All language subtitles for The Genius of Leonardo da Vinci BBC 720p EN SUB_Subtitles01.ENG

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.