Original subtitles

Ever since the earliest programmes flickered onto our screens,

film-makers, presenters and experts have all turned to television

to bring art out of museums and galleries and into our living rooms.

Now, all this may seem rather vulgar.

Quite right - it is.

As the great masters became available to millions instead of hundreds,

programme makers found new ways for us to appreciate them.

From the utterly daft...

SPEAKS GOBBLEDYGOOK

..to the downright astonishing.

That's extraordinary!

Now, with more than six decades of archive,

I want to explore how television has influenced our understanding

of one of the true giants of the art world.

He created a certain painting that you might just have heard of.

Probably the best known portrait in the world.

His scientific mind sought to understand the world around him.

Curiosity was the driving force of his investigations.

And he filled his notebooks with hundreds of inventions and discoveries,

many of them centuries ahead of their time.

For some, he is quite simply the greatest genius who ever lived.

He will stand out for ever in the history of human thought.

I've selected some of my favourite moments from the archives to create

a television history of Leonardo da Vinci.

Among its many treasures,

Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire boasts a magnificent ceiling.

It was painted by James Thornhill in 1716,

just as the Renaissance in Europe was drawing to a close.

Spanning four centuries,

this was a period of intense discovery and exploration,

of new ways of thinking and doing -

the very qualities which have come to define

one of its greatest figures -

Leonardo da Vinci.

In these surroundings, it's easy to see why he has been the subject

of more television programmes than just about any other artist.

The BBC archives are such an

incredible resource on Leonardo,

so I'm excited at the opportunity

to see how, over the years,

programme makers have explored and explained his life and work,

but it is a daunting task.

He achieved such an incredible array of things in his 67 years of life

that it's difficult to know quite where to start.

He started life as an artist, of course.

But of course we know he was much more than just an artist.

We know that Leonardo was strikingly handsome,

possessed of great physical strength.

It was said that he could straighten a horseshoe in his bare hands.

He was an artist, musician, botanist, anatomist.

And for me, above all, he was an engineer par excellence.

And I say, yes, he is the greatest genius of all time.

Perhaps the most important word there is...

Genius. Genius.

What are we going to do with him, then?

What, indeed?

Well, I don't think you can even begin to appreciate the vast body

of Leonardo's work without first understanding the one quality

that drove him to master so many different things -

his insatiable curiosity.

One of the first programmes I turned to was Kenneth Clark's epic

1969 series exploring the history of Western civilisation.

Clark focuses less on Leonardo's paintings and more on how his

endless curiosity made him so much more

than just a typical Renaissance artist.

In fact, he belongs to no epoch.

He fits into no category.

And the more you know about him, the more utterly mysterious he becomes.

He was the most relentlessly curious man in history.

Everything he saw made him ask why and how, particularly how.

He's never satisfied with a single answer.

He goes on asking the same question again and again, worrying it,

restating it, conjuring imaginary antagonists,

till the reader is absolutely worn out.

Fortunately, he also left answers in the form of drawings, which are,

or appear to be, easier to take in.

From the mid-1480s, and for the rest of his life,

Leonardo recorded his every thought in the form of sketches.

Thousands of them. We'll return to these notebooks again and again.

While some were preliminary drawings for his paintings,

the vast majority were so much more than that.

For Clark, these yellowing pages

contained the answers to a lifetime of questions.

How does one stream of water deflect another?

What is the cause of whirlpools?

Why do the leaves of the Star of Bethlehem

resemble the movement of water?

What is the structure of a bird's wing?

How does a bird fly?

Curiosity was the driving force of his investigations,

of his enquiries.

But essentially he was curious about one thing -

the causes of phenomena.

Leonardo was, I suppose, in the best possible way,

a little bit like a kind of child in a sweet shop.

"Oh, I like that one. Oh, I like that one."

And following that line of inquiry and then suddenly diverting

to something else.

For programme makers,

conveying the scope of an imagination as vast as Leonardo's

is no easy task.

One solution is to simply hand the job over

to another brilliant artist.

This Arena special from 1978 sought the opinion of sculptor Henry Moore,

who compared this same curiosity to that of an infant child,

a trait which uniquely, Moore believes, da Vinci never lost.

Human beings ordinarily, we give up learning,

we make up our minds about something and accept it.

But Leonardo kept that childish or childlike curiosity and wished to understand things.

This is what makes him such a unique and marvellous person.

The artist is often more a person who wants to express emotions

that he feels about life so that other people can share them.

Leonardo had that same human desire and understanding of our situation

in the world, of our make-up, of our emotional sentiments, all this,

which is really what life is based on.

