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.
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♪ Man as Leonardo: The ancients described man as the world in miniature because, inasmuch as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the planet; and as man has in him bones, the supports and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks, the supports of the earth; as man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth has its ocean tide, which likewise rises and falls every 6 hours, as if the world breathed.
♪ Man: There is a very ancient idea which he adopts and develops very strongly, and that is the relationship of the microcosm and the macrocosm.
The microcosm is our body, the macrocosm is the whole system out there, including the body of the Earth, as he put it.
What Leonardo does is to give it visual power.
He can draw bits of the body; he can draw bits of the Earth.
And once he draws them, the analogy is graphically illustrated.
So, he gives the microcosm a completely new birth, lease of life, and it's a visual lease of life.
Man 2: There are certain supreme figures in the life of our civilization, who fascinate us in part because they seem to belong to two worlds at once.
Shakespeare's like that.
Bach, among musicians, is very much like that-- in many respects, a man of the past, in many other respects, a visionary of the musical future.
And Leonardo is perhaps supreme amongst all of that kind.
♪ He is someone who in many respects is a pre-scientific and, therefore, pre-modern thinker.
So, in lots of ways, he still belongs to the world of antiquity.
At the same time, his intellectual freedom, his dissatisfaction with received wisdom, that restlessness is very much part of the modern spirit.
It's very much part of the scientific spirit.
♪ Man as Leonardo: The governor of the castle taken prisoner.
Visconti carried away and his son killed.
The Duke has lost his state, property, and liberty, and none of his projects have been completed.
♪ Narrator: On April 10, 1500, Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo da Vinci's patron for more than a decade, was captured and imprisoned by the French army of Louis XII.
By then, Leonardo had already left for Venice with his friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli.
Along the way, he had stopped in Mantua, where he made a drawing of Isabella d'Este, a sophisticated and influential patron of the arts who wished to add a work by Leonardo to her collection.
She would hound him for years for a painting that he would never make.
♪ Leonardo stayed barely a month in Venice, then headed south to Tuscany.
[Speaking French] ♪ Narrator: In the decades ahead, he would broaden his scientific inquiries, secure the perfect patron, and pour the sum of his knowledge into a masterpiece that would become the most famous painting of all time.
♪ [Bell ringing] In the years since Leonardo had left Florence, the city had turned away from the openness that had made it the center of the Renaissance.
Mired in a seemingly endless conflict with neighboring Pisa and facing an economic collapse, Florentines had expelled their ruler, Piero de' Medici, in 1494 and embraced a fiery, silver-tongued Dominican friar and reformer, who believed that God spoke through him.
Girolamo Savonarola had excoriated the Vatican for its corruption and warned the people of Florence to cease their decadent ways or face the wrath of God.
"Repent, O Florence," he urged them, "before it is too late."
Woman: Savonarola was a powerful preacher because he understood the power of the word.
And he knew how to use it to scare people, to say you've gone too far.
The vanity, the costumes, the jewelry, the festivities, the art representing human feelings instead of God.
And there is a moment where people follow him, because they're afraid, because superstition is still very strong.
♪ Narrator: His followers had gathered paintings, carnival masks, perfumes, dice games, mirrors, and other items they considered vanities, piled them in the Piazza della Signoria, and set them ablaze.
[Sound of fire crackling, excited chatter] Narrator: But by 1498, Florence had grown weary of Savonarola's piety and prophecies and condemned him as a heretic.
♪ He was hanged and burned in the piazza.
♪ Man: The Florence that Leonardo came back to was, sadly, a different one from the one he had left in 1482, not least because many of the people that he had known, such as Domenico Ghirlandaio and Verrocchio, were deceased by this point, but also there had been a kind of brain drain in Florence in the 1490s largely because of Girolamo Savonarola.
♪ Narrator: Leonardo's father, Ser Piero, 74 years old and still a practicing notary, lived with his fourth wife and their children in Florence's San Pier Maggiore neighborhood.
The artist took up residence nearby at the church of Santissima Annunziata, whose monks, longtime clients of Ser Piero, commissioned Leonardo to paint an altarpiece depicting Mary, the baby Jesus, and Mary's mother, Saint Anne, for their chapel.
Once again, he seemed in no rush to satisfy his patrons.
"The life of Leonardo is unsettled and in disarray," one cleric said.
"His priority is geometry and he has very little patience for the brush."
Mathematics was hardly his only distraction.
In the hills south of town, he sketched the villa of a wealthy Florentine merchant.
He advised one church on how to overhaul their drainage system and another on how to reconstruct their belltower, which had collapsed in an earthquake.
He also visited the remains of Emperor Hadrian's villa near Rome.
Leonardo eventually produced a full-scale preparatory drawing of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which is now lost.
But when the cartoon, as it was called, was exhibited for two days at Santissima Annunziata, it created an enormous sensation.
"Men and women, young and old, flocked in solemn procession to see the wonders of Leonardo," his biographer Giorgio Vasari wrote.
"The entire population was astounded."
[Bramly speaking French] [Speaking Italian] Narrator: Though he once again failed to deliver the finished painting, Leonardo would continue to explore the theme of the Madonna and Christ with Saint Anne, producing a second cartoon featuring John the Baptist as a child, and eventually a painting.
♪ On April 15, 1502, Leonardo turned 50 years old.
Again in search of a patron, he attached himself to another strongman in need of a military engineer and cartographer.
Cesare Borgia, the ruthless son of Pope Alexander VI and commander of the papal troops, was planning a campaign to bring Romagna, an unruly territory east of Florence, under his control.
Man: Borgia is the opportunist, almost gangster warlord, of the outlying territories of the Romagna.
He suddenly takes over this huge swathe of territory, becomes a sort of a player in the power politics of the peninsula almost overnight.
Narrator: While the rest of Florence fretted that Borgia would soon turn up at the city's gates with his army, Leonardo set out to join his new patron.
Traveling the countryside, Leonardo sketched a sunlit copse of trees.
Man as Leonardo: A body illuminated by solar rays passing between the thick branches of trees will produce as many shadows as there are branches between the sun and itself.
♪ Make a harmony from the different falls of water, as you saw at the fountain of Rimini on the 8th of August 1502.
This is how grapes are carried in Cesena.
Narrator: In the towns and villages seized by Borgia's army, Leonardo surveyed the fortifications, pacing off distances and using a compass to determine the measurements.
He also gathered topographical data and drew meticulous maps featuring the hills and mountains, lakes and rivers of eastern Tuscany.
By fall, Leonardo had reached Imola, a well-fortified town on the edge of the Apennine Mountains, where Borgia had established his headquarters.
He was joined there by a young diplomat whom the Republic of Florence had sent to assess Borgia's intentions-- Niccolo Machiavelli.
That winter, while Borgia brutally put down uprisings and Machiavelli kept Florence informed with carefully worded dispatches, Leonardo produced a detailed overhead map of Imola.
