♪
Man as Leonardo: A
good painter must depict
two principal things--
namely, the person,
and the intentions
of their mind.
♪
The first is easy,
the second difficult.
♪
[Thunder]
♪
Man: The modernity of
Leonardo is that he understands
that knowledge and
imagination are intimately related.
♪
Man as Leonardo: Which
nerve causes the eye to move
so that the motion of
one eye moves the other
♪
on closing the eyelids,
on opening the eyes,
on expressing wonder?
Man: There is a
delightful, unbridled joy
of curiosity in him.
♪
His duty is to the question.
♪
His duty is to the
thirst for knowledge.
♪
Basically, he says,
"The thing that was
given to me by the universe
"was the chance to question it,
and that is my divine duty."
♪
Man, speaking French:
♪
Narrator: He began few
paintings and finished even fewer
♪
but more than 500
years after his death,
those he left behind
are among the most
revered works of art of all time.
A draftsman of
incomparable talent,
he sketched everything--
people and landscapes,
flora and fauna, machines
both real and imagined,
equations, fables,
and allegories.
Painting on wood panels
made from walnut or poplar trees,
he devised new ways to
portray how men and women
convey their deepest emotions--
"movements of the
mind," he called it--
and elevated
painting from a craft
to an intellectual pursuit.
He read Greek and
Roman philosophers
but frequently
questioned their wisdom.
Real knowledge, he
believed, was found in nature
and best gained through
observation and experience.
He studied fossils
and water dynamics,
dissected cadavers
and mapped the circulatory
system and the human brain.
He attempted to solve the
ancient geometric problem
of squaring the circle,
and he staged experiments
on the nature of falling objects
more than a century
before Galileo and Newton.
To him, everything--
geology, physics,
anatomy, mathematics, art--
was inextricably linked.
Writing backwards
in a mirror script,
he began treatises on
a vast array of subjects,
combining image and text to
communicate profound insights
that were, in some cases,
centuries ahead of their time,
but he left most
of them incomplete
and published
none in his lifetime.
A singular genius,
he filled his notebooks
with calculations and questions,
theories and innovations,
revealing a mind
of infinite curiosity.
In an age of astonishing
artistic advances
and a newfound
reverence for humanity,
Leonardo da Vinci
made his way, he said,
as a "disscepolo
della sperientia,"
a disciple of experience.
♪
[Man exhales]
♪
Man as Leonardo: Here forms
here colors
here the character of
every part of the universe
is concentrated to a point
[Heartbeat]
and that point is so
marvelous a thing.
[Crying]
Man: If there's a golden thread
that runs through all
of Leonardo's work,
I think it's an attempt to
crack the code of organic form.
He's persuaded that there
are profound likenesses,
profound equivalences
to be found
in the movement of the stars,
and in the behavior
of an ant hill.
That, more than anything
else, is what obsessed Leonardo
and what gives his
work a kind of unity.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
These indeed are miracles.
In so small a space, the
universe can be reproduced
and rearranged in
its whole expanse.
[Birds squawk]
♪
Narrator: In the spring of 1452,
in a tiny village tucked
among the Tuscan hills,
a prosperous, 80-year-old
farmer and landowner
named Antonio da Vinci
made a note in his ledger.
♪
"There was born
to me a grandson--
"the son of Ser Piero, my
son-- on the 15th day of April,
a Saturday, at the
third hour of the night."
Ser Piero was a successful
notary in his mid-20s
who lived and worked in Florence
but returned at times to
his ancestral village of Vinci.
Little is known about
the baby's mother
other than her name--Caterina.
Though his parents were
from different social classes
and did not marry,
the arrival of their son
was cause for celebration.
The day after his birth,
the boy was baptized
at the Church of Santa
Croce in the center of town.
♪
They called him Leonardo.
Man, speaking Italian:
Narrator: Soon after
Leonardo's birth,
Ser Piero returned to Florence.
Within a year, his
father would be married
to a bourgeois Florentine woman,
Caterina to a kiln worker and
farmer who lived near Vinci.
The father in the case of
Leonardo's early childhood
is an absent figure,
and he probably spent more
time with his mother Caterina.
She was probably a serving girl,
a contadina, a peasant woman.
♪
Narrator: At
times, the boy lived
with his paternal
grandparents Antonio and Lucia
and their son Francesco,
Leonardo's uncle.
Vinci, a village of
fewer than 100 families,
was made up of
a medieval castle,
a church, and a
modest cluster of homes
that gave way to
vineyards and olive groves.
Locals harvested medicinal
herbs from Vinci's hillsides
to supply the
pharmacies of Florence
and diverted a small
mountain stream
to power the town's olive press.
♪
As a boy, Leonardo was
enamored of his natural surroundings,
exploring his grandfather's
orchards and wheat fields
and the hills, valleys,
and woodlands beyond.
He also grew close
to his uncle Francesco,
who loved the leisurely
pace of country life.
[Speaking French]
Narrator: Because he
was born out of wedlock,
Leonardo was limited in what
education he could receive
and, eventually, which
professions he could pursue.
Woman: The education he
got was the kind of education,
we think, that
merchants' sons got
where you get
practical mathematics
and you learn how to gauge
how much oil is in a barrel.
[Speaking French]
Narrator: In time,
Leonardo would regard
his lack of a formal education
as among his greatest strengths.
[Birds chirp]
[Thunder]
♪
[Animal howls]
Man as Leonardo: Having
wandered some distance
among dark rocks,
I came to the entrance
of a vast cavern
♪
and after some time there,
two contrary
emotions arose in me:
fear and desire--
fear of the sinister,
dark cavern,
desire to see whether it
contained something wonderous.
♪
Nicholl: The Renaissance
is an enlightenment,
a rebirth of classical learning,
but it's also a time
of tremendous change
and, therefore, uncertainty.
Everything's up for grabs,
and I think the keynote
of the time is uncertainty.
With every question
comes a doubt,
and I think the story of
Leonardo's about looking
into the dark cave is a
very Renaissance viewpoint.
♪
Narrator: As Europe emerged
from a devastating pandemic
that had ravaged the
continent in the mid-1300s,
the city-states that
crowded the Italian peninsula
established
maritime trade routes
to Constantinople
and North Africa,
giving rise to a wealthy class
of merchants and bankers
and accelerating an
exchange of knowledge
that helped ignite
the cultural expl*si*n
that would come to be
known as the Renaissance.
Woman: It started in the more
mature part of the Middle Ages,
but the big change occurs
with what is called humanism.
Humanism's really the
beginning of the Renaissance,
and it happens because
scholars like Petrarch and others
for the first time don't
look at the texts of the past
and try to Christianize them.
Before, it was always
to take the knowledge
and try to fit the
Christian doctrine.
Instead, now they see a need
for what they are within
the historical context.
It's a secular approach.
It was not there before.
That's what sparks
the Renaissance.
Narrator: The
Renaissance reached
its most profound expression
in the city-state of Florence
with a blossoming
of art and architecture
informed by mathematics and
science and classical ideals.
Man, speaking French:
del Toro: It's celebrating
not only empirical,
but physical sensation
and why does it happen,
where does it come from,
how do we belong in the world.
There is a re-centering
of the world into man.
♪
Narrator: Florence
was first established
on the banks of the Arno
River by Julius Caesar in 59 B.C.
Since the Middle Ages, it
had been the seat of power
of the Republic of Florence,
a city-state that controlled
a large swath of Tuscany.
Its government, a council
made up of members
of the leading trade
guilds called the Signoria,
was a source of great pride
for the city's inhabitants,
but in reality, Florence
functioned as an oligarchy
in which the richest families
controlled the levers of power
from behind the scenes.