If curiosity was the engine that drove this incredibly powerful mind,

where, then, did this curiosity stem from?

In recent decades,

programme makers have looked for answers in the circumstances

of Leonardo's childhood.

Leonardo was born illegitimate.

His father, Ser Piero, had a liaison with Caterina, a local peasant girl.

She was then married off to a man in the next village.

Ser Piero married a woman of his own class and kept the child, Leonardo.

His illegitimacy would shape his future.

He wasn't given a formal education in the classical languages,

Latin and Greek.

And all his life he would be stung by criticism

of his lack of book learning.

His schooling stopped with the abacus school,

that is as in adding and subtracting with an abacus, and in a funny way,

this turned out to his great advantage

because he was not bound by book learning.

Knowing very little Latin

and having to study it late in life, because he felt this to be a lack,

he didn't know what he was supposed to think

and he was therefore able to look for himself.

All knowledge is vain and full of error when it is not born of experience,

and so experience will be my mistress.

Leonardo believed that visual knowledge is superior

to anything you get from a book.

He thought that the eye is the most powerful of the senses,

that seeing is the most powerful of the senses,

that it has the most direct inlet to the brain.

So his art absolutely is a way of knowing the world.

It's a way of... He-he...

Observation is a way of discovering the world.

It's quite possible that Leonardo turned to pictures rather than words

to satisfy his curiosity

partly because he found writing more problematic.

Leonardo was ambidextrous.

It was said he could write with one hand,

while at the same time drawing with the other.

He had a curious habit of writing backwards with his left hand

in mirror script, probably to avoid smudging the wet ink as he wrote.

Through his drawings, though,

Leonardo developed a purely visual means

of deciphering and decoding the world around him,

one that others could readily understand.

In 1973,

this uniquely visual curiosity was explored by someone not usually

associated with this branch of the arts, Sir John Gielgud.

Leonardo's early preoccupation was with the natural world.

It was an interest that never left him.

The complexity of the simple things of nature fascinated him.

Leonardo approached natural phenomena by observing carefully

and then by making an accurate drawing of what he saw.

To be able to draw something accurately was not only a means of

understanding it, but also of making it clearer to other people.

Drawing is the main tool of analysis for Leonardo.

He repeatedly writes in his notes

that drawing takes precedence over words.

Drawing is almost an instrument for understanding reality,

nature and the working of things.

This continuous stream of questions and his search for answers through his drawings

are the key to Leonardo's prolific range of accomplishments.

But, as more recent programmes have shown,

this also meant he often possessed an alarmingly short span of attention.

It's almost a surgical mind.

The thing is right in front of you, you're totally focused on it,

it's the most important thing in the world.

The moment it's over, it's over, and the next thing becomes the most important thing in theworld.

That's Leonardo's mind.

It's a free associating mind.

Here is work that fascinates me,

I will work with it till it stops fascinating me,

I'll stop and I'll go to another thing that fascinates me.

And, of course, over short periods of time, you don't get much done,

but over a long period of time, you get a great deal done.

Of the many things which Leonardo did achieve,

undoubtedly the most celebrated are his paintings.

They can be appreciated on many levels, of course,

but for me, it's their sheer technical innovation

that sets them apart.

Renaissance art is renowned for its use of light and shade

to capture its subjects in the most breathtakingly lifelike ways.

Many of the techniques used to achieve this were pioneered by Leonardo

from the very beginning of his career.

Leonardo's father apprenticed him to Andrea Verrocchio,

whose workshop was the most important in Florence.

Here on Via Dell'Acqua, Water Street,

Leonardo's career as an artist was to begin.

In 1973, Sir John Gielgud brought us to Florence,

to introduce us to one of the earliest examples

of Leonardo's brush work.

His master, Verrocchio, was a famous craftsman, painter, a sculptor,

a goldsmith.

At the Uffizi, the great museum in Florence,

is Verrocchio's painting The Baptism Of Christ,

more famous now for Leonardo's contribution to it

than Verrocchio's.

The angel on the left is the work of Leonardo,

an other-worldly creature

that Verrocchio never painted and never could have painted.

However, the quality of this vintage film does make it

a little difficult to appreciate what all the fuss is about.

Clearly, the development of art on TV was revolutionised with colour.

Before colour, I think art on television was a sort of rather distant,

slightly stiff kind of thing, you know.

A painting, a painting of the Adoration of the Magi.

It's unfinished, and that's why it looks so dark and scrubby.

Fast-forward more than 50 years and the clarity of high definition TV

means that Fiona Bruce doesn't have to rely entirely on her powers

of description to bring Leonardo's earlier work alive.