Man: And Leonardo comes up with his best military invention, which is not a machine, it's an aerial view map.
Because he knows that information is the most important weapon you can have.
He didn't have a plane to do it, but Leonardo paces around the town and figures out how it would look from above.
Narrator: In early 1503, Borgia took Siena, but when his father, Pope Alexander VI, died, the new pope had Borgia arrested.
He was expelled from Italy and eventually murdered in an ambush in Spain.
Niccolo Machiavelli would one day compose an influential treatise on political power informed in part by his astute observations of Borgia.
♪ Though it is not known how much Leonardo had seen while in Borgia's service, he was certainly aware of war's violent toll.
[Horses neighing, men yelling] Narrator: War is "bestial madness," he wrote.
[Bramly speaking French] Narrator: In the spring of 1503, Leonardo returned again to Florence, where he purchased a small farm in the hills above the city.
Later that year, he began a portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a prosperous silk merchant.
He also pursued a new project that allowed him to explore one of his lifelong passions--water.
Man: So, his, entire life of Leonardo, he was compiling 7 different indices of a treatise, a very ambitious treatise, that he wanted to devote to water.
And he's so much intrigued by water that he also tried to understand its molecular structure.
Man as Leonardo: Observe the motion of the water's surface, which resembles that of hair, and has two motions: one follows the flow of the surface, the other forms the lines of the eddies.
Galluzzi: Water is also important as a field in which he can develop models to control the energy of water.
Water can be disastrous for men.
Men cannot live without water, but he has to keep control of that.
Narrator: At Machiavelli's behest, the Republic of Florence hired Leonardo to draw military maps and advise on a major engineering project involving the Arno River.
Florence was now plotting to retake the strategically important city of Pisa, which straddled the mouth of the Arno 45 miles to the west.
Machiavelli hoped to divert the river and deny Pisa access to the sea.
Leonardo calculated that it would take 1.3 million man-hours to dig a ditch large enough to change the Arno's course.
Kemp: He devised this idea of diverting the Arno, and people went out and dug channels.
They actually implemented this at great cost.
And it didn't work.
Leonardo was not the sole author of the scheme, but it couldn't have done his reputation much good.
I think it heightened his sense that rather than trying to say to the Arno, "I want you to go down there," you actually had to do very subtle things-- to make it flow in the direction that you wanted.
Man as Leonardo: The river, if it is to be diverted from one place to another, must be coaxed and not treated roughly or with violence.
Narrator: Leonardo also designed a canal that would bypass the Arno's unnavigable stretches and give Florence access to the sea.
In 1502, Florentine-born navigator Amerigo Vespucci had returned from a trans-Atlantic voyage and declared that the land he had reached was not Asia but a separate continent.
Leonardo's canal would have allowed the Republic to directly participate in explorations of the New World, but work on the costly project never began.
♪ Though neither of Leonardo's ambitious ideas for taming the Arno River were realized, he soon began compiling his observations and conclusions on water dynamics, geology, and astronomy for a treatise in which he would attempt to understand the forces that had shaped the earth over many eons.
♪ That fall, the Republic hired him to paint a monumental fresco to adorn one wall in the city's enormous grand council hall, where members of the ruling Signoria met.
It would be 3 times larger than "The Last Supper," commemorating Florence's triumph over Milan on the plain of Anghiari more than 60 years earlier.
Nicholl: The Battle of Anghiari was a battle just within living memory in which a heavily outnumbered Florentine troop defeated the Milanese army.
And Leonardo was presumably expected to produce a stirring battle scene with ranks of horsemen and bold captains.
Narrator: He was given a studio in a suite of rooms reserved for papal visits at the Church of Santa Maria Novella.
While laborers erected scaffolding and covered his windows to diffuse the light so he could begin his cartoon, Leonardo jotted down compositional ideas, created models of soldiers in wax, and filled a notebook with sketches of horses in various poses.
Now, he also gives us a description of how to do a battle.
And he describes everything that's going on in the battle.
He then says, "You've got to calculate-- the dust in the air and how it's brighter above than below."
Man as Leonardo: First you must represent the smoke of artillery mingling in the air with the dust tossed up by the movement of horses and combatants.
♪ The dust, being a thing of earth, has weight; It is the finest part that rises highest; so that part will be least visible and will seem almost the same color as the air.
♪ Kemp: This is extraordinary description of how to do a battle, and I've likened it to a visual layout of what you do in a film.
And even a film would find it hard to capture all that.
Man as Leonardo: Some might be shown disarmed and beaten down by the enemy, turning upon the foe, with teeth and nails, to take an inhuman and bitter revenge.
You might see some riderless horse rushing among the enemy, his mane flying in the wind, and wreaking destruction with his hooves.
And there must not be a single spot of flat ground that is not trampled with gore.
♪ Woman: Leonardo was very keen on articulating the pazzia bestialissima, as he calls war.
It's really madness.
And so, the horses and the figures begin to have similar expressions of great fierceness.
And he works very closely at making these comparisons of physiognomy.
♪ [Church bell ringing] Man as Leonardo: On the 9th of July 1504, Wednesday, at 7:00, died Ser Piero da Vinci, notary at the Palazzo del Podesta, my father aged 80 years, leaving behind 10 sons and two daughters.
Narrator: Ser Piero had secured his son Leonardo's apprenticeship in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio and, later, helped him to get some of his most important commissions, but there's almost no evidence of how Leonardo felt about his father.
There was no will.
Born out of wedlock, he was not entitled by law to any inheritance.
His half-siblings made sure he received nothing.
Leonardo returned to his epic battle scene.
In the late summer of 1504, Florence's Signoria commissioned a second mural for the council's meeting hall.
The new assignment went to a talented and prickly young artist, who, at 29 years old, had already carved several sculptures that would become among the best-known works of the Renaissance.
Michele Agnolo di Lodovico Buonarroti had briefly been apprenticed to the great Florentine master Ghirlandaio and had enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici before moving to Rome, where he'd sculpted a breathtaking marble Virgin and Christ called the "Pietà," and signed it, an audacious and nearly unheard-of gesture in his day.
In a letter to his father, Michelangelo claimed that he had made the "impossible, possible."
He had then returned to Florence only to find that it was Leonardo whose homecoming was the talk of the town.
Bambach: Michelangelo had a pretty brutal personality; he was very solitary, given to moods.
I mean, very passionate man, very secretive.
And so, it's the complete antithesis of Leonardo.
Narrator: But Michelangelo's next work, a 17-foot-tall marble colossus of David, would become an enduring symbol of civic pride for Florence.
♪ Man as Leonardo: Do not make all the muscles in your figures prominent, because muscles are not visible unless the limbs in which they are situated are exerting great force.
Otherwise, you will have depicted a sack of walnuts rather than the human form.
♪ Narrator: At a meeting to discuss where Michelangelo's statue would be displayed, Leonardo suggested, "It should be placed in the Loggia... behind a low wall."