Cosimo de' Medici,
the politically astute head
of a powerful banking family,
had become Florence's
de facto ruler in 1434.
His clever diplomatic maneuvers
had led to a 1454 treaty
among the kingdoms,
republics, and dukedoms
that divided the
Italian peninsula,
ushering in a delicate peace
for the first time
in half a century.
Cosimo was also a
generous patron of the arts.
Man: Increasingly, artists
who previously would've sought
to work for the cathedral,
to work for the city,
to work for one of the guilds
want to work for the Medici
because working for the
Medici is not only a good fee,
it also guarantees recognition
in a new world of
art appreciation.
[Weaving shuttle rattles]
Narrator: Florence
had long been home
to a flourishing
garment industry
with its silk and wool weavers,
leather tanners, and furriers.
[Chipping]
As the arts grew, workshops
that produced paintings,
sculptures, jewelry,
and metalworks
expanded and prospered.
[Pounding]
Nicholl: The Italian word
for a studio is "bottega,"
and that means a shop or,
more precisely in this context,
a workshop--
a noisy, communal,
collective space.
Different people are
working on different things.
[Hammering and clanging]
There's hammers and tongs
and fires that heat up metal
and a lot of smells of solvents.
You might also hear, of
course, the clucking of chickens
because one of the major paints
that were used was egg tempera.
Narrator: Sometime in the 1460s,
Leonardo, now an adolescent,
made the long day's ride
from Vinci to Florence,
where his father secured
him an apprenticeship
in the workshop of
Andrea del Verrocchio.
A talented sculptor,
painter, and goldsmith,
Verrocchio had trained
many of Florence's
most celebrated artists.
Man: I think he recognized
very quickly that young Leonardo
was going to be
sort of the cream
of these young apprentices,
someone that he could
outsource some of the work to,
and someone he could train up
to be an extremely good sculptor,
painter, jewelry designer,
whatever he wanted to be.
Narrator: In the late 1460s,
Verrocchio received a commission
from the Medici family to
cast a bronze statue of David,
the Biblical shepherd boy who
had slayed the giant Goliath.
Leonardo--whose
contemporaries described him
as a beautiful,
curly-haired youth--
may have been his model.
Delieuvin, speaking French:
♪
Bramly, speaking French:
Woman, speaking Italian:
♪
Narrator: As an apprentice,
Leonardo prepared wood panels,
ground pigments for paint,
and made models
in clay and terracotta.
He also learned to draw,
a skill that artists viewed
as the foundation for all
other artistic endeavors.
Man: Drawing is the
key to almost everything.
If you can't
really draw it well,
you're never gonna
be able to paint it well.
Leonardo said, one
should find for oneself
a really good master,
copy their work
because it will train
your hand to good form.
Gopnik: He drew
with astounding acuity.
If there's one thing that
makes Leonardo's drawings
distinct from the
beautiful drawings
of someone like his
master Verrocchio,
Leonardo adds a note of movement
and internal
agitation to drawings.
Everything is dissolved
into the world of movement.
Man: Leonardo does a lot of
studies of draperies and cloths,
and what it shows is,
he understands how
light hits a curving object,
how shadows are formed
♪
how depth is
conveyed in a drawing.
The drapery studies give
a sense of light, of depth,
but also of motion.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
The painter will produce
pictures of small
merit if he makes
other artists'
work his standard,
but if he studies
from natural objects,
he will bear good fruit.
Narrator: In the summer of 1473,
Leonardo made a
small, high-angle drawing
of the Arno River Valley.
♪
Bramly, speaking French:
♪
Borgo, speaking Italian:
♪
♪
♪
♪
[Church bell clanging]
♪
King: One of the remarkable
things about Florence
is that there was a
succession of geniuses
decade after decade
after decade in the 1400s.
When Leonardo came
to Florence in the 1460s,
he could look back at
the previous 50 years
and see great
public works of art,
things that you
could see for free.
You could walk through
the streets of Florence
and see this.
He wants to take his place
in the pantheon of great artists
like Alberti, Ghiberti,
and Brunelleschi.
Narrator: Filippo Brunelleschi
was the city's most
celebrated architect.
In 1418, he had entered
a public competition
to engineer a dome for
the city's central cathedral,
Santa Maria del Fiore,
which had been under
construction since 1296.
♪
At 143 feet in diameter,
the long-planned dome
was intended to be wider
than that of Rome's
celebrated Pantheon,
still the world's largest
1,300 years after
its completion.
♪
Few believed it
could ever be built,
but Brunelleschi was undeterred.
It took 18 years, but
the structure of the dome
was finally completed in 1436,
16 years before
Leonardo was born.
♪
3 decades later,
Verrocchio won a contract
to construct and install a
monumental copper sphere
8 feet in diameter and
weighing more than 4,000 pounds
to complete the lantern
atop Brunelleschi's dome.
King: And Leonardo da Vinci
was 19 years old at that point,
and he'd been with Verrocchio
for at least a couple of
years learning his trade.
He would've seen
up close and personal
everything that
Brunelleschi had achieved.
Leonardo da Vinci says, "I
want to do the impossible.
I want to create miracles,"
because he's inspired
by these miraculous works of
art which have come before him.
[Bell tolls] Narrator:
In the early 1470s,
Verrocchio received a commission
from the Church of San Salvi
to paint a Baptism of Christ.
The master assigned
sections of the work
to his talented apprentice,
including the Messiah's feet,
parts of the landscape,
and one of the two angels.
While Verrocchio
had painted in tempera
and used white highlights
to produce contours,
Leonardo worked in oil,
applying imperceptibly
thin layers of color
to develop light and shadow
and create the illusion
of 3-dimensionality.
Isaacson: Verrocchio's
paintings and sculptures
both had a bit of
a sense of motion,
and Leonardo builds on that
and does it even better
than Verrocchio did,
and it's a first sign that
Leonardo's beginning
to surpass Verrocchio as a
painter of motion and emotion.
♪
Man as Leonardo: The
art of perspective is such
that it makes what
is flat appear in relief
and what is in
relief appear flat.
♪
Verdon: Part of
Leonardo's heritage
was the revolutionary invention
of single-point
linear perspective,
so a young man learning
art in Florence in the 1460s,
as Leonardo would have done,
he understood that he had to
be a complete master of that.
Narrator: Single-point
linear perspective,
a method of bringing
the illusion of depth
to a two-dimensional work,
had been devised
by Brunelleschi,
but it was the architect
Leon Battista Alberti
who had enshrined it
for Renaissance artists
in his treatise "Della Pittura."
Man: Perspective was very
important to the painters.
That's basically how
things recede into space
and the vanishing point that
parallel lines seem to go to.
Musicians had mathematical
theories of harmony,
and perspective was
rather like that for painters.
They had a theory,
so he began to
develop an interest
not just in the mathematics
of organizing space in pictures,
but also in how the eye
works and how slippery it is.
He's the first of the
theorists in painting
who realizes that the business
of seeing is very complicated.
♪
Man as Leonardo: All objects
transmit their image to the eye
by a pyramid of lines
which start from the
edges of an object's surface
and, converging from a
distance, meet in a single point
and I will show that this
point is situated in the eye,
which is the universal
judge of all objects.
♪
Narrator: In 1472,
at the age of 20,
Leonardo joined a painter's
guild whose members
were among the most
talented artists in Florence--
Filippino Lippi,
Domenico Ghirlandaio,
Pietro Perugino,
and Sandro Botticelli.
Though Leonardo remained a
part of Verrocchio's workshop,
he was now a dipintore,
a professional painter,
able to receive his
own commissions.
