned to paint

more than two decades earlier.

Florence's city council,
still expecting Leonardo

to complete "the battle of anghiari,"

reluctantly granted him a 3-month leave.

Milan's French overseers
were all too happy to welcome

Leonardo back to the
city where his "last supper"

had once so impressed king Louis xii.

Governor Charles d'amboise
authorized a raft of projects

for Leonardo, including plans

for an elaborate
summer villa and garden,

and theatrical spectacles
to keep the court entertained.

"We must confess, we loved him

even before meeting him
in person," wrote d'amboise,

who praised the "extraordinary
power of Leonardo's gifts."

Leonardo's 3-month
leave came and went.

When d'amboise wrote to request that he

stay longer in Milan,

the head of Florence's
city council, piero soderini,

called Leonardo a "laggard."

But when Leonardo's
uncle francesco died in 1507,

leaving everything to
his beloved nephew,

the artist was forced
to return to Florence,

where his siblings, determined to again

disinherit their half-brother,

had taken the matter to court.

It is a moment of great difficulty.

Francesco basically had been the figure

that had been most present for Leonardo

when he was growing up in vinci.

As the legal proceedings dragged on,

Leonardo immersed himself
in refining what was now

nearly two decades of notes

on the theory and practice of painting.

If the painter wishes to see

enchanting beauties, he
has the power to create them;

if he wants to see frightful monstrosities,

or things that are funny, ridiculous,

or truly heart-rending,

he is their lord and master.

In fact, anything that exists

in the universe, in essence,
presence, or imagination,

he has first in his
mind, then in his hands;

and they are so excellent
that they can generate

a well-proportioned
Harmony in the same time

as a single glance, as real things do.

He's always in the "treatise
on painting" using "you."

The addressee is you,
the second person address,

which I really, really like.

But I sometimes feel
like he's talking to himself

the way we talk to ourselves,

like, "you've gotta get this right."

So, it seems like a
conversation with himself

in which he's trying
to work it out a little bit.

So, for instance, when
he wants to talk about

how shadows don't all
have the same color, he says,

"if you see a woman in a
Meadow, dressed in white,

"that part of the woman
that is turned toward the sun

"will be white in a way
that reflects the sun's rays.

"That part of her that
is next to the Meadow

will reflect the Meadow."

It's so beautiful.

One of the things he
always emphasized was

look at form in the world

and try and see not
what you expect to see

a face, a shoulder, a
torso... but see what's there.

So, Leonardo was acutely
aware of the possibility

of that kind of imaginative projection

into places where no one

would look for representational form.

When you look at a
wall spotted with stains,

or with a mixture of stones,

if you have to devise some scene,

you might notice a resemblance
to various landscapes

adorned with mountains, rivers,

rocks, trees, plains,

wide valleys, and hills variously arranged;

or again, you may see
battles and figures in action;

or strange faces and costumes,

and an endless variety of objects,

which you could reduce to
complete and well-drawn forms.

Four centuries later, the
German artist Max Ernst

would recall that
Leonardo's advice to seek

familiar forms in unexpected places

walls, stains, clouds

had provoked an
"unbearable visual obsession"

and left him staring
endlessly at floorboards.

Leonardo was, more
than any single artist,

the one who emancipated
painters, visual artists,

from their role essentially
as glorified artisans,

craftsmen, into the role
that they occupy to this day

as seers and philosophers
and sort of princes of the mind.

From very early on, people
recognized that Leonardo

was another class of creature.

They saw that he had gifts that were

discontinuous with other people's gifts.

So, Leonardo's self-imagining
and self-fashioning

was as a poet, a philosopher,

someone who transcended the artisanal,

and in very real ways,
he was the very first artist,

certainly in western
history, to play that role.

One day,

Leonardo visited the
hospital of Santa Maria nuova,

where, for years, he had stored

drawings, manuscripts,
a collection of books,

and his savings.

On this day, he was
there to see a patient.

The old man, a few
hours before his death,

told me he was over 100 years old,

and that he felt nothing
physically wrong with him

except weakness.

Thus, sitting on a bed in the
hospital of Santa Maria nuova

in Florence, with no other
movement or sign of suffering,

he passed on from this life.

And I dissected his body

to see the cause of this gentle death.

It had been nearly two decades

since Leonardo's initial
attempt to map the human body

an effort that had resulted

in a revolutionary
study of the human skull

and an illustration that would
become one of the best-known

drawings ever made...
"the vitruvian man."