The committee disagreed.
The "David" would go outside the main entrance to Florence's city hall.
Leonardo not only wants to sideline Michelangelo's "David," but he wants to sideline Michelangelo as well.
And so, he's a bit of a dissenting voice in that committee, because everyone else is really, as they would be, impressed by this huge, more than life-size sculpture of the muscular "David."
Bambach: And so, Leonardo had had to cope with this great genius who is at the height of his powers and really able to pull off the Colossal.
And I do believe that Leonardo had a crisis of confidence.
Narrator: Concerned by Leonardo's slow pace on "The Battle of Anghiari," the Republic of Florence demanded that he begin painting right away.
[Thunder] Man as Leonardo: On Friday, at the stroke of the 13th hour, I began painting.
As I made the first brushstroke, the weather turned and the court bell rang, calling men to judgment.
And immediately it began raining, and poured until evening.
And it was like night.
Kemp: Leonardo has to get things right.
He looks at nature, and it's a complicated system.
Optically it's complicated, in terms of movement it's complicated, and he wants his painting to do everything.
[Thunder] But, of course, to have this level of obeying natural law in all its complexity, to have this ability to deal with movement, the psychological movement and the physical movement, ultimately, it's an impossible agenda.
[Thunder] Narrator: That fall, just as the central scene of Leonardo's mural had begun to take shape on the west wall of the council hall, he stopped painting, abandoning yet another commission.
[Borgo speaking Italian] Narrator: It's unlikely Michelangelo ever began the mural he had been assigned to paint on the opposite wall; only another artist's copy of his cartoon survives.
Florence would eventually hire Giorgio Vasari to replace Leonardo's incomplete painting, but not before other artists were inspired to reproduce his battle scene.
♪ Nicholl: What it depicted was the bestiality of war, not the glory and the victory but this melee of terrified horses and sort of snarling soldiers hacking into each other.
And it's a frightening painting.
Gopnik: And I think we feel that there's something almost nihilistic in what survives, what we understand of "The Battle of Anghiari," where it seems in the famous image of the two horsemen facing each other down, that doesn't seem to be good versus evil.
It doesn't seem to be nobility versus nobility.
It just seems to be violence versus violence.
Narrator: One witness who had seen it praised Leonardo's incomplete effort.
"Having climbed the stairs of the Great Hall, "look closely at a group of horses and men, "part of a battle scene by Leonardo da Vinci; it will strike you as a miraculous thing."
Man as Leonardo: The bird is a machine that functions according to mathematical law; man has the capacity to create this machine and all its motions, but without as much power; such a machine lacks nothing except the bird's soul, which must be counterfeited by man.
Narrator: Now Leonardo returned to a subject that had captivated him for as long as he could remember.
♪ Man as Leonardo: This writing about the kite seems to be my destiny, because in my earliest childhood recollection, I was in my cradle, and a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, striking my lips several times.
[Bird squawking] Nicholl: He has this idea of this kite, this bird of prey flying down and actually putting its tail in his mouth as if kind of like a shaman receiving the secrets of nature from an animal and this idea that it was his destiny, as he calls it-- we might call it his obsession-- to pursue the subject of birds from this moment on.
Bambach: My sense is that as he was aging, that he begins to fashion himself more in the guise of the great philosopher, thinker, magician.
And so, the prophetic voice starts becoming more and more apparent in his manuscripts of this mature and later period.
Narrator: He continued to design flying machines, but his focus would now be more scientific.
He sketched the birds darting and diving above the hills north of Florence and noted how they beat their wings to compress the air and rode the currents to climb and soar.
♪ Later, in his studio, Leonardo refined his drawings and reworked his analysis of wind patterns, aerodynamics, and gravity.
Man as Leonardo: When the bird wants to lift off, it raises its shoulder bones and beats its wings toward itself, compressing the air between the tips of the wings and the bird's chest, which causes the bird to rise up.
Man: And you can see how he draws the movement of air.
You need to use the drag of the body in order for the wing to do the work for you, to lift you up.
♪ These are delicate understandings of how aerodynamics work.
So, to me, is somebody that had a complete understanding of dynamic soaring and how birds use gravity, to store the energy, and the wind itself to do the work.
♪ Narrator: In time, he would gather his impressions in a compact manuscript-- or codex-- dedicated to the flight of birds.
All the principles that Leonardo is exploring about what makes a bird fly are always based on geometrical proofs.
So, it's this constant dialogue with geometry and mathematics.
[Speaking French] [Bird chirping] Narrator: Though Leonardo would continue to study birds for years to come, he would never realize his dream to build a human-powered aircraft capable of flight.
It would be almost 500 years before anyone would succeed.
[Speaking Italian] ♪ Man: Vasari, the artist, really sums up something that Leonardo often tried to do.
He waxes eloquent about Leonardo's capacity to suggest movement and feeling, even with just a few strokes of the brush.
And he shows us something, tra il vedi e il non vedi, something between what you see and what you don't see.
And, of course, we all often have this experience.
We see out of the corner of our eye a gesture, a facial expression, a twitch of the lips.
And we see it, and then it changes, it's not there.
We can't study it, we can't fix it.
Normally it's something that an artist cannot capture.
And yet Leonardo does.
Gopnik: The influence of his techniques and of his vision was--was enormous.
It's hard to think of one of the great glories of Western art, the painting of Venice in the latter part of the 15th century, beginning of the 16th century, the painting of Giorgione and Bellini and Titian, without Leonardo's optical example.
While some of that came down from the north in the way of oil painting techniques, it's quite clear that a lot of it exuded upward from Florence and Rome into Venice.
That idea, which is very distinctly Leonardesque, that we should see the world as a beautiful passing pattern of light and color, rather than as a series of stock forms set in a two-dimensional space.
Narrator: In the spring of 1506, Leonardo was ordered back to French-occupied Milan by a judge who found that the artist had failed to deliver the main panel of an altarpiece that he and his collaborators had been commissioned to paint more than two decades earlier.
Florence's city council, still expecting Leonardo to complete "The Battle of Anghiari," reluctantly granted him a 3-month leave.
Milan's French overseers were all too happy to welcome Leonardo back to the city where his "Last Supper" had once so impressed King Louis XII.
Governor Charles d'Amboise authorized a raft of projects for Leonardo, including plans for an elaborate summer villa and garden, and theatrical spectacles to keep the court entertained.
"We must confess, we loved him even before meeting him in person," wrote d'Amboise, who praised the "extraordinary power of Leonardo's gifts."
Leonardo's 3-month leave came and went.
When d'Amboise wrote to request that he stay longer in Milan, the head of Florence's city council, Piero Soderini, called Leonardo a "laggard."
[Bramly speaking French] [Ringing] Narrator: But when Leonardo's uncle Francesco died in 1507, leaving everything to his beloved nephew, the artist was forced to return to Florence, where his siblings, determined to again disinherit their half-brother, had taken the matter to court.
