Original subtitles

Announcer: Major funding

for "Leonardo da Vinci" was provided by

the Better Angels Society and its members:

the Paul and Saundra Montrone family,

Stephen A. Schwarzman,

Diane and Hal Brierley, Carol and Ned Spieker,

and these additional members.

Funding was also provided by Gilbert S. Omenn

and Martha Darling,

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation,

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station

from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Announcer: Can looking back push us forward?

Man: Ladies and gentlemen,

Miss Billie Holiday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

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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.

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 as Leonardo: Here forms...

here colors...

here the character of every part of the universe

is concentrated to a point...

and that point is so marvelous a thing.

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.

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.

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.

Narrator: In time, Leonardo would regard

his lack of a formal education as among his greatest strengths.

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 explosion

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.

Narrator: Florence had long been home

to a flourishing garment industry

with its silk and wool weavers, leather tanners, and furriers.

As the arts grew, workshops that produced paintings,

sculptures, jewelry, and metalworks

expanded and prospered.

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.

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:

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.

Three 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.

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.

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.

Homosexuality, 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 gay.

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...

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.

If the bone is that shape, then it must do something.

Every small aspect of that form must have a function.

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.

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.

I will make safe and unassailable covered chariots

which, entering among the enemy with their artillery,

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 cocked

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.

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:

Nicholl: Why is that happening?

Man as Leonardo:

Nicholl: How does it happen?

Man as Leonardo:

Nicholl: What is the quality of that thing or person or emotion?

Man as Leonardo:

Nicholl: He's posing questions and looking for answers.

Man as Leonardo:

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:

Del Toro: His knowledge knows no boundaries.

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 war.

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.

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 war, 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 war. 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

He has the horse rearing...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Announcer: Major funding

for "Leonardo da Vinci" was provided by

the Better Angels Society and its members:

the Paul and Saundra Montrone family,

Stephen A. Schwarzman,

Diane and Hal Brierley, Carol and Ned Spieker,

and these additional members.

Funding was also provided by Gilbert S. Omenn

and Martha Darling,

the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,

the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation,

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station

from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Announcer: Can looking back push us forward?

Man: Ladies and gentlemen,

Miss Billie Holiday.

Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

...act of concern...

Bank of America supports filmmakers like Ken Burns,

whose narratives illuminate new perspectives.

What would you like the power to do?

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Timothy Verdon: Normally it's something

that an artist cannot capture.

And yet Leonardo does.

Announcer: Next time...

Adam Gopnik: The first stirrings

of the Scientific Revolution was just being felt.

Charles Nicholl: He was always interested.

He was always wanting to know.

Carmen Bambach: We really do see

all of Leonardo's scientific knowledge

in the painting.

Martin Kemp: He's taken this straightforward subject

and turned it into something wonderful.

Announcer: Don't miss

the conclusion of "Leonardo da Vinci."

Scan this QR code with your smart device

to explore more of the story of Leonardo da Vinci,

including interactives on his life and works,

classroom materials, and more.

The "Leonardo da Vinci" DVD and Blu-ray,

as well as the soundtrack on CD or vinyl,

are available online and in stores.

This series is also available with PBS Passport

and on Amazon Prime Video.