His preoccupation with the human figure,

and insistence that the painter

know both its outer and inner form

had never waned, but his concept

of the nervous and circulatory systems

was still heavily influenced
by the Greek physician galen,

whose inaccurate theories
on blood flow and respiration

remained widely accepted

more than 1,500 years after his death.

Galen was a second-century physician,

and he wrote widely on the subject.

These form the basis of understanding

of anatomy, physiology for
the next nearly 1,600 years.

And that was that the blood
was made in the liver continuously

and the heart basically was there

to churn the blood and to heat it,

and it communicated
with the airways directly,

so it'd get rid of the
evil spirits and so forth.

Doctors in Bologna had performed

public dissections on the
bodies of condemned criminals

for their students since the early 1300s.

For Leonardo, the practice
offered him an opportunity

to merge rigorous scientific exploration

with expert artistry,

and to challenge galen's
uncontested views.

He depicted the blood vessels

of the old man's neck,
thorax, and upper torso

and the nerves and
blood vessels of his head.

Then he moved to the abdominal organs

stomach, liver, bladder, and kidneys.

He made notes on the
colon and intestines,

and the heart's importance
in heating the blood

a theory of galen's which
would prove to be incorrect.

And, once again, he looked to nature

to help him make
sense of his discoveries,

comparing the arteries
and veins to tree branches,

and the heart to the seed
from which the tree Springs.

Why the veins of old
people become so long,

and become sinuous when
they used to be straight,

and the walls become so thick

that it prevents the motion of the blood.

This causes the death of
the elderly without disease.

And what he got out of that
dissection was astonishing.

He said, "I could see that the artery"

"that surrounded the heart was silted up,

and this is like a river."

And he knew as a canal
engineer, a river engineer,

if it silted up, then it didn't flow properly,

and it causes all sorts of trouble.

So, the old man died
from having a silted-up

system of blood vessels.

And from that, he
makes the first description

of coronary atherosclerosis in the world.

And it isn't just the chance, you know,

"by the way, this is what killed him."

He goes on to describe in several places

the tortuosity of the
vessels and "I want to dissect

the young and the old,
the animals, the birds,

and try and understand what's
going on in these vessels."

The scope of Leonardo's
investigations grew.

He planned a book that
would describe human anatomy

from the fetus to the fully
grown man and woman

their proportions, skeletal framework,

muscular systems, and
the nature of the senses.

My way of depicting the human body

will be as clear to you as if a real man

were standing before you;

and the reason is that
if you wish thoroughly

to know the parts of the
human body, anatomically,

you... or your eye... must
see it from different aspects,

considering it from
below and from above

and from its sides, turning it about

and seeking the origin of each part;

and in this way the natural anatomy

is sufficient for your comprehension.

In an ambitious study
of the inner workings

of the female torso,

Leonardo combined what he'd learned

of both human and bovine anatomy

to create a detailed
3-dimensional drawing

of the main organs and vascular system.

Though it contained inaccuracies

his rendering of the heart
had two, not 4, chambers

it was Leonardo's most
complete effort to capture

what he referred to

as "the cosmography
of the lesser world."

And he's looking at
the respiratory system,

he's looking at the blood system,

he's looking at the urinogenital system.

And it's a supreme
mapping of all these things

all in one drawing...
an awesome drawing.

This vision of the body of the woman

as the body of the earth as
the microcosm, macrocosm.

It's a great statement of

the unity of all things in nature.

Later, Leonardo would befriend

a young physician who taught anatomy

at the university of pavia,

marcantonio della torre.

As della torre dissected
cadavers for his students,

Leonardo would make drawings.

He really develops a
methodical approach

to how to visualize dissection,

and also how to
communicate it in a drawing.

On the cause of breathing...
Causa Dell'alitare...

Causa del moto del core...
On the cause of the motion...

We see him lifting, pointing out

what is skin layer,

then lifting and pointing
out what is muscle,

and then showing us
what the bone structure is.

On the cause of losing feeling... Causa...

And we can see this
unpacking, say, in layers.

Tears come from the
heart and not from the brain.

We have an artist who
has completely figured out,

broken down the nuts and
bolts of how the body functions,

but also how one presents it
in a way that communicates

all the scientific information.

This is completely new.

And what we have is the artist

leading the scientific discoveries.

It's the most amazingly sequential way

of thinking about anatomy
that we will ever see.

His fetus in utero,

drawn in brown ink and red chalk,

would one day be understood
as a groundbreaking study

of embryonic anatomy

as well as a breathtaking work of art.

The child does not breathe,

because he is constantly in water.