[Birds chirping] Bambach: It is a moment of great difficulty.
Francesco basically had been the figure that had been most present for Leonardo when he was growing up in Vinci.
Narrator: As the legal proceedings dragged on, Leonardo immersed himself in refining what was now nearly two decades of notes on the theory and practice of painting.
♪ Man as Leonardo: If the painter wishes to see enchanting beauties, he has the power to create them; ♪ if he wants to see frightful monstrosities, or things that are funny, ridiculous, or truly heart-rending, he is their lord and master.
In fact, anything that exists in the universe, in essence, presence, or imagination, he has first in his mind, then in his hands; and they are so excellent that they can generate a well-proportioned harmony in the same time as a single glance, as real things do.
He's always in the "Treatise on Painting" using "you."
The addressee is you, the second person address, which I really, really like.
But I sometimes feel like he's talking to himself the way we talk to ourselves, like, "You've gotta get this right."
So, it seems like a conversation with himself in which he's trying to work it out a little bit.
So, for instance, when he wants to talk about how shadows don't all have the same color, he says, "If you see a woman in a meadow, dressed in white, "that part of the woman that is turned toward the sun "will be white in a way that reflects the sun's rays.
"That part of her that is next to the meadow will reflect the meadow."
It's so beautiful.
♪ Gopnik: One of the things he always emphasized was look at form in the world and try and see not what you expect to see-- a face, a shoulder, a torso-- but see what's there.
So, Leonardo was acutely aware of the possibility of that kind of imaginative projection into places where no one would look for representational form.
Man as Leonardo: When you look at a wall spotted with stains, or with a mixture of stones, if you have to devise some scene, you might notice a resemblance to various landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills variously arranged; or again, you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could reduce to complete and well-drawn forms.
♪ [Man speaking French] Narrator: Four centuries later, the German artist Max Ernst would recall that Leonardo's advice to seek familiar forms in unexpected places-- walls, stains, clouds-- had provoked an "unbearable visual obsession" and left him staring endlessly at floorboards.
Gopnik: Leonardo was, more than any single artist, the one who emancipated painters, visual artists, from their role essentially as glorified artisans, craftsmen, into the role that they occupy to this day as seers and philosophers and sort of princes of the mind.
From very early on, people recognized that Leonardo was another class of creature.
They saw that he had gifts that were discontinuous with other people's gifts.
So, Leonardo's self-imagining and self-fashioning was as a poet, a philosopher, someone who transcended the artisanal, and in very real ways, he was the very first artist, certainly in Western history, to play that role.
Narrator: One day, Leonardo visited the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, where, for years, he had stored drawings, manuscripts, a collection of books, and his savings.
On this day, he was there to see a patient.
Man as Leonardo: The old man, a few hours before his death, told me he was over 100 years old, and that he felt nothing physically wrong with him except weakness.
Thus, sitting on a bed in the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, with no other movement or sign of suffering, he passed on from this life.
And I dissected his body to see the cause of this gentle death.
Narrator: It had been nearly two decades since Leonardo's initial attempt to map the human body-- an effort that had resulted in a revolutionary study of the human skull and an illustration that would become one of the best-known drawings ever made-- "The Vitruvian Man."
His preoccupation with the human figure-- and insistence that the painter know both its outer and inner form-- had never waned, but his concept of the nervous and circulatory systems was still heavily influenced by the Greek physician Galen, whose inaccurate theories on blood flow and respiration remained widely accepted more than 1,500 years after his death.
♪ Man: Galen was a second-century physician, and he wrote widely on the subject.
These form the basis of understanding of anatomy, physiology for the next nearly 1,600 years.
And that was that the blood was made in the liver continuously and the heart basically was there to churn the blood and to heat it, and it communicated with the airways directly, so it'd get rid of the evil spirits and so forth.
Narrator: Doctors in Bologna had performed public dissections on the bodies of condemned criminals for their students since the early 1300s.
For Leonardo, the practice offered him an opportunity to merge rigorous scientific exploration with expert artistry, and to challenge Galen's uncontested views.
♪ [Bramly speaking French] Narrator: He depicted the blood vessels of the old man's neck, thorax, and upper torso and the nerves and blood vessels of his head.
Then he moved to the abdominal organs-- stomach, liver, bladder, and kidneys.
He made notes on the colon and intestines, and the heart's importance in heating the blood-- a theory of Galen's which would prove to be incorrect.
And, once again, he looked to nature to help him make sense of his discoveries, comparing the arteries and veins to tree branches, and the heart to the seed from which the tree springs.
Man as Leonardo: Why the veins of old people become so long, and become sinuous when they used to be straight, and the walls become so thick that it prevents the motion of the blood.
This causes the death of the elderly without disease.
And what he got out of that dissection was astonishing.
He said, "I could see that the artery "that surrounded the heart was silted up, and this is like a river."
♪ And he knew as a canal engineer, a river engineer, if it silted up, then it didn't flow properly, and it causes all sorts of trouble.
So, the old man died from having a silted-up system of blood vessels.
Wells: And from that, he makes the first description of coronary atherosclerosis in the world.
And it isn't just the chance, you know, "By the way, this is what killed him."
He goes on to describe in several places the tortuosity of the vessels and "I want to dissect the young and the old, the animals, the birds, and try and understand what's going on in these vessels."
Narrator: The scope of Leonardo's investigations grew.
He planned a book that would describe human anatomy from the fetus to the fully grown man and woman-- their proportions, skeletal framework, muscular systems, and the nature of the senses.
Man as Leonardo: My way of depicting the human body will be as clear to you as if a real man were standing before you; and the reason is that if you wish thoroughly to know the parts of the human body, anatomically, you--or your eye--must see it from different aspects, considering it from below and from above and from its sides, turning it about and seeking the origin of each part; and in this way the natural anatomy is sufficient for your comprehension.
[Speaking Italian] ♪ Narrator: In an ambitious study of the inner workings of the female torso, Leonardo combined what he'd learned of both human and bovine anatomy to create a detailed 3-dimensional drawing of the main organs and vascular system.
Though it contained inaccuracies-- his rendering of the heart had two, not 4, chambers-- it was Leonardo's most complete effort to capture what he referred to as "the cosmography of the lesser world."
♪ Kemp: And he's looking at the respiratory system, he's looking at the blood system, he's looking at the urinogenital system.
And it's a supreme mapping of all these things all in one drawing-- an awesome drawing.
This vision of the body of the woman as the body of the Earth as the microcosm, macrocosm.
It's a great statement of the unity of all things in nature.
♪ Narrator: Later, Leonardo would befriend a young physician who taught anatomy at the University of Pavia, Marcantonio della Torre.
As della Torre dissected cadavers for his students, Leonardo would make drawings.
Bambach: He really develops a methodical approach to how to visualize dissection, and also how to communicate it in a drawing.