♪
Florentine artists were
frequently hired by churches
and the city's
wealthiest families
to paint the Bible's
most popular subjects--
the Madonna and Child,
the Adoration of the Magi,
the Crucifixion.
Another frequently depicted
scene was the Annunciation,
the moment in which
the angel Gabriel
descends from heaven to
proclaim to the Virgin Mary
that she will give
birth to the Son of God.
It would be the focus
of one of Leonardo's
first independent works.
♪
Though he borrowed freely
in technique from Verrocchio,
Leonardo's "Annunciation"
revealed his grasp
of perspective,
his deftness with
light and shadow,
and his devotion to nature.
Vecce, speaking Italian:
♪
Gopnik: He's one of those
people who lives in his own head.
We meet those people in life,
and we recognize that they live
on a planet other than our own.
♪
There are very, very
few times in history
when what you did
when you had that kind
of restless, inquiring, creative
mind was to paint pictures.
Renaissance Italy was
perhaps the only place and time
when that was so, and
we're blessed that it was.
♪
♪
Narrator: Leonardo received
another commission--
to paint a portrait of the
young poet Ginevra de' Benci,
the daughter of a wealthy,
well-connected banking family
who had occasional dealings
with Leonardo's father.
To look at the
"Ginevra de' Benci"
is probably one of the
great ways to understand
Leonardo's early
painting technique.
It is a very deliberated,
very protracted process.
The painting is done on a
very thin poplar wood panel,
and it has a
priming that is gesso.
Leonardo began
by doing the cartoon,
a full-scale drawing on paper.
♪
He pricked the outlines
and rubbed with a pouncing bag
while the panel was underneath,
a technique we call spolvero.
♪
The oil medium, it's basically
linseed oil and pigments.
♪
He applied in the thinnest veils
what we call the glazes,
or the velature in Italian.
♪
Layer by infinitesimal layer,
he's able to calibrate
the tonal transitions
that permit him to explore
the sfumato technique
where you blend the
gradations in such a way
that they seem to be
the manner of smoke.
♪
Narrator: In a playful
reference to Ginevra's name,
Leonardo surrounded
her with juniper branches,
ginepro in Italian.
Borgo, speaking Italian:
♪
Bambach: We can already see
how intensely Leonardo believes
that the motions of the
mind, the motions of the soul--
so the moti dell'animo,
e moti dell'anima--
show through this almost
inscrutable gaze that she holds,
and there is a
connectivity with the viewer
that gives it this
tremendous power.
♪
[Bats screeching]
[Church bell ringing]
♪
Narrator: In April of 1476,
Florentine authorities
received an anonymous note
accusing 17-year-old
Jacopo Saltarelli
of sodomy and prostitution.
The accuser listed 4
men as Saltarelli's lovers
or customers, including
24-year-old Leonardo.
♪
Nicholl: Theoretically,
it's a crime.
Theoretically, it's
punishable by death,
so Leonardo might
well have been arrested.
He might well have spent
time in the holding cells.
Narrator: But among
the accused was a son
of the Tornabuoni family,
a powerful Florentine clan
with enough connections
to have the charges dropped.
Two months later, the
4 men were absolved.
No further prosecution
was pursued against them.
h*m*, though
condemned by the church,
was widely tolerated in
15th-century Florence,
where a number of
notable artists and poets
were publicly known to be g*y.
♪
Bramly, speaking French:
♪
Narrator: Leonardo wrote
nothing about his sexuality
or the allegation, but
just a few years later,
he would draw a device for
removing bars from windows
and another for
opening a prison cell.
They were some of his
first mechanical inventions.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
Painting is born of nature,
or, rather, it is the
grandchild of nature
[Birds chirping]
♪
for all visible things
are produced by nature,
and these, her creations,
have given birth to painting
♪
so we may justly call it
the grandchild of nature
and related to God.
♪
Man: Nature is God.
Nature is perfection.
♪
Nature is proportion.
Nature is the entity
which obtains every effect
with the shortest and
direct way that is possible.
The best a scientist
or a painter can do
is imitate nature.
♪
Kemp: He has an amazing sense
that nature is a
perfect invention,
that there is nothing
superfluous and nothing lacking.
Nature does nothing in vain.
[Horse snorts]
If the bone is that shape,
then it must do something.
Every small aspect of that
form must have a function.
[Bat screeches]
He does claim that the
human being can take things
from nature and put them
together in a different way
and that you can invent
things that nature didn't invent,
so you could act as a
second nature in the world.
♪
Narrator: In the late 1470s,
Leonardo finally left
Verrocchio's studio
and opened one of his own
with his own apprentices
and assistants.
Between commissions, he
devised and drew machines
for an array of purposes.
Some were inspired
by the designs
of classical inventors or
Renaissance engineers,
and all were informed by his
close observations of nature--
the spirals in a snail's shell,
the eddies of water
in a surging stream,
and the swirls of wind
induced by a thunderstorm.
He drew an Archimedes screw,
an ancient device created to
force water to flow upwards,
and sketched
construction machines,
a mill for processing grain,
and a human flying contraption
featuring batlike wings.
For Leonardo,
building the machines often
seemed beside the point.
Galluzzi: What is beauty
for Leonardo is proportion
and harmony among its parts
and is a balance
between light and shade,
is organization of all
the inner parts in a way
that provide an immediate
perception of coherence.
This is why I like to call
these drawings portraits.
He takes the same
care in making them
as he puts into portraying
one of his famous ladies.
Narrator: In March of 1481,
an order of Augustinian friars
hired Leonardo to paint
a massive altarpiece
for the Monastery of
San Donato a Scopeto
located just outside
the city's walls.
His father, who did
legal work for the monks,
helped broker the contract.
He was to depict another
frequently painted Bible scene
known as the
Adoration of the Magi
in which 3 kings visit
the newborn Jesus
and recognize
Him as the Messiah.
Verdon: There's little
evidence that he was personally
a very religious person.
It's evident that he
knew the stories.
That was his bread
and butter as an artist.
Even when he is dealing
with nonreligious subjects--
rocks or water or trees--
I think he brings that
sense that all things
are part of this astounding
system that God has made.
He never simply bows to
conventional religious ideas
and makes himself the
illustrator of the catechism.
He's always looking
for something more.
♪
Narrator: For the
dozens of figures
who would populate his painting,
Leonardo sat in the
piazzas of Florence
quietly observing and sketching.
♪
Man as Leonardo: You
must wander around
and constantly as
you go, observe, note,
and consider the circumstances
and behavior of men
as they talk, quarrel,
laugh, or fight together
♪
and make brief sketches
of them in a notebook,
for the forms and movements
of bodies are so infinite
that the memory is
incapable of retaining them
♪
so keep these sketches
as your guides and masters.
♪
Narrator: In one preparatory
drawing for his "Adoration,"
Leonardo used dozens
of perspective lines
to create an intricate,
3-dimensional setting
which he then populated
with animals and figures.
♪
On an 8-foot-wide poplar
panel coated with gesso,
Leonardo sketched and
resketched an underdrawing by hand
using black chalk or charcoal.
♪
On top of this, he began
to rough out the figures
in black, brown,
and blue pigments
which he applied by brush.
♪
Next, he added a
thin coat of white paint.
♪
Using layers of diluted
black and brown glazes,
Leonardo masterfully
developed contrasting areas
of light and shadow that
eventually would give the scene
dimension and depth,
a technique known
as chiaroscuro.
♪
Soon, a riveting scene
featuring the Virgin and Child,
3 kings kneeling in homage,
a throng of astonished
eyewitnesses,
ancient ruins,
and horses and
soldiers in a distant battle
began to emerge.