And he has no need to
breathe because he is kept alive

and nourished by the
life and food of the mother.

It thus follows that the same soul

governs and nourishes both bodies.

Over the years, Leonardo would compile

a massive trove of anatomical drawings

informed by dozens of
human and animal dissections.

Even though he would
never publish any of them

in his lifetime,

his illustrations are to this day

admired for their astonishing accuracy.

Still, his devotion to mastering

every fiber of the human body

is evident in each painting,

including his incomplete.

"Saint Jerome praying in the wilderness."

Other artists often
portrayed Saint Jerome

as a penitent hermit who
beat his chest with a stone

while wilting under a
merciless desert sun.

According to legend, he had
earned the devotion of a lion

by removing a Thorn from its paw.

Leonardo had precisely
depicted the bones and muscles

beneath the skin of
Jerome's shoulder and neck

to illustrate the Saint's deep anguish.

If you look at the
anatomy of what we call

the anterior triangle of the neck,

with Saint Jerome's
head turned to one side,

it shows the sternomastoid muscles,

scalene muscles very, very clearly.

It's the poise of the body, it's
the movements of the head,

the control, the
muscles that are working.

Informs you so much
about what's in the head,

what's in the mind,
and what's in the heart.

By April of 1508, the legal dispute

with his half-brothers had been
resolved in Leonardo's favor,

and he had left Florence
and returned to Milan.

Later that year, he finally
delivered a new version

of the altarpiece known today
as the "virgin of the rocks,"

bringing a nearly
two-decades-old disagreement

to a close.

When he and his entourage found
a new home in a parish church,

they were joined by francesco melzi,

the well-educated 14-year-old son

of a milanese engineer
and military captain.

Melzi had come to
apprentice as a painter,

but it was as Leonardo's
personal assistant

that he would become indispensable

and perhaps closer to
Leonardo than anyone,

including his companion and lover salai.

Francesco melzi is more
like Leonardo's secretary,

amanuensis,

more of an intellectual
companion than salai.

Melzi is more aristocratic.

Salai is pretty working class in origin.

Perhaps there was a bit
of friction between salai

and melzi because
they fulfill different roles

in Leonardo's entourage.

In time, melzi would ensure the survival

of many of Leonardo's manuscripts.

Before going any further,

I shall do some experiments

because I intend to first
produce the experience

and then use reason to prove

why the experience is
forced to act that way,

and this is the true rule

whereby those who investigate
natural effects must proceed,

and, although nature
begins with the cause

and ends in experience,

we must proceed in the opposite sense,

in other words, starting from experience

and using that to investigate the cause.

Though Muslim scientists
in the middle east

had long been testing their
theories with experiments,

most natural philosophers
in Europe continued to follow

the example of Aristotle,
whose scientific conclusions

had relied solely on observation.

Leonardo comes of age at
a time when the first stirrings

of the scientific revolution
was just being felt.

It progressed by narrowing the problems

that it was asking itself.

Leonardo's mind is still elsewhere.

He's trying to think,

"what if you looked at it all at once?

How would you solve it?"

But he has the kind of
restless curiosity and intellect

and the perpetual dissatisfaction

with the received
solution which are core,

kind of the pro me the an
fire, of the scientific revolution,

so if we see Leonardo
helping to set alight

that great adventure, I
don't think we're wrong.

His early work, definitely his writings,

are influenced by Aristotle,

but, as he aged, he
became more of a scientist.

You could see that his approach

was more of a analytical approach,

combination of a hybrid of experiments

and, you know, the theory.

Force arises from dearth or abundance.

It is the child of physical motion

and the grandchild of spiritual motion,

and the mother and origin of gravity.

Gravity is limited to the
elements of water and earth,

but this force is unlimited,
and it could be used

to move infinite worlds if
instruments could be made

by which the force could be generated.

He realized that every
object at the given height

takes the same time to reach the ground.

Very quickly, he realizes

there's something called acceleration.

Leonardo understood that gravity

caused falling objects to accelerate.

Seeking to measure this force,
he designed an experiment.

He filled a jar with sand

and then emptied it while
moving the tilted jar horizontally,

increasing his speed as he went.

When the falling sand formed
an isosceles right triangle,

he knew that the acceleration
of his lateral motion

matched the acceleration of
the falling sand due to gravity.

And in his experiments,

he tried different accelerations,

and he shows the patterns
of the sand and then shows

that exactly at the moment
that he has g, that degree,

9.81 meters per second per
second that we know today,

he gets exactly the triangle that is here.