Man as Leonardo: On the cause of breathing... causa dell'alitare... causa del moto del core... on the cause of the motion... Bambach: We see him lifting, pointing out what is skin layer, then lifting and pointing out what is muscle, and then showing us what the bone structure is.
Man as Leonardo: On the cause of losing feeling...causa... Bambach: And we can see this unpacking, say, in layers.
Man as Leonardo: Tears come from the heart and not from the brain.
Bambach: We have an artist who has completely figured out, broken down the nuts and bolts of how the body functions, but also how one presents it in a way that communicates all the scientific information.
This is completely new.
And what we have is the artist leading the scientific discoveries.
It's the most amazingly sequential way of thinking about anatomy that we will ever see.
[Heartbeat] Narrator: His fetus in utero, drawn in brown ink and red chalk, would one day be understood as a groundbreaking study of embryonic anatomy as well as a breathtaking work of art.
Man as Leonardo: The child does not breathe, because he is constantly in water.
And he has no need to breathe because he is kept alive and nourished by the life and food of the mother.
It thus follows that the same soul governs and nourishes both bodies.
Narrator: Over the years, Leonardo would compile a massive trove of anatomical drawings informed by dozens of human and animal dissections.
Even though he would never publish any of them in his lifetime, his illustrations are to this day admired for their astonishing accuracy.
Still, his devotion to mastering every fiber of the human body is evident in each painting, including his incomplete "Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness."
Other artists often portrayed Saint Jerome as a penitent hermit who beat his chest with a stone while wilting under a merciless desert sun.
According to legend, he had earned the devotion of a lion by removing a thorn from its paw.
♪ Leonardo had precisely depicted the bones and muscles beneath the skin of Jerome's shoulder and neck to illustrate the saint's deep anguish.
♪ Wells: If you look at the anatomy of what we call the anterior triangle of the neck, with Saint Jerome's head turned to one side, it shows the sternomastoid muscles, scalene muscles very, very clearly.
It's the poise of the body, it's the movements of the head, the control, the muscles that are working.
Informs you so much about what's in the head, what's in the mind, and what's in the heart.
♪ Narrator: By April of 1508, the legal dispute with his half-brothers had been resolved in Leonardo's favor, and he had left Florence and returned to Milan.
Later that year, he finally delivered a new version of the altarpiece known today as the "Virgin of the Rocks," bringing a nearly two-decades-old disagreement to a close.
When he and his entourage found a new home in a parish church, they were joined by Francesco Melzi, the well-educated 14-year-old son of a Milanese engineer and military captain.
Melzi had come to apprentice as a painter, but it was as Leonardo's personal assistant that he would become indispensable and perhaps closer to Leonardo than anyone, including his companion and lover Salai.
Nicholl: Francesco Melzi is more like Leonardo's secretary, amanuensis, more of an intellectual companion than Salai.
Melzi is more aristocratic.
Salai is pretty working class in origin.
Perhaps there was a bit of friction between Salai and Melzi because they fulfill different roles in Leonardo's entourage.
Narrator: In time, Melzi would ensure the survival of many of Leonardo's manuscripts.
Man as Leonardo: Before going any further, I shall do some experiments because I intend to first produce the experience and then use reason to prove why the experience is forced to act that way, and this is the true rule whereby those who investigate natural effects must proceed, and, although nature begins with the cause and ends in experience, we must proceed in the opposite sense, in other words, starting from experience and using that to investigate the cause.
Narrator: Though Muslim scientists in the Middle East had long been testing their theories with experiments, most natural philosophers in Europe continued to follow the example of Aristotle, whose scientific conclusions had relied solely on observation.
♪ Gopnik: Leonardo comes of age at a time when the first stirrings of the Scientific Revolution was just being felt.
It progressed by narrowing the problems that it was asking itself.
Leonardo's mind is still elsewhere.
He's trying to think, "What if you looked at it all at once?
How would you solve it?"
But he has the kind of restless curiosity and intellect and the perpetual dissatisfaction with the received solution which are core, kind of the Promethean fire, of the Scientific Revolution, so if we see Leonardo helping to set alight that great adventure, I don't think we're wrong.
Gharib: His early work, definitely his writings, are influenced by Aristotle, but, as he aged, he became more of a scientist.
You could see that his approach was more of a analytical approach, combination of a hybrid of experiments and, you know, the theory.
♪ Man as Leonardo: Force arises from dearth or abundance.
It is the child of physical motion and the grandchild of spiritual motion, and the mother and origin of gravity.
Gravity is limited to the elements of water and earth, but this force is unlimited, and it could be used to move infinite worlds if instruments could be made by which the force could be generated.
♪ He realized that every object at the given height takes the same time to reach the ground.
Very quickly, he realizes there's something called acceleration.
Narrator: Leonardo understood that gravity caused falling objects to accelerate.
Seeking to measure this force, he designed an experiment.
He filled a jar with sand and then emptied it while moving the tilted jar horizontally, increasing his speed as he went.
When the falling sand formed an isosceles right triangle, he knew that the acceleration of his lateral motion matched the acceleration of the falling sand due to gravity.
Gharib: And in his experiments, he tried different accelerations, and he shows the patterns of the sand and then shows that exactly at the moment that he has G, that degree, 9.81 meters per second per second that we know today, he gets exactly the triangle that is here.
Narrator: Leonardo called it the "equalization of motion," and it allowed him to roughly calculate Earth's gravitational constant.
It would be a century before Galileo's experiments proved gravity's universal effect on objects and far longer before Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would use calculus, not yet invented in Leonardo's time, to define and explain gravity.
[Speaking French] It shows clearly that he had the imagination.
He had the power of, you know, putting an experiment together in order to look at a theory that he had, and that is not something that, you know, you find it in every, even normal, scientist.
For him, it was a burning question to answer, a puzzle that he wanted to understand for himself, and that's what I think is the character of a genius.
Narrator: In a manuscript dedicated to the physical world and its mechanics, Leonardo compiled his scientific observations and theories on geology, astronomy, and especially water.
Kemp: So water was mobile and visible.
You could see what was going on, and he enhanced his abilities to see it.
He set up experimental tanks, and water poured out of a rectangular mouth into this tank, and he used millet seeds to see what's going on in the water to try to understand these things, so water epitomized the movement of nature, but it had the advantage of being mobile, visible, and could be subject to experiment.
Narrator: Natural philosophers as far back as Aristotle had believed that rain could not be the only source of water feeding mountain springs and streams.
In seeking to test their theories, Leonardo turned again to the ancient analogy of the microcosm and macrocosm.
Man as Leonardo: Just as the blood surges upward and pours through the broken veins of the forehead, so from the lowest depths of the sea, the water rises to the mountaintops, where, finding its veins broken, it flows downwards and returns to the sea.
Isaacson: When he tries to form a pattern about how water gets to the top of the mountain and he makes an analogy with our blood, he realizes, "Well, that's not correct," because he tests it out by showing how heated water can move up and down.
Man as Leonardo: The water of the ocean cannot make its way from the roots to the tops of the mountains.
