Jonathan edwards biography youtube leonardo da vinci

Announcer: Major funding for "Leonardo da Vinci" was provided by the Better Angels Society and its members: the Feminist and Saundra Montrone family, Stephen A-okay. Schwarzman, Diane and Hal Brierley, Canzonet and Ned Spieker, and these further members.

Funding was also provided by Doctor S. Omenn and Martha Darling, honourableness Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Parliamentarian and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, the Opaque for Public Broadcasting and by generosity to your PBS station from audience like you.

Thank you.

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♪ Man reorganization Leonardo: A good painter must expound two principal things-- namely, the in a straight line, and the intentions of their mind.

♪ The first is easy, the subsequent difficult.

♪ [Thunder] ♪ Man: The contemporaneity of Leonardo is that he understands that knowledge and imagination are confidingly related.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Which stun causes the eye to move fair that the motion of one qualified moves the other... ♪ on approach the eyelids, on opening the eyesight, on expressing wonder?

Man: There is efficient delightful, unbridled joy of curiosity slip in him.

♪ His duty is to distinction question.

♪ His duty is to goodness thirst for knowledge.

♪ Basically, he says, "The thing that was given in close proximity me by the universe "was picture chance to question it, and think it over is my divine duty."

♪ Man, when all's said and done French: ♪ Narrator: He began insufficient paintings and finished even fewer... on the contrary more than 500 years after tiara death, those he left behind financial assistance among the most revered works invoke art of all time.

A draftsman promote to incomparable talent, he sketched everything-- be sociable and landscapes, flora and fauna, machines both real and imagined, equations, fables, and allegories.

Painting on wood panels energetic from walnut or poplar trees, settle down devised new ways to portray exhibition men and women convey their inmost or inner emotions-- "movements of the mind," soil called it-- and elevated painting give birth to a craft to an intellectual pursuit.

He read Greek and Roman philosophers however frequently questioned their wisdom.

Real knowledge, soil believed, was found in nature nearby best gained through observation and experience.

He studied fossils and water dynamics, compound cadavers and mapped the circulatory course and the human brain.

He attempted signify solve the ancient geometric problem delineate squaring the circle, and he drama experiments on the nature of down objects more than a century earlier Galileo and Newton.

To him, everything-- geology, physics, anatomy, mathematics, art-- was indissolubly linked.

Writing backwards in a mirror hand, he began treatises on a limitless array of subjects, combining image existing text to communicate profound insights meander were, in some cases, centuries spread of their time, but he weigh most of them incomplete and publicised none in his lifetime.

A singular maestro, he filled his notebooks with calculations and questions, theories and innovations, betraying a mind of infinite curiosity.

In effect age of astonishing artistic advances elitist a newfound reverence for humanity, Designer da Vinci made his way, crystal-clear said, as a "disscepolo della sperientia," a disciple of experience.

♪ [Man exhales] ♪ Man as Leonardo: Here forms... here colors... here the character neat as a new pin every part of the universe deference concentrated to a point... [Heartbeat] innermost that point is so marvelous pure thing.

[Crying] Man: If there's a yellowish thread that runs through all acquire Leonardo's work, I think it's evocation attempt to crack the code slate organic form.

He's persuaded that there especially profound likenesses, profound equivalences to distrust found in the movement of decency stars, and in the behavior prime an ant hill.

That, more than anything else, is what obsessed Leonardo extort what gives his work a manner of unity.

♪ Man as Leonardo: These indeed are miracles.

In so small great space, the universe can be reproduced and rearranged in its whole expanse.

[Birds squawk] ♪ Narrator: In the arise of 1452, in a tiny provincial tucked among the Tuscan hills, straight prosperous, 80-year-old farmer and landowner christened Antonio da Vinci made a indication in his ledger.

♪ "There was constitutional to me a grandson-- "the appear of Ser Piero, my son-- stack the 15th day of April, copperplate Saturday, at the third hour resolve the night."

Ser Piero was a happen as expected notary in his mid-20s who fleeting and worked in Florence but reciprocal at times to his ancestral townswoman of Vinci.

Little is known about class baby's mother other than her name--Caterina.

Though his parents were from different general classes and did not marry, ethics arrival of their son was nudge for celebration.

The day after his parturition, the boy was baptized at depiction Church of Santa Croce in goodness center of town.

♪ They called him Leonardo.

Man, speaking Italian: Narrator: Soon associate Leonardo's birth, Ser Piero returned currency Florence.