It was unlike any
Adoration ever painted.
Delieuvin, speaking French:
♪
Verdon: When the star
stops and the kings see Mary
and the Christ child,
they are full of great joy.
♪
They feel joy, but
there are many people--
there are 3 kings,
and then there are all the
members of the entourage--
and people do not all respond
in exactly the same way.
♪
Delieuvin, speaking French:
♪
Verdon: So he's really
looking at it in a way
that no one had
ever done before,
no one had ever done before,
and that is simply astounding.
Borgo, speaking Italian:
♪
♪
Narrator: Among the bystanders
in the painting's
lower right corner,
Leonardo painted a male figure,
likely a self-portrait,
who gazes away from the
scene's dramatic center
♪
but less than a
year after beginning
his "Adoration of the Magi,"
Leonardo abandoned the work.
"So grand was his vision,"
wrote Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo,
one of Leonardo's
early biographers,
that "he saw errors
even in things that
others called miracles."
♪
Gopnik: You can feel
this sort of dissatisfaction.
He wants to not only capture
the snapshot of that scene,
but he wants to ask himself,
"How would everyone
have behaved?
"How would the camels and
the animals and the Magi--
how would everyone have
behaved at that moment?"
He ends up with a
lot of unfinished work
because the questions
he's setting himself
are not questions that
you can answer easily.
♪
[Droplets splashing]
Man as Leonardo:
We do not lack ways
of passing our miserable days.
Still, we do not want
to spend them in vain,
drawing no praise,
and leaving no
memory of ourselves
in the minds of mortals.
Isaacson: We can see
in Leonardo a despair,
and a gloom happening.
He hasn't finished the
"Adoration of the Magi,"
and he keeps jotting
in his notebook
Man as Leonardo: Dimmi.
Dimmi. Dimmi se mai fu fatto cosa
Isaacson: "Tell me. Tell me.
Tell me if anything
ever gets done."
Bramly, speaking French:
Narrator: "Tell me,
Leonardo, why such anguish?"
wrote a friend on a
sheet of Leonardo's paper.
"Where will I settle?" Leonardo
asked himself on the same page.
Isaacson: It was time for
Leonardo to move on. He knew it.
He needed to seek new
horizons, and he gets an opportunity
when there is a delegation
that's sent from
Florence to Milan.
It's almost cultural diplomacy
because the people in Florence
are trying to appeal
to the Duke of Milan
by sending great architects
and artists and painters.
Narrator: The delegation
likely traveled on horseback,
first climbing the
Apennine Mountains,
then riding up the
Po River Valley
before reaching the
plains of Lombardy,
where Milan, a city
of 80,000 people
surrounded by 3
miles of medieval walls,
rose up before the Alps.
Unlike Florence, a
republic whose officials
were elected from
the leading guilds,
Milan was a city-state
ruled for 2 centuries
by merciless strongmen
who went by the title of Duke.
Ludovico Sforza, though
not officially Milan's duke,
had sidelined his nephew
in 1480 and kept control
through brute force
and cunning statecraft,
which he used to navigate
the ever-shifting alliances
of Italy's duchies,
kingdoms, republics,
and the Papal States.
King: Any prince, any
government had to be wary
of all the neighbors, all
the other people in Italy
because there was a
kind of tense balance,
a kind of equipoise between
and among these states.
Ludovico was very much a
spider at the center of this web
which would tremble
whenever someone else
began to move on the peninsula,
brilliant figure in many
ways, politically astute,
extremely deceitful
and unscrupulous,
and by the 1480s,
probably militarily
the most powerful person
on the Italian Peninsula.
Narrator: Known
as Il Moro, the Moor,
in part for his dark complexion,
Sforza had cultivated a court
that was among the most
sophisticated in all of Europe.
♪
He kept his palace populated
with engineers and poets,
doctors, artists,
and mathematicians
whom he commissioned
to design and build churches
and fortifications,
create works of art,
and collaborate on plans
for the elaborate pageants
he was fond of staging.
♪
Verdon: One of the
things that surprises us
about Leonardo's choice
to go and live in Milan is that
he went from a city
which had always prized
its political liberty to
a Soviet-type situation.
He needs the leisure to
be able to work his ideas out
in a creative way without
the immediate market pressure
of producing a work.
Man as Leonardo:
Most illustrious Lord,
I shall endeavor to explain
myself to Your Excellency,
showing Your
Lordship my secrets.
Narrator: Leonardo dictated
a letter addressed to the duke
proclaiming his
skill as an engineer
and enumerating his
ideas for military devices.
Man as Leonardo: I have
designs for extremely light
and strong bridges, suitable
to be most easily carried,
and with them, you
may pursue the enemy
and flee at any time.
I have methods for
destroying every stronghold
or other fortress, even
if it were built on rock.
[Horse neighs]
I will make safe and
unassailable covered chariots
which, entering among
the enemy with their a*tillery,
can withstand any attack,
even by large groups of warriors.
Should bombardment
operations fail,
I would contrive catapults,
mangonels, trebuchets,
and other admirably efficient
machines not in common use.
Bramly, speaking French:
Narrator: There is no evidence
Leonardo ever received
a reply to his letter
or even sent it.
With no prospect of a job
as Sforza's military engineer,
he needed to find
other paying work.
Eventually, he
formed a partnership
with brothers Ambrogio
and Evangelista de Predis,
who operated a
successful local studio.
Together, the 3 artists
secured a commission
to paint an altarpiece
for the chapel
of the Confraternity of the
Immaculate Conception.
The contract--
dated April 25, 1483--
specified that the altarpiece
should include an image
of the Virgin and Child, flanked
by two smaller side panels.
Leonardo was to
paint the central panel.
Verdon: Mary, of course,
was the most common subject
in medieval and Renaissance art.
♪
Here, Mary is Leonardo's focus.
♪
Mary's right hand,
which is on the back
of John the Baptist,
is very tense.
The fingers are
pressing into John's back,
but the thumb is
over his shoulder,
and what she's doing
is holding him back.
Mary, in the popular
theology that Leonardo
and everyone at the time knew,
already understood her
son must one day die,
and here, he shows her
preventing the prophet
of her own son's future death
from drawing near to Christ.
Christ, the child at her left,
accepts this future death.
Indeed, He's turned
to John the Baptist,
and He's blessing him.
She's lowering her left
hand toward His head,
but her hand can never
reach her child's head
because there's
a figure, an angel,
kneeling behind her son,
and the angel is pointing
toward John the Baptist.
Mary, as human mother,
knows her son must die
but cannot accept that,
and so God sends
His angel to prevent
Mary's instinctive,
natural, maternal instinct
from avoiding
the future Passion.
It is absolutely
the most complex Madonna
image of the entire Renaissance.
♪
Its complexity lies
in a probing effort
to understand a deep
mystery, which is how,
in a woman prepared from all
eternity to bear the Son of God,
humanity still fully
expresses itself.
♪
Narrator: After a disagreement
with the monks over money,
Leonardo and his partners
withheld the painting.
Their dispute would go
unresolved for decades.
Bambach: Leonardo will
do what Leonardo does,
pretty much disregarding
what the expectations
of the patrons are,
and the patrons learned through
their enormous frustrations--
and they would get quite angry--
that this was who Leonardo was.
Narrator: Leonardo soon
formed his own studio in Milan,
where he collaborated on
portraits and religious works
with assistants and other
accomplished masters
and offered instruction
to eager apprentices.
He started but
abandoned a painting
of the 4th-century theologian
and ascetic Saint Jerome.
He got further with a
portrait of a musician,
likely Atalante Migliorotti,
who had traveled
with him to Milan,
and Leonardo finally
began to get commissions
from Ludovico Sforza.