So he went through a lot of different solutions that had been proposed, and he did experiments-- some of them real experiments, we're quite sure, some copied from other places, like the siphoning.
Leonardo made a lot of different sketches, and he thought about what happens and gravity as he thought about it in those times, and it just didn't add up, so he kept on going.
Narrator: Eventually, he concluded correctly that precipitation alone supplied the water that flowed down from mountain peaks.
While studying a valley, Leonardo noticed marine fossils embedded in layers of rock that had been carved by a river over the ages.
For many, the fossils were evidence of the great biblical flood which had inundated the entire planet.
Kemp: He accepts the Bible as a book of revelation and the books of the saints and so on.
He says, "I let be the sacred writings, for they're the supreme truth," but that then frees him, as it were, to describe nature, and he can see that these-- there's evidence that these creatures were living there, actual living colonies.
They weren't just left there by floods, as it were.
Man as Leonardo: You must first inquire whether the deluge was caused by rain or by the swelling of the sea, and then you must show how neither rain nor flooding rivers nor overflowing seas could have caused the shells, being heavy objects, to have floated up the mountains.
[Vecce speaking Italian] Kemp: He concludes that the earth must be very ancient, and that, of course, is a rather challenging idea because it's saying that the earth, if we look at it analytically, isn't something which is made in 7 days, 7 nights.
♪ Guillermo del Toro: Leonardo carries with him all the questions in the world.
The notebooks are a dialogue with the world and a dialogue with yourself, and it doesn't matter if the empirical observation leads to confirmation.
There are many errors there, and not all of them are original ideas.
Of course, he is reworking ideas that come from the past, but I think that the progress of knowledge and the human mind is not a line, is not linear.
It's little revolutions.
Gopnik: One of the things that was very important to Renaissance artists, Leonardo included, was the idea of a demonstration, that you would add something to this extraordinary NASA-like project of conquering the world of visual appearances, and one of the things that Leonardo adds very strongly is this idea of aerial perspective, that the atmosphere with which things are seen changes the way that they're seen.
In Leonardo, the beautiful blur enters the world, and he distinguishes between, and he deliberately blurs, makes optical, makes suggestive, invites what's called the beholder's share into the picture, in effect, to complete and deepen, enrich, sweeten the form that we can't entirely see.
That's a Leonardesque contribution.
♪ Man as Leonardo: Above Lake Como toward Germany is the Valley of Chiavenna, where the River Mera flows into this lake.
Here are barren and very high mountains with huge rocks.
They are impossible to climb except on foot.
♪ Narrator: On a trip to the mountains north of Milan, Leonardo observed how atmospheric phenomena-- light, haze, vapor-- as well as altitude and distance affected the appearance of the landscape, the intensity of colors, the sharpness of details.
♪ [Speaking French] Bambach: He is really thinking about what the atmosphere does to color and to light in the distance.
It is the way in which he creates infinity.
Man as Leonardo: I say that the blueness we see in the atmosphere is not intrinsic color but is caused by warm vapor evaporating into minute and imperceptible atoms on which the solar rays fall, rendering them luminous against the infinite darkness of the fiery sphere which lies beyond.
Bambach: He becomes quite obsessed by the idea that you have infinite gradations in tone, in a color.
You also get these indivisible ethereal qualities.
[Bramly speaking French] Narrator: Back in his studio in Milan, Leonardo returned to a theme he had been exploring on and off for years-- the Madonna and Child with Mary's mother Saint Anne.
In the years since his cartoon depicting the 3 figures had caused a stir in Florence, he had made studies of an infant holding a lamb and created another full-scale cartoon that also featured Saint John as an infant.
Now he began work on a painting.
♪ In a preparatory drawing of the Madonna, Leonardo explored her features using the sfumato technique, blending shadows in ways so subtle that her contours practically vanished.
Man as Leonardo: The line itself has neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object, and this being its nature, it occupies no space.
Farago: He made it his business.
His whole life is, "How can you account "for the way things appear without any drawn lines which are not visible in nature?"
So the sfumato comes in there because sfumato refers to the modeling of figures and how they turn in space and then the most difficult of all of how to make it look like it's surrounded by air.
Leonardo is very insistent there are no lines in nature.
There are edges, so if you're drawing, you draw the edge, but this is not a natural thing.
He says there are no lines in nature.
You simply have a surface which hits another surface, and that's it.
There's no line that runs down that point, and as things get a little way away from the eye, so you don't see these edges precisely, and he said at one point, "The eye does not know the edge of any body."
All bodies exist in space, and all bodies are dimensional... and space is all about relationships between things.
When you're drawing a figure, you have to draw the back side of it and the front side of it.
You have to account for the proximity between things by being able to draw the side that you can't see and then extend the drawing from that part you can't see to the place where the image you can see actually is.
You look at the world as if you have X-ray eyes.
♪ Narrator: The rocky outcrops and distant vertical peaks he'd sketched in fine detail would inform the outdoor space he intended for his subjects.
On a 5 1/2-foot-tall-by- 3 1/2-foot-wide poplar panel, Leonardo probed both the psychological states of Saint Anne, Mary, and Jesus and their natural surroundings.
[Speaking French] ♪ Bambach: We really do see all the sum of all of Leonardo's scientific knowledge, artistic knowledge make their appearance in the painting.
If we look at the foreground especially and see the stratification of the rocks, he's gonna create the continuum of the atmospheric perspective from the foreground to the deep distance.
His objective is to suggest an infinity of space.
♪ Narrator: Leonardo would continue to refine the painting for years, but like so many of his previous works, it, too, would go unfinished.
[Speaking Italian] [Men shouting] Narrator: In December 1511, an alliance of city-states attacked Milan in an attempt to drive the French army off the Italian peninsula.
Amidst the upheaval and a devastating outbreak of the plague, Leonardo and his retinue decamped to his apprentice Francesco Melzi's family villa along the Adda River, about 20 miles northeast of Milan.
There, he explored the valley and its surrounding hills and drew plans for improving the Villa Melzi.
At night, he continued his studies of the motion of candle flames.
Galluzzi: I can imagine Leonardo is working at night on his table.
Of course, the light is candlelight, and he stopped a minute, and looking out, the candle started to form this little globe of light at the beginning, and he goes on for two pages to describe the dynamics, again, process, and then the way in which from the round initial shape, it comes to become pyramidal and why it get pointed and what is happening to the air, which is warmed up, that create vortices like air.
He could find all the laws of nature in the candlelight.
They were at work all together.
Narrator: At Villa Melzi, Leonardo had also returned to his anatomical studies, dissecting ox hearts to determine how blood flows through their chambers and valves.
He now recognized that rather than having two chambers, as anatomists had believed since the second century, the human heart had four.
"Marvelous instrument invented by the supreme master," he had written below a drawing.
Wells: He came up with this totally accurate idea that the valves begin to close while the blood's still flowing through them, and he translates that along with other knowledge to say, "Well, look.