The fact that the angel is three-quarter turned away from us,

gazing raptly, adoringly at Christ,

that pose was ground-breaking at the time.

And look at the curls.

Fine detail like ripples of water.

You'll see that more and more.

And then the subtlety of the blue

and the shading of the drapes of material.

Apparently, when Verrocchio saw that,

the story goes he decided that he should put down his brush and stop

painting altogether because he had been surpassed by his apprentice.

I think that's not true!

Verrocchio is a highly successful and multi-talented artist,

leader of one of the largest workshops in Florence.

Leonardo himself, on the other hand, writes about it and he writes that,

"It is a poor pupil, the one who doesn't overcome his master."

Determined that his work was going to be noticed,

da Vinci began pushing the boundaries,

not just in terms of poses but also in technique and materials.

As he starts on his angel figure,

the young Leonardo makes a momentous decision.

The painting has so far been done the traditional way with egg tempera,

but he's going to paint his figure in oils.

It was an astonishing gamble for the young Leonardo to take,

but it paid off.

And again, television found a way to clearly demonstrate

what a difference this made.

The tempera version is on the right and on the left is the old version.

Yeah. And you took about the same time, a week or so, to do each of them.

But they are strikingly different.

Oh, yes, yes. The whole effect of the paint is totally different.

Much, much richer colours in the oil version, much duller in the tempera.

And much more depth of feel, do you feel there?

You can sort of sense that there is something going on under it as well.

That's right, yes.

There's a subtlety you can build into the lights

and the darks in the oils you just can't do in the tempera, basically.

It was a defining moment for both the young apprentice

and the art world in general. In southern Europe,

painting in oils would eventually replace tempera

as the medium of choice.

Innovations like this became the hallmark of Leonardo's work.

And throughout the decades,

programme makers have explored the huge impact he would have on art

in the Western world through his mastery of light and shade.

Light is the chaser away of darkness.

Shade is the obstruction of light.

Everything in nature is shaped by them.

His understanding of shadow and light

would transform European painting for ever.

His rendering of the delicate shadows he saw,

his concern with light and shade, influenced many of the artists

of his own time and of times to come.

Giorgione, Titian,

Caravaggio, and through Caravaggio,

Rembrandt.

He was really obsessed by understanding how light

hits the bodies and how light is reflected and rebounds.

He conceived the figures not as defined by outlines and colours,

but as defined by light and shade.

Leonardo developed techniques such as "sfumato", meaning smoky,

named for the misty,

soft transitions of light and shade rather than hard borders,

which he applied to faces like those in the Virgin Of The Rocks.

And he pioneered a revolutionary process called chiaroscuro

using light and dark tones to enhance contrast

and form in his paintings.

And, for me, the archives have been instrumental in conveying how

Leonardo's scientific understanding of light

revolutionised painting technique.

Since the Middle Ages,

the painter was instructed to lay down and ground and then build up

the highlights on top of it, which is an additive kind of process.

Philosophically, Leonardo turned it around.

He assumed the object is there,

his problem was to depict it.

And the way he attacked this problem was to show where the light wasn't,

where the shadows were.

In his notebooks, we have diagrams showing how light

defines forms by not being there at all.

It looks abstract enough,

but in fact it was the theoretical study of light falling on a sphere

that enabled Leonardo to achieve the incredibly precise,

scientifically precise continuous modelling

of the head of the Mona Lisa.

A good painter has to bring out two things -

the physical appearance of the subject he's painting,

but also what is in the mind, the intentions of the soul.

Achieving the first is easy - the second, very hard.

Ah, yes, the Mona Lisa.

Surely the ultimate expression of Leonardo's scientific mastery of light and shadow.

She's become a global icon, and television has certainly played a part in that.

But, like the artist himself, the question really is - where do you begin?

To show just how ground-breaking the Mona Lisa was,

Andrew Graham-Dixon started where Leonardo himself had - in his notebooks.

If you want some sense of just how much work there was behind

the surface of the picture, then this is a great place to start.

It's a sheet of drawings by Leonardo's own hand.

It's a series of studies of the human mouth,

the motions of the mouth.

How the mouth puckers,

how the mouth bares its teeth.

We have a very strong sense that, for Leonardo,

every picture is a kind of encyclopaedia entry.

What does it contain in faint outline?

Look here.

It's a bit like the Cheshire Cat.

It's the Mona Lisa smile without the Mona Lisa attached.

The result of this encyclopaedic knowledge was of course

that famously enigmatic smile,

as demonstrated by Alan Yentob

in a time before smoking was banished from our screens.

You know,

one of the reasons that this smile so endlessly fascinates people

is because they can't quite make it out.