Among them was a
portrait of Cecilia Gallerani,
the well-educated
teenage daughter
of a Milanese civil servant
who had caught Il Moro's eye
and soon after was living in
a suite of rooms in his castle.
♪
Kemp: What Leonardo has
done is to tell a mini-narrative
in this image.
She is holding the ermine,
this animal which is symbolic
of purity because the ermine
was said to prefer to
die rather than get dirty,
and she is turning away from us,
looking, and smiling slightly,
so we must imagine
the duke is over there.
We're looking at her.
She is looking at the duke.
She is given status by
this unseen presence,
which is just spectacularly
remarkable, given the fact
that portraits didn't
have narratives in them.
Isaacson: The way
her wrist is c*ck
protectively around the ermine,
the way the eyes of the
ermine and the eyes of the lady
are both glancing
in the same direction,
and the way the light
glints off of her eyes
and off the white ermine,
it's Leonardo at his best,
showing a scene in motion.
The greatest task of the painter
is to paint the figure and
the intentions of the mind.
He says, "Where there
is no life, make it alive."
♪
Speaking Italian:
♪
Narrator: Leonardo moved
into a spacious studio
and living quarters
at the Corte Vecchia,
a former palace adjacent
to Milan's colossal cathedral.
In the new workshop,
which he would refer to
as "la mia fabrica," my factory,
Leonardo would paint portraits,
draw futuristic machines,
and make meticulous
observations in dozens of notebooks.
[Dog barks]
Borgo, speaking Italian:
Nicholl: I think we get close
to a key quality of Leonardo
in the notebooks.
It's not just that Leonardo
knew an awful lot.
It's that he found
out an awful lot.
Man as Leonardo: What
light and shadow are?
What outlines are seen in trees?
What rules should be given
to boys learning to paint?
Nicholl: The way he found
out was by asking questions
Man as Leonardo: Why the
sun appears larger when setting
than at noon when
it is nearer to us?
Nicholl: and indeed
the interrogative mode
is quite often present
in the notebooks.
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
Nicholl: Why is that happening?
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
Nicholl: How does it happen?
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
Nicholl: What is the quality of
that thing or person or emotion?
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
Nicholl: He's posing questions
and looking for answers.
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
del Toro: The beauty
of what he does is that
he is carrying a
catalog of notions
that are organized almost
like a stream of consciousness.
Man as Leonardo:
[Speaking Italian]
del Toro: His knowledge
knows no boundaries.
[Splash]
[Lion roars]
The way we absorb
the world is all at once,
and that's the simultaneous,
gluttonous impact
that you get from his notebooks.
He has to be there, and he
has to render it right away.
Man as Leonardo: Define first
what is meant by
height and depth,
also how the
elements are situated
Narrator: In one notebook,
he designed a city
built on two levels
to improve sanitation;
sketched castle and
church architecture,
including a study for the
dome of Milan's cathedral;
and invented weapons of w*r.
♪
Leonardo also drew
fantastical flying machines.
♪
Vecce, speaking Italian:
Narrator: He wasn't the first to
imagine conquering the skies.
Daedalus, a mythic
craftsman of ancient Greece,
had fashioned wings for
himself and his son Icarus
in an effort to escape their
captors on the isle of Crete.
♪
Aspiring aviators in China,
Iran, Scotland, and elsewhere
had designed machines and
made ill-fated attempts at flight.
♪
Man as Leonardo: Remember
that your flying machine
must imitate the bat
because the web,
being connected
to the structure,
gives strength to the wings.
Narrator: Many of Leonardo's
designs were ornithopters,
machines that relied on the
human-powered flapping of wings
to achieve flight.
His wings would be constructed
of cane, rope, and fine linen,
the lightest materials
he could find.
Pilots would use pulleys and
cords to coordinate movement
and pedals and
cranks to supply power.
Man as Leonardo: A man
with large enough wings
duly connected might
overcome the resistance of the air
and succeed in conquering
it and rising above it.
♪
Man: In order to achieve lift,
he needed to create, basically,
a deflection of the air.
We are flying because we
are able to redirect the airflow
from horizontal to downward.
And Newton's law says that
if you deflect it downward,
the reaction to it
is, it pushes you up,
and he basically understood that
without being
able to explain it.
♪
Narrator: Though ingenious
and of singular artistic beauty,
his flying machines
could not have flown.
The materials of his
day were too heavy
and human musculature too weak.
♪
Man as Leonardo: The
dragonfly flies with 4 wings,
and when the front
wings are raised,
the back wings are lowered,
but each pair needs
to be sufficient of itself
to bear the full weight.
♪
Narrator: In the years ahead,
Leonardo would fill his
notebooks with drawings
of a multitude of other
mechanical devices--
hydraulic screws, hoists,
a perpetual motion
machine, clocks--
and their component parts--
springs, gears, ball bearings.
Many of his designs were
utilitarian, some theoretical,
but all were devised
with great consideration
for the properties of physics,
such as friction,
inertia, and gravity.
[Pottery shatters]
del Toro: There's a great
little phrase Kubrick said,
and I'll paraphrase him.
The lesson in the Icarus myth
is not that we
shouldn't fly that high.
We just need to build
better wings, you know,
and I think Leonardo
wants to build better wings--
from irrigation to
circulatory systems
to machines of w*r, everything.
♪
Galluzzi: One of the
greatest invention by Leonardo
is not the submarine
or the airplane.
They would not have worked,
and I'm sure he was
absolutely aware of that.
It's the way in which he used
drawings to explain machines.
These drawings are
spectacular as drawings.
♪
He's able, for the first time,
to portray a complex machine
with one drawing in a way that
you can understand perfectly
even its interior parts.
He was making exploded views
aside the general
view of the machine,
and that was unsurpassed
for many, many generations.
♪
Woman: One of my favorite
things is a little musical pun he does
where he takes Do
Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do
and arranges those
into Italian words
that make a sentence,
but they're also, of course,
notes, so you can sing it,
and what is being sung is,
"Love alone makes me remember.
Love alone makes me alert,"
and there's a little,
stray comment
on the back of one of
the sheets of paper--
"If there is no
love, what then?"
♪
Man as Leonardo:
Giacomo came to live with me
on the Feast of Saint
Mary Magdalene, 1490.
♪
Narrator: In the summer
of 1490, Giacomo Caprotti,
a 10-year-old from
a nearby village,
joined Leonardo's household.
♪
Caprotti's father had
agreed to pay room and board
while his son learned
painting from the master.
In time, the boy would
show modest talent,
but at first, he ran errands,
modeled for Leonardo,
and caused trouble.
Nicholl: He's immediately
noted as a mischief maker,
a disruptive figure,
and indeed, the name
that is given to him, Salai,
it means little
demon, little devil,
and the first thing
we learn about him
is a long notation
in Leonardo's--
one of Leonardo's
notebooks, one of the longest
continuous pieces of
writing about another person
that Leonardo ever
put down on paper,
and it's a list of
Salai's misdeeds.
Man as Leonardo: The second day,
I had two shirts cut for him,
a pair of hose, and a jerkin,
and when I put aside some
money to pay for these things,
he stole the money
out of the purse,
and I could never
get him to confess,
though I was quite
certain of the fact.
Again, on April 2,
Gian Antonio left a silver
point on a drawing he had made,
and Giacomo stole it.
Narrator: "Thief" Man
as Leonardo: Ladro
Narrator: "liar" Man
as Leonardo: bugiardo
Narrator: "obstinate"
Man as Leonardo: ostinato
Narrator: "greedy"
Man as Leonardo: ghiotto.