That's what must happen to the blood.
"It must form these vortices, and the vortex which is forming "as the blood is still flowing out of the heart "is actually unfurling the leaflets so they can close in perfect harmony," and then he challenges himself, "Well, what if I'm wrong?
What happens then?"
He then designed an experiment to demonstrate how this happens.
Gharib: He writes notes to himself that-- how to actually pour hot wax inside the calf heart and then use that wax model to make a glass model out of it and buy some silk fabrics and cut it to the shape of the leaflets of the heart of the calf and, you know, sew it together and then put together perhaps the first, you know, synthetic heart valve ever.
Then he uses water and a hand pump and use grass seeds to do visualization, basically watching how the flow pattern forms every time the heart valve opened or closed.
Wells: The first-ever drawing of a synthetic heart valve which is exactly like heart valves we use today-- tissue valves-- but he didn't stop there.
He went on, and he described why the aortic valve-- pulmonary valve-- had to have 3 leaflets, not two, not 4, through geometric proof, beautiful geometric proof.
Narrator: It would be more than 450 years before scientists, using modern imaging techniques, proved Leonardo's theory correct.
Wells: Why?
Why did he do this?
First of all, there was no use for it.
There was no cardiac surgery.
There was no cardiology.
You couldn't do anything with it, so it wasn't of any use to anybody.
It was purely understanding for understanding's sake.
♪ Man as Leonardo: Learning acquired in youth arrests the evil of old age, and if you understand that old age is nurtured by wisdom, you will so conduct yourself in youth that your old age will not lack for nourishment.
Narrator: Leonardo was now 60 years old.
Francesco Melzi drew the master in red chalk.
Zimmerman: One of the most beautiful observations in his writing is, "Behold how when we're away, we long to return "to our home country and to our former state, "how like it is to the moth with the flame, "but the man who desires each new day and each new hour "thinking that they are too slow in coming "does not realize that he is longing for his own destruction."
Narrator: By March 1513, Leonardo was back in Milan, where Swiss mercenaries had ousted the French and Sforza's son now claimed the title of Duke.
The political landscape was shifting all over the Italian peninsula.
The previous year, after almost two decades in exile, the Medici family, now led by Giovanni and Giuliano, had regained power in Florence.
When Pope Julius II died in March of 1513, the conclave of cardinals chose Giovanni to replace him.
He took the name Leo X. Giuliano followed his brother to the Vatican and soon invited Leonardo to join them.
Many of Italy's greatest artists had already joined the Vatican court, including Michelangelo, who had recently completed a fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and Raphael Sanzio, a 30-year-old painter from Urbino who had been heavily influenced by Leonardo.
♪ Raphael had quickly become a star in Rome and a favorite of the Pope.
In his recently completed masterpiece for the Papal Palace, "The School of Athens," Raphael had modeled the ancient Greek philosophers on himself and his contemporaries.
Plato, one of the central figures, was based on Leonardo.
♪ [Speaking French] Narrator: That fall, Giuliano de' Medici installed Leonardo and his entourage at the Vatican's Villa Belvedere and paid him a monthly stipend.
Pope Leo commissioned a painting from Leonardo but soon became frustrated.
"Alas!
This man will never do anything," the Pope complained.
"He is already thinking of the end before he has even begun to work."
♪ The stipend left Leonardo free to study botany, mathematics, and architecture and to create amusements for the court.
Once when a gardener at the villa found a strange lizard, Leonardo gave it wings, horns, and a beard and kept it in a box so he could frighten his friends, but Leonardo grew unhappy in Rome.
He complained that a new assistant was rude and lazy, that authorities prevented him from performing dissections, and he began writing in code, paranoid that a German mirror maker was spying on him.
♪ Man as Leonardo: Tenebre, darkness, vento, wind, tempest at sea, fortuna di mare, forests on fire, selve infoccate.
[Bramly speaking French] Man as Leonardo: The air was dark because of the dense rain which fell in oblique descent.
All around may be seen venerable trees, uprooted and stripped by the fury of the winds.
[Bramly speaking French] ♪ ♪ Man as Leonardo: Bolts from heaven... Saette del cielo... earthquakes and crumbling mountains... terremoti e ruina di monti... and above these judgments, dark clouds split by the forked flashes lighting up on all sides the depth of the gloom.
E sopra queste maladitioni, oscuri nuvoli, vento, cielo alluminande or qua, fortuna di mare... Zimmerman: I wonder if those deluge drawings are, in part, self-portrait.
They're mysterious, the flareup of his mind towards the end of his life, the agitation of all of that idea.
♪ [Church bells ringing] Narrator: In 1516, Giuliano de' Medici died of tuberculosis.
With his patron gone, Leonardo accepted an invitation that would take him beyond Italy for the first time in his life.
Francis I, the charismatic 21-year-old King of France, was building a court at his chateau in Amboise to enhance his reputation as an enlightened and cultured monarch.
Leonardo, now 64 years old, packed all his belongings and--traveling by mule with Francesco Melzi, Salai, and a new servant named Battista de Vilanis-- headed north over the Alps toward the Loire River Valley of France.
He did not expect to return.
♪ The king installed Leonardo at the Chateau de Cloux, an elegant manor house down the road from his castle at Amboise.
He paid Leonardo a generous salary and provided him with a housekeeper who prepared his meals.
Kemp: Francis I is very ambitious in military terms but also in cultural terms.
He knows the Renaissance, what the Italians are doing is the hot thing, and he wants to buy into that Italianate-Renaissance culture, and Leonardo was clearly a kind of tourist attraction for Francis' court.
He could say, "I've got the greatest artist in the world down here."
[Bramly speaking French] ♪ Narrator: The Italian sculptor Benvenuto Cellini said that Francis was "besotted with those great virtues of Leonardo's."
The king "could never believe there was another man born in this world who knew as much."
♪ [Vecce speaking Italian] Narrator: Leonardo had finally found the perfect patron.
He staged spectacles as he had in Milan and sketched designs for a new royal palace at Romorantin that was never built.
♪ What may have been a small stroke made painting difficult, but he continued to draw and to teach.
[Bramly speaking French] Narrator: In October 1517, Leonardo received a visit from an acquaintance he'd met in Rome-- Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona.
During a tour of his studio, Leonardo proudly shared his manuscripts, which the Cardinal's assistant described as an "infinity of volumes," as well as several unfinished paintings that he'd carried with him from Rome.
They included a mysterious and sensual likeness of Saint John the Baptist and his depiction of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
♪ Leonardo also showed them a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the wife of a well-to-do Florentine silk merchant, which he had been commissioned to paint 14 years earlier.
♪ At the time, she had been 24 years old and was the mother of 5 children.
Leonardo had carried the painting from Florence to Milan, then to Rome, and finally over the Alps to France.
♪ Like many of his works, it had over time become something more than a commission.