And I think something of this is to do with the fact it's lopsided,

the smile. Now, look at this, if I cover this side of the picture,

now that looks quite severe.

If I turn it round and cover

this side of the face...

..now she looks like she's smiling.

And you see, the smile is also mirrored in a way by the landscape

because the landscape seems lopsided, too.

On the left-hand side here, you see the water lower in the frame,

and in the right-hand side, it seems to be higher in the frame,

protruding from the right-hand side of the picture.

And, of course, Leonardo did nothing by accident.

He was fascinated by optical effects.

So I think this must have been intentional and it gives you

a real sense of unease about the picture.

He is very happy to bamboozle people with his skill,

and the Mona Lisa is still us bamboozling today.

When he first showed that to people, that was a kind of...

It was just gob-smacking because nobody had seen a portrait that was so lifelike before.

He really has created life in his painting, and it's a bit weird.

She's a mysterious creature, this woman,

who gazes at us with such withdrawn intensity.

Might she not break her frozen silence and even speak and move.

It is uncanny.

It lives in a very extraordinary way.

Now, the way Leonardo did that

is not by some kind of mystery,

he did it by technique.

A lot of these techniques were really Leonardo's invention,

whether it be sfumato, or the stronger chiaroscuro.

The idea that you can bring glazes for instance,

so you can subtly model a face, an expression,

the area around the eyes just using something that's almost a kind of

clear liquid with just a little bit of pigment in it.

The Mona Lisa is a painting that Leonardo painted over a long period of time.

And therefore, in it, he explored basically all these innovations.

We can find in the Mona Lisa

all the defining aspects of Leonardo's technique.

Some of the archive I've chosen may lead you to assume

that the Mona Lisa is universally loved and adored.

But I've also found that, despite her celebrity status,

or perhaps because of it, some have questioned her worth,

while others have even dared to suggest that she could be a fake.

In 1981, Arena found one critic

who was less than impressed with the Mona Lisa's level of fame.

It demonstrates quite conclusively,

and more conclusively almost than any other art object

in the history of art,

the way in which generation after

generation of millions of people

can be conned and hyped

and bludgeoned and convinced into aghast admiration of something

which in the present-day situation they can barely see even if they go to the Louvre to lookat it.

Also, it's even suggested,

that the one they do finally get a look at in the Louvre may even be a copy.

I don't know what's hanging in the Louvre,

but this is the genuine article.

But in 1972, Australian art critic Robert Hughes argued

that real or fake, the point was moot.

It wouldn't matter.

There are millions of Mona Lisas printed on everything from postcards

to tea towels, from soap to sweatshirts.

In Italy, she advertises processed cheese.

In Spain, she wraps oranges.

And she's good for drinks, too.

Several liquor firms have claimed that her smile was the result

of sipping their own brands of aperitif.

But no other painting has been so completely replaced by its phantoms as this one has.

The Mona Lisa has become the supreme example of the masterpiece

with no context. It passes the final test of celebrity -

it is famous for being famous.

The Mona Lisa looks great on postcards,

it looks great in photographs.

I suppose that's why Marcel Duchamp ended up drawing a moustache on a

postcard of the Mona Lisa because

it's almost as if it was designed to be reproduced.

Leonardo da Vinci almost anticipated the age of television

and anticipated the age of pop art.

If you think about Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Titian,

you know, the giants of art,

you have to stand in front of a Rembrandt portrait

to understand what the fuss is about. Leonardo, funnily enough,

who was older than all those artists,

Leonardo worked in such a way

that his art reproduces fantastically well.

Five centuries after his death,

Leonardo da Vinci is still often seen as the very embodiment of Renaissance man,

as much renowned for his scientific endeavours as for his artistic masterpieces.

His notebooks contain a bewildering array of designs for inventions,

engineering projects and, despite being a sworn pacifist, war machines.

A human-powered tank, 23 feet high.

A multi-barrelled cannon emitting one line of barrels to be loaded

while another was being fired.

These ideas have been an endless source of fascination

for programme makers,

not least because many of them feel like they came straight out of

the 19th century rather than the 15th.

We find designs for the building of sluices and canals.

And a moveable bridge.

Paddle wheels for water transportation.

This is an escapement mechanism.

It transforms rotary motion into linear motion.

It is even today the basis of the way most clocks work and it was one

of the results of Leonardo's increasing fascination

with mechanics.

The ingenuity of this little device,

which Leonardo designed for a clock mechanism,

is a typical illustration of his ability to provide simple solutions

to complicated problems.

But of 40 of Leonardo's notebooks mentioned in literary sources,

31 of them have survived.