Narrator: Leonardo
wrote in the margin.
Nicholl: Throughout it runs
this wonderful sort of twinkle
of fondness from the maestro
as he lists these misdeeds
of the urchin Salai,
and this fondness
for this mischievous
but rather attractive and
charismatic young lad
carries on, really,
throughout the next 30
years of companionship.
Salai is a apprentice,
then assistant, then companion--
one might almost
certainly say lover--
and finally sort
of indispensable
sort of partner
of Leonardo's life.
♪
He has a very particular look
which becomes the
sort of trademark, almost,
of Leonardo's presentation
of the beautiful male face--
or, indeed, androgynous face--
because his angels often
feature the look of Salai.
Man as Leonardo: Salai, I
want to rest, so no more wars.
No more w*r. I surrender.
Zimmerman: There's a
contemporary reference to Salai.
Someone says, "Our Leonardo
stopped by the other day
with the insufferable Salai,"
and yet something's
being satisfied.
He was with him
for the rest of his life,
and I think you sort
of can't argue with that.
♪
Man as Leonardo: Pleasure
and Pain appear as twins
since there is never
one without the other.
They stand back to back as
though they were attached.
If you take Pleasure,
know that behind him
is one who will deal you
Tribulation and Repentance,
and they exist as
opposites in the same body
because they have
the same basis,
and the various
forms of evil pleasure
are the origin of pain.
Bramly, speaking French:
Speaking Italian:
♪
[Hooves clopping]
Narrator: In January of 1490,
Ludovico Sforza hosted a
lavish celebration to honor
the marriage of his nephew
to the Princess of Naples.
The evening featured
a sumptuous feast
and an elaborate
pageant, "Il Paradiso,"
with costumed actors,
music, and dancing.
Near midnight, a curtain
was drawn to reveal
a giant half-egg,
the top edge arrayed
with the twelve
signs of the zodiac
and the inside gilded with gold.
The 7 known celestial bodies
were represented by actors.
Candles served as stars.
♪
The performance culminated with
the gods descending from heaven
to proclaim the
bride's many virtues.
Leonardo had decorated the hall
and designed all the
costumes and sets.
♪
He had finally found a
niche on Sforza's court.
In time, Il Moro
would appoint him
an official engineer
and painter.
Kemp: He became
a guru of the court.
He had a stipend.
He was a stipendiato.
It gave him space. It
also gave him an area
where there were musicians,
and he himself was an
accomplished musician.
There were poets.
There were historians.
There were people
doing natural philosophy.
There were engineers.
He was a very gracious
man by all accounts,
rather charming.
The courts suited
him quite well.
King: He was someone
who loved the humorous
and loved the grotesque,
loved practical jokes.
♪
We might not think
of Leonardo da Vinci
as having a sense
of humor, but he did.
Man as Leonardo: It was
asked of a painter why,
since he painted
such beautiful figures,
his children were so ugly,
to which the painter replied
that he made his pictures by
day and his children by night.
♪
Bambach: Leonardo also
cultivates a huge network
of intellectual
friends and craftsmen,
and his ambitions to write
treatises really emerges.
[Bell tolling] In Milan,
there was an interest
in more Aristotelian
ways of thinking,
which are much more
based on empiricism,
empirical observation.
Leonardo was able to
befriend all these people
who translated treatises
that probably
enhanced his education,
and he kind of got his
sea legs as an author.
[Thunder] Verdon: Plato said,
"You have to start
with the great ideas."
Aristotle said, "No. You have
to start with the hard facts,
"like rocks and dirt and plants.
"In analyzing them, you
will come to the larger ideas
that allow you to
construct a system,"
and I think that corresponded
much more closely
to Leonardo's own curiosity
about the natural world,
and, in a sense, shaped it.
Narrator: Determined to
become a writer and intellectual,
Leonardo acquired
more and more books.
The German craftsman
Johannes Guttenberg
had invented the
printing press in 1452,
the year Leonardo was born.
♪
Within two decades,
Venice had established itself
as a center for publishing,
and Milan and Florence
each had their own print shops.
♪
King: Leonardo was an
inveterate and omnivorous reader,
and if he couldn't buy a
book, he would borrow it.
He's not just looking
at the natural world--
he's certainly doing that--but
he's also looking at the best
that has been thought and
said by his predecessors.
Man as Leonardo: Try
to obtain the Vitolone,
which is in the
library of Pavia.
Ask Benedetto Portinari
how people go on
the ice in Flanders.
Ask Maestro Antonio how
mortars are placed on bastions
by day or by night.
Get the Friar at Brera to
show you "De ponderibus."
Narrator: Leonardo
also frequently quoted
"The Divine Comedy,"
the epic poem
by Dante Alighieri, Florence's
most famous writer
♪
and he tried to master Latin,
long the language
of European scholars,
filling page after
page of his notebooks
with vocabulary words
written in his mirror script.
♪
Vecce, speaking Italian:
♪
Man as Leonardo: Not
being a literary man,
certain presumptuous
people will think
that they may
reasonably criticize me,
alleging that I am a
man without letters.
Foolish men.
They do not know
that my subjects
are to be dealt
with by experience
rather than by
words and experience
has been the master
of those who wrote well.
Therefore, I shall cite
my master in all cases.
♪
Galluzzi: He says that I
am "uomo sanza lettere."
"I am a man who has
no traditional knowledge,"
and is a kind of admission,
which is, in fact, an
expression of proudness.
"I've learned not from
libraries, not from books,
"but from the
observation of nature.
"Nature is the real teacher.
I am a disciple of nature."
Many expressions
in his notebooks
express this frustration
for not being considered
as an intellectual, we would
say today, as a scholar.
At the same time,
this was tempered
by the self-confidence
of knowing much more
than those people, being
able to perform things
that the others not
even could conceive.
♪
Narrator: Meanwhile,
Leonardo had embarked
on another ambitious
project-- a series of books
that, together, would
present his core beliefs
on the art and
science of painting.
♪
Man as Leonardo: Light is
the chaser away of darkness.
♪
Shade is the
obstruction of light,
and the eye can best
distinguish the forms of objects
when it is placed between the
shaded and illuminated parts.
Narrator: Using candles
to illuminate spheres
and cylinders, he
observed how light,
when cast on curved surfaces,
created shadows of
varying intensity and length.
♪
Delieuvin, speaking French:
Man as Leonardo: The edges
of shadows darken by degrees,
and anyone ignorant of this fact
will paint things
with no relief,
and relief is the heart
and soul of painting.
♪
[Man exhales]
Narrator: Like his
old master Verrocchio,
Leonardo believed that a deep
knowledge of human anatomy
was essential to
depicting the human form,
but he and his contemporaries
were still dependent
on the medical teachings
of ancient physicians
and philosophers whose
centuries-old theories
had mostly gone unchallenged.
Existing anatomical
illustrations,
which had been
informed by those theories,
were inaccurate and inadequate.
Man as Leonardo: A painter
who learns about the nature
of tendons, muscles, and
sinews will know just how many
and which tendons cause
the movement of a limb
or which muscle bulges and
causes that tendon to contract.
Narrator: Leonardo drew
muscles, bones, and organs
and experimented with
different techniques--
cross sections and transparency.
♪
Speaking Italian:
Narrator: Now
he obtained a skull
and set out to map it
in a series of drawings.
Kemp: He sectioned it
horizontally and vertically.
You think, "Well,
that's obvious,"
but it wasn't obvious.
Nobody did that.
There were no anatomical
drawings in earlier books
with sections of the skull,
and he's looking at the skull
empirically for its
features, what it looks like,
and wonderful, delicate drawings
which are just awesome
in terms of technique,
and you think, "Well, he's
doing the anatomy of the skull,"
but what he's really looking for
is where the center
of the brain is.