Leonardo called it the
"equalization of motion,"

and it allowed him to roughly calculate

earth's gravitational constant.

It would be a century
before Galileo's experiments

proved gravity's
universal effect on objects

and far longer before Isaac
Newton and Albert Einstein

would use calculus, not yet
invented in Leonardo's time,

to define and explain gravity.

It shows clearly that
he had the imagination.

He had the power of, you know,
putting an experiment together

in order to look at a theory that he had,

and that is not something
that, you know, you find it

in every, even normal, scientist.

For him, it was a burning
question to answer,

a puzzle that he wanted
to understand for himself,

and that's what I think is
the character of a genius.

In a manuscript dedicated
to the physical world

and its mechanics, Leonardo compiled

his scientific observations
and theories on geology,

astronomy, and especially water.

So water was mobile and visible.

You could see what was going on,

and he enhanced his abilities to see it.

He set up experimental tanks,

and water poured out
of a rectangular mouth

into this tank,

and he used millet seeds
to see what's going on

in the water to try to
understand these things,

so water epitomized
the movement of nature,

but it had the advantage
of being mobile, visible,

and could be subject to experiment.

Natural philosophers
as far back as Aristotle

had believed that rain could
not be the only source of water

feeding mountain Springs and streams.

In seeking to test their theories,

Leonardo turned again
to the ancient analogy

of the microcosm and macrocosm.

Just as the blood surges upward

and pours through the
broken veins of the forehead,

so from the lowest depths of the sea,

the water rises to the mountaintops,

where, finding its veins broken,

it flows downwards
and returns to the sea.

When he tries to form a pattern

about how water gets
to the top of the mountain

and he makes an analogy
with our blood, he realizes,

"well, that's not correct,"

because he tests it out by showing

how heated water
can move up and down.

The water of the ocean
cannot make its way

from the roots to the
tops of the mountains.

So he went through a
lot of different solutions

that had been proposed,
and he did experiments

some of them real
experiments, we're quite sure,

some copied from other
places, like the siphoning.

Leonardo made a lot
of different sketches,

and he thought about what happens

and gravity as he thought
about it in those times,

and it just didn't add
up, so he kept on going.

Eventually, he concluded correctly

that precipitation
alone supplied the water

that flowed down from mountain peaks.

While studying a valley,

Leonardo noticed marine
fossils embedded in layers of rock

that had been carved
by a river over the ages.

For many, the fossils were evidence

of the great biblical flood

which had inundated the entire planet.

He accepts the Bible
as a book of revelation

and the books of the saints and so on.

He says, "I let be the sacred writings,

for they're the supreme truth,"

but that then frees him, as
it were, to describe nature,

and he can see that these

there's evidence that these
creatures were living there,

actual living colonies.

They weren't just left
there by floods, as it were.

You must first inquire whether the deluge

was caused by rain or
by the swelling of the sea,

and then you must show how
neither rain nor flooding rivers

nor overflowing seas could
have caused the shells,

being heavy objects, to
have floated up the mountains.

He concludes that the
earth must be very ancient,

and that, of course, is
a rather challenging idea

because it's saying that the earth,

if we look at it
analytically, isn't something

which is made in 7 days, 7 nights.

Leonardo carries with him

all the questions in the world.

The notebooks are a
dialogue with the world

and a dialogue with yourself,

and it doesn't matter if
the empirical observation

leads to confirmation.

There are many errors there,

and not all of them are original ideas.

Of course, he is reworking
ideas that come from the past,

but I think that the progress of
knowledge and the human mind

is not a line, is not linear.

It's little revolutions.

One of the things
that was very important

to renaissance artists,
Leonardo included,

was the idea of a demonstration,
that you would add something

to this extraordinary NASA-like project

of conquering the world
of visual appearances,

and one of the things that
Leonardo adds very strongly

is this idea of aerial perspective,

that the atmosphere
with which things are seen

changes the way that they're seen.

In Leonardo, the beautiful
blur enters the world,

and he distinguishes between,
and he deliberately blurs,

makes optical, makes suggestive,

invites what's called the beholder's share

into the picture, in effect,
to complete and deepen,

enrich, sweeten the form
that we can't entirely see.

That's a leonardesque contribution.

Above lake como toward Germany

is the valley of chiavenna,

where the river mera flows into this lake.

Here are barren and very
high mountains with huge rocks.

They are impossible
to climb except on foot.

On a trip to the
mountains north of Milan,

Leonardo observed how
atmospheric phenomena

light, haze, vapor

as well as altitude and distance

affected the appearance
of the landscape,

the intensity of colors,
the sharpness of details.