And here are some typical pages from them.

Many of these sketches are sketches for genuine inventions.

Here, for instance, are sketches for a special kind of chain

which is the prototype of today's bicycle chain.

Here is a link of the chain as it is still manufactured

in Manchester for driving heavy machinery with.

Then, of course, there were his famous flying machines.

And here we've got a small model of one.

He does this very detailed study of how birds fly.

And, of course, he's not just curious about that in a kind of academic way,

he wants to imitate it,

he wants to make a flying machine based on the wings of birds.

He understood that had he cracked the mystery of how birds fly,

his claim to fame would have been phenomenal.

We don't know how far his classical education went.

Probably not very far. He might not have heard of Icarus,

therefore he probably didn't have the warning tale of men who try to fly.

So perhaps that's another advantage of his lack of classical education. Who can tell?

But we do know that he certainly planned to launch it, you know, amazingly.

The wings would flap and the theory of the whole thing was that

at that point it would take off and fly into the air.

Well, of course, it didn't.

It wasn't that practical.

Well, we've used a little

television technology

and we've managed to make it fly.

While some TV shows relied on computer graphics

to realise Leonardo's dreams of flight,

Alan Yentob opted for the altogether more daredevil approach

that only television can offer.

We found two brave experts willing to build and try out the design.

Is there still risk, Robbie,

in man-powered flight?

Ah, there is phenomenal risk.

Medieval flying machines, it's got to be dangerous.

OK, well, good luck. Thank you very much!

Even Leonardo was well aware that his inventions could be lethal.

But the mood is buoyant as I join the team.

So, the teeth are chattering, are they?

Um... No, I'm not really nervous.

I'm hopeful rather than nervous.

You know, I'd like it to fly and I'd like to be able to...

well, at least live my dream,

which is to fly a machine that was designed 500 years ago.

One, two, three.

Ah!

I crashed it again.

The glider was definitely unstable,

so we went back to Leonardo's notes for inspiration.

Look at how birds fly...

..how they use both their wings

and their tail to stop them falling.

If Leonardo had got as far as testing this and found that it was

unstable, the natural move for him to do would be to say, "Yes,

"let's have a tail on it," so, that's fine.

Would the tail make the crucial difference?

It was now all or bust.

Robbie's raised the stakes.

He's going to fly off a much steeper hill.

It will give him more chance of getting airborne,

but if he crashes this time, the consequences will be grave.

Two, three.

Yay!

Well done, Simon. Well done, Robbie.

It's the first time ever a Leonardo flying machine

has successfully taken to the air. A triumph.

Well done. That was amazing.

He would have loved the idea of people reconstructing his machines on TV.

That really accessible side of Leonardo comes across very well

on TV and I think it gets to the joy of him, actually.

Leonardo never quite got round to testing or even building

many of his designs. He was far too busy with other preoccupations,

so they remained pure ideas, just sketches in his notebook.

But in one area of his scientific research, he acquired knowledge

through years of practical investigations.

Leonardo's anatomical studies began as a means of painting more natural and lifelike figures.

But typically this soon became another obsession,

offering programme makers the chance to explore his blend of art and science in ever more creative ways.

Leonardo's anatomical explorations

really are comparable to those of Columbus

in the sense that Leonardo explored the microcosm,

that is the small world, of the body,

at the very same time as Columbus was exploring the greater world,

and he described the human body as a marvellous creation.

As a matter of fact, he called it a temple of beauty,

and the beauty for him consisted of its mechanics and the way it worked.

He studied skeletons to understand the body's structure.

He dissected corpses to see how the organs worked.

It was still a crude and rather sinister business,

with a candle to see by stuck in the corpse's chest.

Alan Yentob's 2003 series found a more visceral means of demonstrating Leonardo's passion for anatomy,

faithfully recreating the full horror of this macabre world as only television could.

Hm. Come here.

And what was the atmosphere like in the dissecting room?

Oh, it's dreadful in the dissecting room.

There was no way of preserving bodies at the time.

Within 48 hours there was a tremendous stench.

Pieces of the body were decaying.

The most important instrument that one had was one's bare hands

with long fingernails that were used to do a lot of the sharp dissecting.

Hold this.

But he soon became intrigued by what went on deeper than the layers of

the muscle and in fact became the very first person

to dissect the organs of the body.

A decade later,

the Culture Show made full use of television's unrivalled ability

to bring us to places we'd never experience otherwise.

How else could we compare da Vinci's anatomical drawings to the real thing during an actual autopsy?

We're going to try and imitate one of the famous drawings that

Leonardo did to give you an idea of how complex the tissue is

and how good a job he actually did.