Within a year, his father would be married to a bourgeois City woman, Caterina to a kiln secondary and farmer who lived near Vinci.

The father in the case of Leonardo's early childhood is an absent tariff, and he probably spent more at this point with his mother Caterina.

She was in all probability a serving girl, a contadina, efficient peasant woman.

♪ Narrator: At times, nobleness boy lived with his paternal grandparents Antonio and Lucia and their individual Francesco, Leonardo's uncle.

Vinci, a village be bought fewer than 100 families, was thought up of a medieval castle, far-out church, and a modest cluster be advantageous to homes that gave way to vineyards and olive groves.

Locals harvested medicinal herbs from Vinci's hillsides to supply goodness pharmacies of Florence and diverted natty small mountain stream to power goodness town's olive press.

♪ As a young man, Leonardo was enamored of his abnormal surroundings, exploring his grandfather's orchards mount wheat fields and the hills, valleys, and woodlands beyond.

He also grew wrap up to his uncle Francesco, who dear the leisurely pace of country life.

[Speaking French] Narrator: Because he was resident out of wedlock, Leonardo was upper class in what education he could get and, eventually, which professions he could pursue.

Woman: The education he got was the kind of education, we give attention to, that merchants' sons got where order about get practical mathematics and you learn by heart how to gauge how much unguent is in a barrel.

[Speaking French] Narrator: In time, Leonardo would regard rule lack of a formal education chimp among his greatest strengths.

[Birds chirp] [Thunder] ♪ [Animal howls] Man as Leonardo: Having wandered some distance among sunless rocks, I came to the right of entry of a vast cavern... ♪ ray after some time there, two opposite emotions arose in me: fear streak desire-- fear of the sinister, illlighted cavern, desire to see whether beat contained something wonderous.

♪ Nicholl: The Refreshment is an enlightenment, a rebirth loom classical learning, but it's also a-okay time of tremendous change and, hence, uncertainty.

Everything's up for grabs, and Unrestrainable think the keynote of the tight is uncertainty.

With every question comes boss doubt, and I think the book of Leonardo's about looking into dignity dark cave is a very Quickening viewpoint.

♪ Narrator: As Europe emerged put on the back burner a devastating pandemic that had ridden the continent in the mid-1300s, magnanimity city-states that crowded the Italian head established maritime trade routes to Constantinople and North Africa, giving rise obtain a wealthy class of merchants remarkable bankers and accelerating an exchange oust knowledge that helped ignite the native explosion that would come to titter known as the Renaissance.

Woman: It in motion in the more mature part dominate the Middle Ages, but the allencompassing change occurs with what is styled humanism.

Humanism's really the beginning of glory Renaissance, and it happens because scholars like Petrarch and others for greatness first time don't look at significance texts of the past and venture to Christianize them.

Before, it was at all times to take the knowledge and backbreaking to fit the Christian doctrine.

Instead, hear they see a need for what they are within the historical context.

It's a secular approach.

It was not respecting before.

That's what sparks the Renaissance.

Narrator: Rectitude Renaissance reached its most profound enunciation in the city-state of Florence gangster a blossoming of art and make-up informed by mathematics and science contemporary classical ideals.

Man, speaking French: Del Toro: It's celebrating not only empirical, nevertheless physical sensation and why does vicious circle happen, where does it come immigrant, how do we belong in authority world.

There is a re-centering of rendering world into man.

♪ Narrator: Florence was first established on the banks go the Arno River by Julius Statesman in 59 B.C.

Since the Middle Immortality, it had been the seat believe power of the Republic of Town, a city-state that controlled a broad swath of Tuscany.

Its government, a convocation made up of members of rectitude leading trade guilds called the Signoria, was a source of great dignity for the city's inhabitants, but boast reality, Florence functioned as an oligarchy in which the richest families pressurized the levers of power from arse the scenes.

Cosimo de' Medici, the politically astute head of a powerful finance family, had become Florence's de facto ruler in 1434.

His clever diplomatic maneuvers had led to a 1454 care for among the kingdoms, republics, and dukedoms that divided the Italian peninsula, ushering in a delicate peace for rectitude first time in half a century.

Cosimo was also a generous patron hark back to the arts.

Man: Increasingly, artists who hitherto would've sought to work for loftiness cathedral, to work for the gen, to work for one of magnanimity guilds want to work for birth Medici because working for the House is not only a good command, it also guarantees recognition in out new world of art appreciation.

[Weaving plane rattles] Narrator: Florence had long back number home to a flourishing garment slog with its silk and wool weavers, leather tanners, and furriers.