He is really thinking
about what the atmosphere

does to color and to light in the distance.

It is the way in which he creates infinity.

I say that the blueness we see

in the atmosphere is not intrinsic color

but is caused by warm
vapor evaporating into minute

and imperceptible atoms
on which the solar rays fall,

rendering them luminous
against the infinite darkness

of the fiery sphere which lies beyond.

He becomes quite obsessed by the idea

that you have infinite
gradations in tone, in a color.

You also get these
indivisible ethereal qualities.

Back in his studio in Milan,

Leonardo returned to a theme

he had been exploring
on and off for years

the Madonna and child with
Mary's mother Saint Anne.

In the years since his
cartoon depicting the 3 figures

had caused a stir in Florence,
he had made studies of an infant

holding a lamb and created
another full-scale cartoon

that also featured
Saint John as an infant.

Now he began work on a painting.

In a preparatory
drawing of the Madonna,

Leonardo explored her features
using the sfumato technique,

blending shadows in ways so subtle

that her contours practically vanished.

The line itself has neither matter

nor substance and may rather be called

an imaginary idea than a real object,

and this being its nature,
it occupies no space.

He made it his business.

His whole life is, "how can you account"

"for the way things appear
without any drawn lines

which are not visible in nature?"

So the sfumato comes in
there because sfumato refers

to the modeling of figures
and how they turn in space

and then the most difficult of all

of how to make it look
like it's surrounded by air.

Leonardo is very insistent
there are no lines in nature.

There are edges, so if you're drawing,

you draw the edge, but
this is not a natural thing.

He says there are no lines in nature.

You simply have a surface
which hits another surface,

and that's it.

There's no line that runs down that point,

and as things get a little
way away from the eye,

so you don't see these edges precisely,

and he said at one point,

"the eye does not know
the edge of any body."

All bodies exist in space,

and all bodies are dimensional...

And space is all about
relationships between things.

When you're drawing a
figure, you have to draw

the back side of it and the front side of it.

You have to account for
the proximity between things

by being able to draw
the side that you can't see

and then extend the drawing
from that part you can't see

to the place where the
image you can see actually is.

You look at the world
as if you have X-ray eyes.

The rocky outcrops
and distant vertical peaks

he'd sketched in fine detail
would inform the outdoor space

he intended for his subjects.

On a 5 1/2-foot-tall-by-3
1/2-foot-wide poplar panel,

Leonardo probed both
the psychological states

of Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus
and their natural surroundings.

We really do see all the sum

of all of Leonardo's scientific knowledge,

artistic knowledge make their
appearance in the painting.

If we look at the foreground especially

and see the stratification of the rocks,

he's gonna create the continuum
of the atmospheric perspective

from the foreground
to the deep distance.

His objective is to
suggest an infinity of space.

Leonardo would continue
to refine the painting

for years,

but like so many of his previous works,

it, too, would go unfinished.

In December 1511,
an alliance of city-states

attacked Milan in an attempt
to drive the French army

off the Italian peninsula.

Amidst the upheaval

and a devastating
outbreak of the plague,

Leonardo and his retinue decamped

to his apprentice
francesco melzi's family villa

along the adda river,

about 20 miles northeast of Milan.

There, he explored the
valley and its surrounding hills

and drew plans for
improving the villa melzi.

At night, he continued his studies

of the motion of candle flames.

I can imagine Leonardo is working

at night on his table.

Of course, the light is candlelight,

and he stopped a
minute, and looking out,

the candle started to
form this little globe of light

at the beginning, and
he goes on for two pages

to describe the
dynamics, again, process,

and then the way in which
from the round initial shape,

it comes to become
pyramidal and why it get pointed

and what is happening to the air,

which is warmed up,
that create vortices like air.

He could find all the laws
of nature in the candlelight.

They were at work all together.

At villa melzi, Leonardo
had also returned

to his anatomical studies,

dissecting ox hearts to
determine how blood flows

through their chambers and valves.

He now recognized that rather
than having two chambers,

as anatomists had believed
since the second century,

the human heart had four.

"Marvelous instrument
invented by the supreme master,"

he had written below a drawing.

He came up with this
totally accurate idea

that the valves begin to close

while the blood's still
flowing through them,

and he translates that along
with other knowledge to say,

"well, look. That's what
must happen to the blood.