So we're just moving on to the dorsum of the foot,

where we'll see the tendons starting to become more prominent.

These are the things that were

really standing out in Leonardo's drawings.

They're a collection of strings or ropes that are connected

to the muscle at one end and to a bone at the other.

Quite remarkably, Leonardo not only captured them wonderfully well in

terms of his drawings, but he quite clearly understood the mechanical purpose of them.

We can see through the filming of a real dissection,

the level of abstraction in Leonardo's depiction

of what he could see in real bodies,

because he highlights so prominently what he's interested in that it

becomes a very clear view, whereas the body is messy.

It's so clear to me now that Leonardo did something really quite

remarkable in the drawings by creating a system to articulate that in a clever, simple, plainfashion.

His anatomical drawings are, for me, actually greater than his paintings.

They are the greatest works...

almost the greatest works of art ever created,

because they're genuine scientific work.

He didn't really fly, obviously,

but he did really discover things about the structure of the ear,

for example, and the muscles of the face,

the actual muscles that express emotion.

He made some very accurate observations.

So his anatomical research was completely revolutionary.

Leonardo's combined skills as a dissector and draughtsman meant that

he would glean insights that would not be observed again for hundreds of years.

It was a point illustrated beautifully to Alastair Sooke

by eminent heart surgeon Dr Francis Wells.

I did bring along a reproduction of a drawing that Leonardo made

in which he observes these so-called vortices.

This is a beautiful example of synopsis in thought.

In it he's got the hypothesis for the flow,

a description of the vortices,

and at the top, little diagrams showing how this argument has to be

the right one for the mechanism of the closure of the valve

and not simple reflux of the blood and how it would fail.

Now, this wasn't known about or understood until the last century

and it was shown most beautifully and reported in Nature in 1968

by two engineers in Oxford, Bellhouse and Bellhouse.

And there's one reference and that is to Leonardo da Vinci.

The reference is 500 years old.

2011's The Secret Of Drawing also showed how Dr Wells was able to

apply da Vinci's ancient discoveries to help save lives today.

Leonardo's insight has led Francis Wells actually to change the way he operates on the mitral valve.

And I know for a fact that the procedure, call it the da Vinci cut,

has been turning people who could barely walk into people who can run up the stairs two at a time.

Do you think that these drawings contain within them other things

that people haven't still quite twigged yet?

Oh, I'm sure there are. One has to be careful in not romancing it too much and saying that

the solution to all our problems are here.

They're not. But I think the essence of what we are seeing is someone who

is absolutely conspicuously honest,

they're searching for the truth.

That is why I say even now, even in 1,000 years' time,

you could have a dialogue with these drawings.

But, for me, the most shocking aspect of this astonishing wealth

of research and discovery, half a millennium ahead of its time,

is that ultimately it all counted for nothing.

Tragically, even his anatomy would be another heroic failure,

lying undiscovered for centuries while the rest of the world caught up with Leonardo da Vinci.

His contribution has no significance because it was lost,

because it affected nobody and nothing,

and when it was rediscovered,

his contribution in anatomy,

all of these things had been identified anyway.

So can we really say that Leonardo was as much a scientist as he was an artist?

As a scientist,

Leonardo developed a line of empirical inquiry

that certainly led eventually to

what we understand

as the scientific method.

Yet he did not move on to a stage of experimental science.

He did not reproduce the phenomena he observed in nature in the lab.

There was a flaw in his character.

He didn't have the moral stamina to carry any single idea right through

to an end. He lacked that rather dreary quality of perseverance.

He didn't invent modern science, but he knew that modern science needed

to be invented, if you see what I mean.

So, you can't say, really, that Leonardo is a scientist in our sense of the word.

What he amounts to in this department of his life is an ideas man of inspired genius.

He saw that technology would completely transform human life,

and nobody else at the time had that idea.

And all his ideas, you see,

are not so much scientific but based upon the acute observation of the artist.

In the Renaissance, science was knowledge,

and so art in that sense is part of knowledge.

Quite apart from their obvious brilliance,

Leonardo's masterpieces command such immense interest and colossal prices

in part because they are relatively rare.

Leonardo was a prolific figure.

He abhorred sleep,

seeing it as a waste of eight hours of his precious day.

And yet, astonishingly,

there are maybe no more than 15 of his finished paintings in existence.

As many of the archives show,

one of the reasons for this lay in the downside of Leonardo's constant

experimentations with materials and techniques.

The most important commission Leonardo received during the

astonishingly productive four years which he spent in Florence

was from the city fathers,

who asked him to decorate one of the walls of a big hall

in the Palazzo Vecchio, the City Hall.