He talks about the
pole of the cranium
and that the point where all
these proportional systems cross
is where the senses all go
into this central
clearinghouse, as it were.
Those skull studies, which
look like descriptive anatomy,
are actually devoted
to understanding
the workings of the brain.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
What sneezing is,
what yawning is,
sweating,
fatigue,
hunger,
sleepiness,
thirst,
lust.
Narrator: Aristotle had believed
that sensory impressions
converged in a brain cavity,
where they were processed,
interpreted, and stored.
He called it the
Sensus Communis.
Man as Leonardo: The
soul seems to be located
in the site of reason,
and the site of
reason seems to be
where all the senses converge.
This is called the senso comune,
and the soul is
not all throughout
and in every part of the body,
as many previously believed,
because if it were, it would
not be necessary to have
the instruments of the senses
converge in a single location.
Narrator: To Leonardo, the
transmission of information
from the eye, which he
called the window of the soul,
to the brain and nervous system
and the reaction that followed--
joy, fear, concern, surprise--
was the essence of
the human experience.
Artists, he believed, should
understand this phenomenon
and the science behind it
to effectively portray emotion,
reveal character,
and tell riveting stories.
Speaking Italian:
Narrator: Leonardo saw
proportion in the natural world
as evidence of nature's
matchless gift for design.
Using male models, he
began a meticulous study.
Man as Leonardo: On the changing
measurements of the human body
through the movements of
the limbs from different views,
the measurements of the
human body vary in each limb
according to how much it is
bent and from different views
so that they grow or diminish
to a varying extent on one side
while they grow or diminish
on the opposite side.
♪
Narrator: Seeking inspiration,
Leonardo studied a treatise
by Vitruvius, a Roman
architect of the 1st century B.C.,
who wrote about the symmetry
between the human body
and a skillfully designed temple
and carefully measured the
proportions of what he described
as a "well-shaped man."
Rossellini: And this
was classical belief
that the symmetry and
proportion of the human body
reflected as in a microcosm
the greater harmony of the world.
Narrator: "Just as the human
body yields a circular outline,
so too a square figure
may be found from it,"
wrote Vitruvius.
Borgo, speaking Italian:
Man as Leonardo: The space
between the parting of the lips
and the base of the
nose is 1/7 of the face.
Leonardo's very,
very scientific about it.
Man as Leonardo: The
space from the mouth
to the bottom of the
chin is 1/4 of the face
Isaacson: He does all
sorts of measurements--
Man as Leonardo: in equal
Isaacson: from the
forehead to the nose
Man as Leonardo: of the mouth
Isaacson: to the
chin to the navel
to the genitals of
all of his assistants
so he gets all the
proportions exactly right,
the way Vitruvius had suggested.
Man as Leonardo: The
distance from the top of the nose,
where the eyebrows begin,
to the bottom of the chin
is 2/3 of the face.
Borgo, speaking Italian:
del Toro: Leonardo is interested
in the human proportion,
and he thinks that's divine
enough to be represented.
He says, "There is enough poetry
"and enough cosmos
and enough infinite
"in another human being
or a rock and a waterfall
or a half-smile."
♪
Man as Leonardo: Caterina
came on the 16th day of July 1493.
Bramly, speaking French:
Narrator: Since leaving
Vinci decades earlier,
Leonardo had rarely made
any note of his mother,
who, by 1493, was in
her mid-60s and widowed.
Bramly, speaking French:
♪
Narrator: One year later,
on a page of his notebook,
he recorded the
costs of burying her.
Man as Leonardo:
For the bier, 8 soldi;
a pall over the bier, 12 soldi;
for bearing and placing
the cross, 4 soldi;
for 4 priests and
4 clerics, 20 soldi;
for the gravediggers, 16 soldi;
sugar and candles, 12 soldi.
♪
Every evil leaves
pain in our memory
except the supreme evil, death,
which destroys this
memory along with our life.
♪
[Birds chirping]
Narrator: In November of 1493,
Ludovico Sforza
hosted a celebration
for his niece Bianca, who was
marrying the king of Germany.
On display for the occasion
was a colossal, 20-foot-high
clay horse sculpted by Leonardo,
the model for part of
a bronze monument
honoring Il Moro's father.
"I am certain that neither
Greece nor Rome,"
one astonished witness said,
"ever saw anything
more massive."
[Horse neighs]
The artist had studied
live horses obsessively,
measuring their proportions
and drawing their features
in his notebooks.
I think he was better at horses
than anyone has ever been.
[Horse snorts]
He has the horse rearing
[Horse neighs]
and then he has the
neck and the head turned
in 3 different ways, and
there's so much motion.
♪
You see all the
different possibilities.
You see how accurate
he is with all of them, too.
Narrator: Rather than
cast the massive statue
in the tried and tested
way, divided into pieces,
Leonardo planned to
create one giant mold.
♪
Man as Leonardo: When
you shall have made
the mold upon the horse,
you must make the
thickness of the metal in clay.
Dry it in layers.
Make the outside mold of plaster
to save time in drying
and the expense in wood.
And with this plaster,
enclose the irons
both outside and inside to
a thickness of two fingers.
Make terra cotta.
♪
Narrator: He planned to
build a lattice metal frame
to secure the mold before
lowering it upside-down
into a pit using a pulley
machine of his own design.
Finally, he would pour
molten bronze through holes
spread across the mold,
using furnaces arrayed
around the pit to
cool the metal evenly.
Ludovico Sforza gave him the
75 tons of bronze he needed,
but in the fall of 1494,
before Leonardo
could put it to use,
Sforza confiscated it all.
[Swords clanging]
The French King Charles VIII
had ordered his troops south
to conquer the
Kingdom of Naples,
setting the entire Italian
peninsula on edge.
To preserve his
control over Milan,
Il Moro quickly aligned
himself with Charles.
At the same time, he
sent the valuable metal
to his father-in-law,
the Duke of Ferrara,
who feared a French invasion
and planned to make cannons
with Leonardo's bronze.
King: He couldn't have been
human if he wasn't disappointed
at losing this commission
which, had he been
able to bring it to fruition,
it really would've
made his reputation.
It would've been
his work of fame.
Narrator: Ludovico
Sforza would soon assign
a new project to Leonardo--
a painting Leonardo
believed few would ever see.
In the early 1490s, Il Moro
had chosen a monastery
to serve as a
mausoleum for his family.
Home to an order
of Dominican friars,
the site featured a
cloistered garden,
quarters for the monks,
a sacristy, and the
recently completed
Church of Santa
Maria delle Grazie.
To adorn the south
wall of the refectory,
Sforza commissioned a fresco
of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
For the north end, Leonardo
was to paint a scene
suitable for the monks who
dined there in silent contemplation--
the final meal Christ
shared with his apostles
before he was crucified--
the Last Supper.
It would be his most
ambitious painting to date,
featuring multiple figures
engaged in a complex,
dynamic narrative on a
physical scale much larger
than any of his previous works,
including the abandoned
"Adoration of the Magi."
It's a difficult
subject for painters
because it's a long,
thin, wide picture,
which is slightly
difficult to organize,
and you want some drama,
or Leonardo wanted drama in it.
King: For the most part,
Last Supper paintings
would be very sedate scenes.
If you look at these paintings,
Christ and the apostles
ranged across the
table mostly in silence,
eating, maybe one
or two talking together,
and they're very placid scenes.
Borgo, speaking Italian:
Narrator: He bought a Bible,
a widely read
Italian-language edition
that had been translated
from Latin two decades earlier.