"It must form these vortices,
and the vortex which is forming

"as the blood is still
flowing out of the heart

"is actually unfurling the leaflets

so they can close in perfect Harmony,"

and then he challenges himself,

"well, what if I'm wrong?
What happens then?"

He then designed an experiment
to demonstrate how this happens.

He writes notes to himself that

how to actually pour hot
wax inside the calf heart

and then use that wax model
to make a glass model out of it

and buy some silk fabrics
and cut it to the shape

of the leaflets of the heart of the calf

and, you know, sew it
together and then put together

perhaps the first, you know,
synthetic heart valve ever.

Then he uses water and a hand pump

and use grass seeds to do visualization,

basically watching how
the flow pattern forms

every time the heart
valve opened or closed.

The first-ever drawing
of a synthetic heart valve

which is exactly like
heart valves we use today

tissue valves... but he didn't stop there.

He went on, and he
described why the aortic valve

pulmonary valve... had to have 3 leaflets,

not two, not 4, through geometric proof,

beautiful geometric proof.

It would be more than
450 years before scientists,

using modern imaging techniques,

proved Leonardo's theory correct.

Why? Why did he do this?

First of all, there was no use for it.

There was no cardiac surgery.
There was no cardiology.

You couldn't do anything with it,

so it wasn't of any use to anybody.

It was purely understanding
for understanding's sake.

Learning acquired in youth

arrests the evil of old age,

and if you understand that
old age is nurtured by wisdom,

you will so conduct yourself in youth

that your old age will
not lack for nourishment.

Leonardo was now 60 years old.

Francesco melzi drew
the master in red chalk.

One of the most beautiful observations

in his writing is,

"behold how when we're
away, we long to return

"to our home country
and to our former state,

"how like it is to the moth with the flame,

"but the man who desires
each new day and each new hour

"thinking that they are too slow in coming

"does not realize that he is longing

for his own destruction."

By march 1513, Leonardo
was back in Milan,

where Swiss mercenaries
had ousted the French

and sforza's son now
claimed the title of Duke.

The political landscape was shifting

all over the Italian peninsula.

The previous year, after
almost two decades in exile,

the medici family, now led
by Giovanni and giuliano,

had regained power in Florence.

When pope Julius ii
died in march of 1513,

the conclave of cardinals
chose Giovanni to replace him.

He took the name Leo x.

Giuliano followed his
brother to the Vatican

and soon invited Leonardo to join them.

Many of Italy's greatest
artists had already joined

the Vatican court,
including Michelangelo,

who had recently completed a fresco

on the ceiling of the sistine chapel,

and Raphael sanzio,
a 30-year-old painter

from urbino who had been
heavily influenced by Leonardo.

Raphael had quickly
become a star in Rome

and a favorite of the pope.

In his recently completed masterpiece

for the papal palace,
"the school of Athens,"

Raphael had modeled the
ancient Greek philosophers

on himself and his contemporaries.

Plato, one of the central figures,

was based on Leonardo.

That fall, giuliano de' medici

installed Leonardo and his
entourage at the Vatican's

villa Belvedere and paid
him a monthly stipend.

Pope Leo commissioned
a painting from Leonardo

but soon became frustrated.

"Alas! This man will never do
anything," the pope complained.

"He is already thinking of the end

before he has even begun to work."

The stipend left Leonardo
free to study botany,

mathematics, and architecture

and to create amusements for the court.

Once when a gardener at
the villa found a strange lizard,

Leonardo gave it
wings, horns, and a beard

and kept it in a box so he
could frighten his friends,

but Leonardo grew unhappy in Rome.

He complained that a new
assistant was rude and lazy,

that authorities prevented
him from performing dissections,

and he began writing in code,

paranoid that a German
mirror maker was spying on him.

Tenebre, darkness, vento, wind,

tempest at sea, fortuna di mare,

forests on fire, selve infoccate.

The air was dark
because of the dense rain

which fell in oblique descent.

All around may be seen venerable trees,

uprooted and stripped
by the fury of the winds.

Bolts from heaven... Saette del cielo...

Earthquakes and crumbling mountains...

Terremoti e ruin a di monti...

And above these judgments, dark clouds

split by the forked flashes

lighting up on all sides
the depth of the gloom.

E sopra queste maladitioni, oscuri nuvoli,

vento, cielo alluminande
or qua, fortuna di mare

I wonder if those deluge drawings

are, in part, self-portrait.

They're mysterious,

the flareup of his mind
towards the end of his life,

the agitation of all of that idea.

In 1516,

giuliano de' medici died of tuberculosis.

With his patron gone,
Leonardo accepted an invitation

that would take him beyond
Italy for the first time in his life.