The subject was to be the victory of the Florentines over the Milanese at

the Battle of Anghiari.

But things began to go very wrong.

On Friday at the 13th hour, I had just picked up my brush when the great storm began.

The church bells rang the alarm.

The day was transformed into night as the rain poured down.

There was water everywhere.

The cartoon began to come apart piece by piece.

He was using techniques which were not necessarily established

and were not always successful.

He wanted to essentially create an oil painting on a wall

and so he made a concoction of paints and glues

to try and do that, and it didn't work.

The painting he'd begun soon started to run and seemed to be melting off

the wall. In desperation,

they lit fires here under the fresco in an attempt to set the paint

and save the painting.

But it was too late.

The picture that's here today is by Leonardo's biographer, Vasari,

a far better writer than he was a painter,

but he leaves us an intriguing clue.

In one corner of the picture he has written, "cerca trova" -

"seek and ye shall find."

Some people believe that somewhere today there are fragments

in this room of Leonardo's long-lost masterpiece.

Eight years later, Fiona Bruce discovered

that this wasn't the only time Leonardo's experiments with oil frescoes had ended in disaster.

It's such a famous image.

But the painting we see today

is the ghost of what it was,

because only 20% of the original remains.

So what happened?

The established technique for large-scale wall paintings

was fresco. Fresco is pigment applied to the wet plaster,

so fresco requires working fast.

You can't wait.

If it dries, you have to start all over again.

But Leonardo knew he was anything but a fast worker.

He chose to work in oil paint on plaster that had already dried.

In ideal conditions, The Last Supper might have survived intact.

But behind its wall was the monastery's kitchen,

pumping out moist heat,

and beneath it was the city of Milan's high water table.

Damp entered the wall and pushed upwards and outwards.

A fresco would have allowed the moisture out,

but The Last Supper's surface could not breathe

and the paint started to flake and detach.

The detail of Leonardo's painting can never be recovered,

but a key to what it looked like

can be found surprisingly close to home.

Fiona took us to the Chapel of Magdalen College in Oxford

to show us Britain's little-known version of The Last Supper.

It was painted in Leonardo's day,

thought to be by a pupil of Leonardo, copied from the original,

possibly approved by the master himself.

Details which have disappeared for ever from Leonardo's picture can

be seen clearly in this one.

The food on the table...

..the sandalled feet of the disciples...

..and, most dramatically, the face of Simon,

stubborn and disbelieving.

Another reason that finished da Vinci paintings are so rare is that

he often simply abandoned them halfway through.

The final task needed in a painting of this kind is to lay in

the colours, but this he did not seem to wish to do,

fearing perhaps that his technical skill would fail to match the ideas

his intellect had conceived.

This would seem to have been one of his recurring doubts.

Not many of the patrons of Leonardo received the paintings

they paid for.

He was notoriously slow and left behind lots of paintings unfinished.

But very often, of course, an unfinished painting

can tell us more about an artist than a finished one,

like an empty, untidy room.

Not finishing his work is a kind of a brilliant strategy

because by not finishing things, he becomes famous not for his works,

he becomes famous for being him.

No matter how many new Leonardos we find,

there will be always an eagerness to see more.

Television loves a good detective story, so the idea of tracking down

a newly discovered da Vinci masterpiece has always been a ripe subject for programme makers.

When Andrew Graham-Dixon took up the case in 2017 he posed a particularly attention-grabbing question.

Is it possible that there might be more than one Mona Lisa?

Setting off on a round-the-world treasure hunt,

Andrew turns art detective, gathering the evidence,

deducing that da Vinci did paint an earlier version of the Mona Lisa

and then, one by one, dismissing a series of possible contenders.

So this Mona Lisa isn't a Leonardo but a mid-17th century French copy.

Finally, in Paris, he meets Pascal Cotte,

inventor of a ground-breaking new technology that can penetrate through layers of paint.

The answer, it seems, was hiding in plain sight all the time.

In 2004, Pascal was invited by the Louvre to scan the Mona Lisa.

His task -

simply to identify the picture's original colours

hidden beneath the discolorations of time.

But Pascal's technique also revealed that there was far more going on

beneath the surface.

For the last decade, he's worked in secret, decoding those discoveries.

Only television could take us inside a work of art to reveal

such previously unknown details.

Marked in red, they appeared to be elements of a larger first portrait

that never got beyond the draft stage.

But that was just the beginning of the revelations.

Ah, here we are. What on Earth is that?

This is a hairpin.

Like this one. Now you know there is a hairpin, you can see it.

Ah!