Kemp: He's poured into that painting his knowledge of the microcosm, the body of the woman, the body of nature, the movement of hair... light on surfaces, atmospheric perspective in the landscape, so he's taken this straightforward subject and turned it into something wonderful.
It ceases to become a functional likeness, and it becomes a statement about the woman in nature.
It becomes a statement about the beloved woman equivalent to the Italian poetry, the woman who is idealized into some sublimated form who's completely unbelievable in a way.
♪ Man as Leonardo: The earth has a living soul, and its flesh is the soil.
Its bones are the strata and structures of the rocks which form the mountains.
[Birds chirping] ♪ Its blood is its veins of water.
♪ The pool of blood around the heart is the ocean.
♪ Its breathing, by the rise and fall of blood through the pulses is likewise, in the earth, the ebb and flow of the sea; ♪ [Speaking Italian] ♪ [Insects chirping] Man as Leonardo: The soul leaves the body with such reluctance, and I do believe that its pain and sorrows are not without cause.
[Bramly speaking French] ♪ Narrator: Over the years, Leonardo had filled many thousands of notebook pages with an astonishing array of observations and fables, grocery lists and instructions for painters, sketches of faces, and studies of nature.
Now, in quiet moments, he returned to the geometric problems that had perplexed and delighted him for decades.
He drew circles and arcs in boxes, trying, as he had for many years, to solve the ancient challenge of squaring the circle.
♪ On a page dedicated to an 1,800-year-old Euclidean geometry problem, he trailed off.
It was time to eat.
"Et cetera," he wrote, "because the soup is getting cold."
It was among his last notebook entries.
♪ As his health began to fail, Leonardo put his estate in order.
On April 23, 1519, in Amboise, before a royal notary and 7 witnesses, Leonardo signed his last will and testament.
♪ To the brothers who had battled him for an inheritance, he left a generous sum of money.
He divided his property in Milan between his servant Battista de Vilanis and Salai, who had already built a house there.
♪ The most significant bequest would go to Francesco Melzi, who would also serve as executor.
He was to inherit Leonardo's pension and clothes as well as his intellectual and artistic legacy-- all of the books, manuscripts, and paintings in his possession.
♪ Leonardo da Vinci died 9 days later on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.
♪ He was buried in the Church of Saint-Florentin in Amboise.
[Thunder] "On account of his many divine qualities," Giorgio Vasari said, "his name and his renown shall never be extinguished."
♪ "It is impossible for me to express the pain his death has caused me," Francesco Melzi wrote.
"It is beyond nature's power to reproduce such a man."
♪ Del Toro: The one act an artist brings to the world is to give you a way of gazing into it.
"Can you look at it through my eyes?"
That's the greatest gift an artist brings, and Leonardo does that.
♪ Very few artists have given us their soul or their mind.
Leonardo gives us both.
♪ Kemp: Leonardo dies as a kind of legend, but if you'd asked, say, in the 1600s, what did they think Leonardo paintings looked like, it's deeply problematic.
There are not many of them.
They're not publicly available, so the picture of what Leonardo actually looked like and what he really did was pretty cloudy.
♪ Narrator: Though few of Leonardo's works could be seen, his writings on the theory of art began circulating among artists in the mid-1500s, first as handwritten manuscripts abridged from his book on painting and later in a print edition published in Italian and French.
The complete book, compiled by Francesco Melzi, was eventually rediscovered in the Vatican libraries and published in 1817.
♪ In the 1800s, a handful of writers began to probe more deeply, offering new insight and lavishing Leonardo's masterpieces with lyrical praise.
"She is older than the rocks among which she sits," wrote Walter Pater of the "Mona Lisa."
He called her the symbol of the modern idea.
♪ Historians turned up new documents-- letters, contracts, wills-- containing more facts and providing more nuance to his life and times.
♪ As academic interest in Leonardo grew, so did his cultural importance.
In a slim volume published in 1910, the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud offered his analysis of Leonardo's memory of a bird visiting him in his cradle.
♪ The bird, Freud decided, represented Caterina, Leonardo's mother.
♪ In 1911, an Italian handyman wrapped the "Mona Lisa" in his smock and smuggled it out of the Louvre in Paris, where it had hung since 1804.
Enrico Caruso: ♪ La donna e mobile ♪ ♪ Qual piuma al vento... ♪ Narrator: 28 months after the heist, authorities caught the thief when he attempted to sell the painting to an antiques dealer in Florence.
Caruso: ♪ Sempre un amabile... ♪ Narrator: Leonardo's masterpiece had never been more famous.
Nicholl: And then we get into the surrealist Marcel Duchamp, who does this painting that's of a cheap postcard of the "Mona Lisa" with a mustache and beard graffitied onto it.
You get the poster of Mona Lisa smoking a joint, the wonderful Andy Warhol, 30 silkscreen Giocondas in one, Nat King Cole's "Mona Lisa," Cole Porter, "You're the Tops," Bob Dylan, "Visions of Johanna"-- Dylan: ♪ But Mona Lisa must've had... ♪ "Mona Lisa must've had the highway blues.
You can tell by the way she smiles."
Dylan: ♪ The way she smiles... ♪ John F. Kennedy: Mr. Minister, we in the United States are grateful for this loan from the leading artistic power in the world.
Dylan: ♪ When the jelly-faced women all sneeze ♪ ♪ Hear the one with the mustache say ♪ ♪ "Jeez, I can't find my knees" ♪ ♪ Narrator: "The Last Supper" had barely survived an Allied air strike during the Second World War as well as numerous ill-conceived attempts at restoration, but recent, more sophisticated efforts to repair the mural, which had begun to flake off the wall within Leonardo's lifetime, have secured the fragile work for visitors who come to the former monastery in droves.
♪ In recent decades, engineers, surgeons, pilots, playwrights, architects, and artists everywhere have found wisdom and inspiration in the unmatched trove of notebook pages and drawings that encompass Leonardo's life of boundless seeking.
♪ [Vecce speaking Italian] ♪ ♪ ♪ Woman: Leonardo, Leonardo, Leonardo!
Vive la Leonardo!
Vive... Man: At 400 million, Leonardo's "Salvator Mundi" selling here at Christie's.
$400 million is the bid, and the piece is sold.
[Applause] Nicholl: Sir Kenneth Clark called him the most curious man in history.
He was always interested.
He was always wanting to know, and I think more than even the paintings, more than the mysterious "Lisa," more than "The Last Supper," is this sense of Leonardo, the man who never took no for an answer in terms of finding things out.
♪ [Delieuvin speaking French] ♪ ♪ ♪ Zimmerman: He has a love of the world.
Nothing was dull or boring or quotidian to him.
It was all a marvel.
That's the blessed state I feel he was sort of in because the world is that abundant.
It is that rich.
It is there for us like he saw, and the more you attend, the richer it is and the more you find your own place in it as part of the marvelous machine.
[Wind blowing] 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.
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Bank of America.
♪ Announcer: 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.
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