Francis I, the charismatic
21-year-old king of France,

was building a court at
his chateau in amboise

to enhance his reputation

as an enlightened and cultured monarch.

Leonardo, now 64 years old,

packed all his belongings
and... traveling by mule

with francesco melzi, salai,

and a new servant
named battista de vilanis

headed north over the alps

toward the loire river valley of France.

He did not expect to return.

The king installed Leonardo
at the chateau de cloux,

an elegant manor house down
the road from his castle at amboise.

He paid Leonardo a generous salary

and provided him with a housekeeper

who prepared his meals.

Francis I is very
ambitious in military terms

but also in cultural terms.

He knows the renaissance,

what the Italians are
doing is the hot thing,

and he wants to buy into that
italianate-renaissance culture,

and Leonardo was clearly
a kind of tourist attraction

for Francis' court.

He could say, "I've got the greatest artist

in the world down here."

The Italian sculptor benvenuto cellini

said that Francis

was "besotted with those
great virtues of Leonardo's."

The king "could never
believe there was another man

born in this world who knew as much."

Leonardo had finally
found the perfect patron.

He staged spectacles as he had in Milan

and sketched designs for a
new royal palace at romorantin

that was never built.

What may have been a small
stroke made painting difficult,

but he continued to draw and to teach.

In October 1517,

Leonardo received a
visit from an acquaintance

he'd met in Rome...
cardinal Luigi d'aragona.

During a tour of his studio,

Leonardo proudly
shared his manuscripts,

which the cardinal's assistant described

as an "infinity of volumes,"

as well as several unfinished paintings

that he'd carried with him from Rome.

They included a mysterious
and sensual likeness

of Saint John the baptist

and his depiction of the
virgin and child with Saint Anne.

Leonardo also showed them
a portrait of Lisa del giocondo,

the wife of a well-to-do
florentine silk merchant,

which he had been commissioned
to paint 14 years earlier.

At the time, she had been 24 years old

and was the mother of 5 children.

Leonardo had carried the painting

from Florence to Milan,

then to Rome, and finally
over the alps to France.

Like many of his works, it had over time

become something
more than a commission.

He's poured into that
painting his knowledge

of the microcosm,
the body of the woman,

the body of nature,
the movement of hair...

Light on surfaces, atmospheric
perspective in the landscape,

so he's taken this straightforward subject

and turned it into something wonderful.

It ceases to become
a functional likeness,

and it becomes a statement
about the woman in nature.

It becomes a statement
about the beloved woman

equivalent to the Italian poetry,

the woman who is idealized
into some sublimated form

who's completely unbelievable in a way.

The earth has a living soul,

and its flesh is the soil.

Its bones are the strata
and structures of the rocks

which form the mountains.

Its blood is its veins of water.

The pool of blood around
the heart is the ocean.

Its breathing, by the rise and fall of blood

through the pulses is
likewise, in the earth,

the ebb and flow of the sea;

The soul leaves the
body with such reluctance,

and I do believe that its pain and sorrows

are not without cause.

Over the years, Leonardo had filled

many thousands of notebook
pages with an astonishing array

of observations and fables,

grocery lists and
instructions for painters,

sketches of faces, and studies of nature.

Now, in quiet moments, he returned

to the geometric problems
that had perplexed

and delighted him for decades.

He drew circles and arcs in boxes,

trying, as he had for many years,

to solve the ancient
challenge of squaring the circle.

On a page dedicated

to an 1,800-year-old
euclidean geometry problem,

he trailed off.

It was time to eat.

"Et cetera," he wrote,

"because the soup is getting cold."

It was among his last notebook entries.

As his health began to fail,

Leonardo put his estate in order.

On April 23, 1519, in amboise,

before a royal notary and 7 witnesses,

Leonardo signed his
last will and testament.

To the brothers who had
battled him for an inheritance,

he left a generous sum of money.

He divided his property in Milan

between his servant
battista de vilanis and salai,

who had already built a house there.

The most significant bequest
would go to francesco melzi,

who would also serve as executor.

He was to inherit Leonardo's
pension and clothes

as well as his intellectual
and artistic legacy

all of the books, manuscripts,
and paintings in his possession.

Leonardo da Vinci died 9 days later

on may 2, 1519, at the age of 67.

He was buried in the church
of Saint-florentin in amboise.

"On account of his
many divine qualities,"

Giorgio vasari said,

"his name and his renown
shall never be extinguished."