And more than that, if you look around the head,

you discover 12 hairpins.

Scanning even deeper beneath the paint layers,

Pascal's secret weapon revealed the last of a number of heads,

hidden for 500 years beneath the world's most famous one.

A ghostly apparition peering back like a Leonardo Turin Shroud.

How many heads is that so far?

This is number three.

Now...

So it's a wonderful proof.

I discovered two crosses just here.

Oh, my!

That's extraordinary! Yeah.

The crosses clearly mark a different set of pupils,

looking in a different direction.

The face behind Mona Lisa, the face is turned 14 degrees

in the right direction.

Also eyebrows.

And here you have another mouth.

Absolutely amazing.

She's barely smiling.

So, Pascal, you found a complete face...

Yes. ..inside...

Inside. ..the Mona Lisa.

Yes.

Wow. That's quite a big discovery, isn't it?

Yes, it is.

This pioneering work marked an extraordinary moment

in the history of art.

By piecing together all the details

and identifying the original pigments used by Leonardo,

Pascal was able to construct a digital photofit of the image,

a perfect match with the historical records of the lost original.

But if this computer image represents the original portrait of Mona Lisa,

it's a portrait her husband never received.

Instead, Leonardo went on to paint the world's most famous picture

over the top.

So there were two Mona Lisas all along.

I personally wasn't surprised that there were other things going on,

because it's not unusual for artists to change their minds.

You know, in terms of the position of the head, maybe,

or the smile or the eyes or whatever it might be, so, you know,

in that sense it's not so unusual, you know,

with the modern techniques of being able to examine pictures and what's

going on beneath the paint surface,

to see the processes of how the actual final artwork evolved.

For nearly 70 years,

television has been fanning the flames of Leonardo's celebrity.

So when his long-lost Salvator Mundi surfaced in 2011,

it wasn't long before Fiona Bruce was on the case.

This is how the picture looked before it was restored,

dismissed as a crude copy, buried in a private collection,

last sold for £45 in 1958.

To view the evidence for herself, Fiona met with Dianne Modestini,

the art restorer behind this incredible discovery.

So what are we looking at here?

Here we can see that there is a first idea for the thumb.

Oh, yes.

So it was more upright.

It was more upright.

But this was the moment that gave us a clue and gave us some hope,

which wouldn't have entered our minds previously,

that we might be dealing with the lost original.

As it became clearer to you that this could well be an original Leonardo,

did you ever momentarily think,

"If I do the wrong thing here..."

..this could all rest on your shoulders?

Yeah. I couldn't let myself think about that.

I couldn't. I would never have dared to touch it.

It must be terribly exciting.

It's rather like, I don't know,

imagine being an archaeologist and you're digging and digging and digging

and all of a sudden you find this piece of treasure.

I suppose it's a bit like that.

But it's a picture just kind of turning into something in front of your eyes.

The discovery of a different first design for the thumb was an incredible breakthrough.

No-one painting a mere copy would experiment in this way.

When the picture was finally shown to leading Leonardo experts,

they examined everything.

Its history, its hidden details, the paint itself.

A Leonardo painting hasn't come along like that

since the early 20th century.

So one every 100 years is kind of rare.

So there is that long process of research where you're putting the

counterarguments and saying, you know,

"Let's look for what's wrong with it."

And in this case I couldn't find anything wrong.

So, the experts agree, this is a long-lost Leonardo,

but should that really alter our opinion of it?

On one level I'd say it's wonderful to know that there is another

Leonardo. It's fascinating.

But on the other hand, if it wasn't a Leonardo,

what would actually change about the picture?

Why wouldn't we want to look at it?

Why wouldn't, you know, the kind of, you know,

the whole thing speak to us in the way that it does at present?

So what does that tell us about our need to have a genius artist

connected to an artwork for it somehow to work for us?

When Salvator Mundi sold at auction in 2017, it shattered all records.

The hammer finally fell at nearly half a billion dollars.

Now, as far as I'm concerned,

mere money is no true measure of artistic genius,

but it could be said that this is an indication of quite how valuable

Leonardo's reputation has become.

Even if we never discover another of his works,

my journey through the archives has shown me that we'll never cease

to be enthralled by his insights and discoveries.

Ultimately it's not the drawings, the paintings,

the water-powered clocks or flying machines that fascinate us,

but the workings of a mind so keen,

so advanced that it never stopped yearning to comprehend

all there was to know.

And that, for me, is the very purpose of great art -

the quest for knowledge and understanding.

To borrow a very famous phrase, it's about the big questions of life,

the universe and everything,

and I believe that few came closer to finding answers

than Leonardo da Vinci.