The Gospels--
the books attributed to
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John--
offered varied but similar
accounts of the evening
on which Jesus
gathered His 12 apostles
and during dinner staggered
them with a declaration--
"He that dippeth his
hand with me in the dish,
the same shall betray me."
King: It's an incredibly
emotional moment,
where we have this
charismatic religious leader
with his band of brothers,
and they're meeting
in an occupied city
whose authorities are
plotting against them,
and, of course, sitting
in their midst is a traitor,
the one who's going
to betray the leader,
and I think Leonardo
was probably electrified
by this story, and
he was going to tell it
in a very dramatic,
theatrical way,
a way in which no artist
previously had thought about,
let alone attempted.
Narrator: Leonardo began
exploring how the disciples,
roiled by Christ's words,
would twist their limbs,
wring their hands,
and distort their faces.
Man as Leonardo: One who
was drinking and has left the glass
where it was and turned
his head towards the speaker;
another, weaving the
fingers of his hands together,
turns, frowning
to his companion.
Kemp: For Leonardo,
he had to understand
how the body worked
as a responsive machine.
What happens when Christ
says, "One of you will betray me,"
with the brain and the
nervous impulses and so on?
♪
He would see if he was
looking, say, at a disciple
who reacts to Christ's
pronouncement
by, say, throwing
out their arms,
that figure is expressing
il concetto dell'anima,
the purpose of the
mind, purpose of the soul.
It's a way of
expressing character
and expressing emotion.
♪
[Door opens]
Narrator: Leonardo erected
scaffolding along the north end
of the refectory and
began his mural
♪
first by coating the wall
with a layer of plaster,
then a binding agent,
and on top of that, a
primer of lead white.
♪
He pounded nails into
the plaster for reference
and used a ruler to
draw construction lines
and a stylus to etch grids.
♪
Using the incisions,
he laid out the scene's
ceiling and walls,
constructing a space with
realistic scale and depth
and geometric harmony.
♪
One nail hole at the very
center would serve as the point
at which all perspective
lines would converge.
♪
It was where he would
paint the face of Christ.
♪
Man as Leonardo:
Filippo, Simone,
Matteo, Tome, Jacopo maggiore
Narrator: He made sketches
in chalk and used a brush
to paint outlines
directly atop the plaster.
♪
Man as Leonardo: Pietro,
Andrea, Bartolomeo.
♪
Marshall: The moment
you lay down the first mark
or first line, you're
engaged in a process
of evaluating every next step
and understanding whether or not
you have to make some major
changes or some minor changes.
This is what's going on all
the way through the process.
Narrator: Rather than follow
the traditional technique
for fresco in which pigments
ground in water are painted
on wet plaster and bind to
the wall in a matter of hours,
Leonardo used a
mixture of oil and tempera
that he'd concocted himself.
Bambach: This allowed
him the luxury of painting
during a long process of
time so he was not limited
to 8 hours a day and
just one part of the design,
and it also, very importantly,
allowed him to create
the transitions of tone
and the transitions of light
because you could not get
the effect of light with fresco.
♪
Narrator: In layer upon
layer, he applied the pigments
that would, over time,
bring the scene to life,
often disregarding
his initial outlines
as the contours of
his design evolved.
♪
For Christ's garments,
he used vermillion,
a pigment made from a
brick-red mineral called cinnabar,
and ultramarine, created
by crushing lapis lazuli,
a costly but brilliant
blue metamorphic rock
that could only be
found in Afghanistan.
♪
"Often, he would not put
down his brush from first light
until nightfall, forgetting
to eat and drink,"
wrote the novelist
Matteo Bandello,
who, as a boy, had watched
as Leonardo toiled on the mural.
♪
On other days, he
added little to the wall.
♪
[Birds chirping]
Meanwhile, Sforza
had grown impatient
with Leonardo's unhurried pace
and directed his secretary
to draft a revised agreement
that would impose a
deadline on the artist.
♪
Within months,
Leonardo was finished.
♪
The mural rose 15
feet from bottom to top
and spanned 29 feet across
the refectory's north wall.
♪
It showcased his gift for
blending tones and colors,
his mastery of light and shadow,
and his command of geometry,
which he wielded
with great precision
to bring harmony to
a moment of chaos.
♪
Kemp: It's often said
he's portraying a moment,
that it's like a kind of flash
photograph of what's going on.
It is in a way, but it's
more complicated than that
because if you look in
the picture, the main thing
is that Christ's saying is,
"One of you will betray me."
Verdon: And they're all
saying, "Is it I?" "Is it I?" "Is it I?"
And this central figure,
totally focused on what's
going to happen the next day
and on the sign that
he's giving of the offering
of His body and blood, He
gazes down in deep sadness.
He doesn't look at the apostles.
Kemp: And all the disciples
react in a particular way
apart from Judas, who's rigid
and his tendons on his neck
stick out because he's aware
of what's going to happen.
♪
The announcement of
betrayal then ripples out.
♪
Delieuvin, speaking French:
♪
♪
King: This was the heart
of the painting for him
because it allowed him
to show gesture and action
and facial expression,
the motions of the mind.
All of this 3, 4 seconds
that happens at this table
is unfolding before our
eyes in this single image,
and the brilliance of him
being able to bring this off
is truly astounding.
♪
Narrator: Leonardo da Vinci
had magnificently rendered
the gestures, both subtle
and dramatic, that testified
to the psychological
states of his subjects,
and he had resoundingly
answered the question
that he had asked
himself many times before--
"Tell me if anything
was ever done."
♪
Bambach: For him, painting
was an entire
philosophical meditation.
It is so much a process
of thinking, of engaging,
of feeling that was essential
in his creative process,
and, really, this is part of
the reason that this painting
has that transformative,
transcendental aspect to it.
♪
When we go as
viewers and look at it,
we all fall into
the same reverie.
♪
Narrator: The artist now turned
his attention to other projects.
He provided illustrations
for "De divina proportione,"
a book on mathematics
by his friend Luca Pacioli.
He painted another
mural for Sforza--
a canopy of tangled tree
branches knit together
by a golden rope for the
vaulted ceiling of a tower
in the Duke's castle,
but in early 1499,
Louis XII, who had recently
succeeded his cousin Charles
as King of France,
began mustering his troops
for another invasion
of the Italian peninsula.
This time, the French
planned to depose Sforza.
Bramly, speaking French:
Narrator: Il Moro
fled to Innsbruck.
The French took
Milan without a fight.
Bramly, speaking French:
♪
Narrator: Louis
XII arrived that fall
and visited the refectory.
When he saw the beauty
of Leonardo's "Last Supper,"
he decided that he wanted
to take it back to France,
but his engineers could find no
way to safely remove the mural.
♪
After 18 years in Milan,
Leonardo decided it was
time for him to move on.
He was 47 years old.
His best-known painting
remained out of sight
in a monastery's dining hall.
[Thunder]
♪
Bambach: Leonardo was
tremendously ambitious,
intellectually ambitious.
He had no concern for being
a successful
professional painter
and to be admired,
adored for that.
He wants to be
admired for his intellect.
♪
Narrator: Eager to find a
patron who would support
his artistic and
scientific curiosity,
Leonardo headed
east toward Venice
with his friend Luca Pacioli.
Although he had no
commissions on the horizon,
Leonardo da Vinci's
greatest work was yet to come.
♪
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01x01 - The Disciple of Experience
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This two-part, four-hour documentary delves into the world of a 15th-century art titan and unravels his journey while shedding light on his lasting impact on future generations.
This two-part, four-hour documentary delves into the world of a 15th-century art titan and unravels his journey while shedding light on his lasting impact on future generations.