"It is impossible for
me to express the pain

"his death has caused
me," francesco melzi wrote.

"It is beyond nature's power
to reproduce such a man."

The one act an artist brings to the world

is to give you a way of gazing into it.

"Can you look at it through my eyes?"

That's the greatest gift an artist brings,

and Leonardo does that.

Very few artists have given
us their soul or their mind.

Leonardo gives us both.

Leonardo dies as a kind of legend,

but if you'd asked, say, in the 1600s,

what did they think
Leonardo paintings looked like,

it's deeply problematic.

There are not many of them.

They're not publicly
available, so the picture

of what Leonardo actually looked like

and what he really did was pretty cloudy.

Though few of Leonardo's
works could be seen,

his writings on the theory
of art began circulating

among artists in the mid-1500s,

first as handwritten manuscripts

abridged from his book on painting

and later in a print edition
published in Italian and French.

The complete book,
compiled by francesco melzi,

was eventually rediscovered
in the Vatican libraries

and published in 1817.

In the 1800s, a handful of writers

began to probe more
deeply, offering new insight

and lavishing Leonardo's masterpieces

with lyrical praise.

"She is older than the
rocks among which she sits,"

wrote Walter pater of the "Mona Lisa."

He called her the symbol
of the modern idea.

Historians turned up new documents

letters, contracts, wills

containing more facts
and providing more nuance

to his life and times.

As academic interest in Leonardo grew,

so did his cultural importance.

In a slim volume published in 1910,

the Austrian psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud

offered his analysis
of Leonardo's memory

of a bird visiting him in his cradle.

The bird, Freud decided,

represented caterina, Leonardo's mother.

In 1911, an Italian handyman
wrapped the "Mona Lisa"

in his smock and smuggled
it out of the louvre in Paris,

where it had hung since 1804.

28 months after the heist,

authorities caught the
thief when he attempted

to sell the painting to an
antiques dealer in Florence.

Leonardo's masterpiece
had never been more famous.

And then we get into the
surrealist Marcel duchamp,

who does this painting

that's of a cheap
postcard of the "Mona Lisa"

with a mustache and
beard graffitied onto it.

You get the poster of
Mona Lisa smoking a joint,

the wonderful Andy warhol,
30 silkscreen giocondas in one,

nat king Cole's "Mona Lisa,"

Cole Porter, "you're the tops,"

Bob Dylan, "visions of Johanna"

"Mona Lisa must've
had the highway blues.

You can tell by the way she smiles."

Mr. Minister, we in the United States

are grateful for this loan

from the leading artistic
power in the world.

"The last supper" had barely survived

an allied air strike during
the second world war

as well as numerous
ill-conceived attempts

at restoration,

but recent, more sophisticated
efforts to repair the mural,

which had begun to flake off the wall

within Leonardo's lifetime,
have secured the fragile work

for visitors who come to the
former monastery in droves.

In recent decades,

engineers, surgeons, pilots, playwrights,

architects, and artists everywhere

have found wisdom

and inspiration in the unmatched trove

of notebook pages and drawings

that encompass Leonardo's
life of boundless seeking.

Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo!

Vive la Leonardo! Vive... At 400 million,

Leonardo's "salvator mundi"
selling here at christie's.

$400 million is the bid,
and the piece is sold.

Sir Kenneth Clark called him

the most curious man in history.

He was always interested.

He was always wanting to know,

and I think more than even the paintings,

more than the mysterious
"Lisa," more than "the last supper,"

is this sense of Leonardo, the man

who never took no for an answer
in terms of finding things out.

He has a love of the world.

Nothing was dull or
boring or quotidian to him.

It was all a marvel.

That's the blessed state
I feel he was sort of in

because the world is that abundant.

It is that rich.

It is there for us like he saw,

and the more you attend, the richer it is

and the more you
find your own place in it

as part of the marvelous machine.

Major funding

for "Leonardo da Vinci" was provided by

the better angels
society and its members:

The Paul and saundra montrone family,

Stephen a. Schwarzman,

Diane and hal brierley,
Carol and ned spieker,

and these additional members.

Funding was also provided
by Gilbert s. Omenn

and Martha darling,

the Alfred p. Sloan foundation,

the Robert and Mercedes
eichholz foundation,

the corporation for public broadcasting

and by contributions to your pbs station

from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Can looking back push us forward?

Ladies and gentlemen,
miss Billie Holiday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

Act of concern...

Bank of america supports
filmmakers like Ken burns,

whose narratives
illuminate new perspectives.

What would you like the power to do?

Bank of america.

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