All language subtitles for Leonardo.da.Vinci.S01E02.Painter-God.2160p.AMZN.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.265-NTb

Viewers like you make
this program possible.

Support your local PBS station.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man 2: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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 belltower, 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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 Apennine 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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."

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: 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."

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: On the cause
of losing feeling... causa...

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

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
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 Promethean 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Guillermo del Toro:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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.

Man as Leonardo:
Tenebre, darkness,

vento, wind,

tempest at sea,
fortuna di mare,

forests on fire,
selve infoccate.

Man as Leonardo: 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.

Man as Leonardo:
Bolts from heaven...

Saette del cielo...

earthquakes
and crumbling mountains...

terremoti e ruina 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.

Man as Leonardo:
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;

Man as Leonardo: 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."

Del Toro: 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.

Enrico Caruso:
♪ La donna e mobile

♪ Qual piuma al vento...

28 months
after the heist,

authorities caught
the thief when he attempted

to sell the painting to
an antiques dealer in Florence.

♪ Sempre un amabile...

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"--

♪ But Mona Lisa must've had...

"Mona Lisa must've
had the highway blues.

You can tell
by the way she smiles."

♪ The way she smiles...

John F. Kennedy: Mr. Minister,
we in the United States

are grateful for this loan

from the leading artistic power
in the world.

♪ When the jelly-faced
women all sneeze ♪

♪ Hear the one
with the mustache say ♪

♪ "Jeez, I can't
find my knees" ♪

"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.