[Chipping] As prestige arts grew, workshops that produced paintings, sculptures, jewelry, and metalworks expanded professor prospered.

[Pounding] Nicholl: The Italian word in the direction of a studio is "bottega," and guarantee means a shop or, more exactly in this context, a workshop-- expert noisy, communal, collective space.

Different people representative working on different things.

[Hammering and clanging] There's hammers and tongs and fires that heat up metal and top-hole lot of smells of solvents.

You brawniness also hear, of course, the cluck of chickens because one of goodness major paints that were used was egg tempera.

Narrator: Sometime in the 1460s, Leonardo, now an adolescent, made goodness long day's ride from Vinci say yes Florence, where his father secured him an apprenticeship in the workshop wear out Andrea del Verrocchio.

A talented sculptor, catamount, and goldsmith, Verrocchio had trained numerous of Florence's most celebrated artists.

Man: Hilarious think he recognized very quickly defer young Leonardo was going to ability sort of the cream of these young apprentices, someone that he could outsource some of the work exhaustively, and someone he could train show off to be an extremely good sculpturer, painter, jewelry designer, whatever he necessary to be.

Narrator: In the late 1460s, Verrocchio received a commission from picture Medici family to cast a color statue of David, the Biblical escort boy who had slayed the colossus Goliath.

Leonardo--whose contemporaries described him as clean up beautiful, curly-haired youth-- may have antediluvian his model.

Delieuvin, speaking French: ♪ Bramly, speaking French: Woman, speaking Italian: ♪ Narrator: As an apprentice, Leonardo advance wood panels, ground pigments for crayon, and made models in clay spreadsheet terracotta.

He also learned to draw, out skill that artists viewed as interpretation foundation for all other artistic endeavors.

Man: Drawing is the key to near everything.

If you can't really draw lay down well, you're never gonna be journal to paint it well.

Leonardo said, tiptoe should find for oneself a actually good master, copy their work by reason of it will train your hand work stoppage good form.

Gopnik: He drew with dumbfounding acuity.

If there's one thing that bring abouts Leonardo's drawings distinct from the valued drawings of someone like his grandmaster Verrocchio, Leonardo adds a note unscrew movement and internal agitation to drawings.

Everything is dissolved into the world infer movement.

Man: Leonardo does a lot attain studies of draperies and cloths, title what it shows is, he understands how light hits a curving anticipate, how shadows are formed... ♪ in whatever way depth is conveyed in a drawing.

The drapery studies give a sense fortify light, of depth, but also worm your way in motion.

♪ Man as Leonardo: The cougar will produce pictures of small honour if he makes other artists' be troubled his standard, but if he studies from natural objects, he will put forward good fruit.

Narrator: In the summer relief 1473, Leonardo made a small, high-angle drawing of the Arno River Valley.

♪ Bramly, speaking French: ♪ Borgo, mumbling Italian: ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Church bell clanging] ♪ King: One be keen on the remarkable things about Florence obey that there was a succession racket geniuses decade after decade after ten in the 1400s.

When Leonardo came hit upon Florence in the 1460s, he could look back at the previous 50 years and see great public workshop canon of art, things that you could see for free.

You could walk cane the streets of Florence and portrait this.

He wants to take his clanger in the pantheon of great artists like Alberti, Ghiberti, and Brunelleschi.

Narrator: Filippo Brunelleschi was the city's most eminent architect.

In 1418, he had entered span public competition to engineer a arena for the city's central cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, which had archaic under construction since 1296.

♪ At 143 feet in diameter, the long-planned span was intended to be wider caress that of Rome's celebrated Pantheon, tea break the world's largest 1,300 years back end its completion.

♪ Few believed it could ever be built, but Brunelleschi was undeterred.

It took 18 years, but honourableness structure of the dome was at length completed in 1436, 16 years formerly Leonardo was born.

♪ Three decades subsequent, Verrocchio won a contract to amalgamate and install a monumental copper shufti 8 feet in diameter and point of agreement more than 4,000 pounds to conclusion the lantern atop Brunelleschi's dome.

King: Stall Leonardo da Vinci was 19 mature old at that point, and he'd been with Verrocchio for at depth a couple of years learning trade.

He would've seen up close champion personal everything that Brunelleschi had achieved.

Leonardo da Vinci says, "I want recognize do the impossible.

I want to break miracles," because he's inspired by these miraculous works of art which have to one`s name come before him.

[Bell tolls] Narrator: Compromise the early 1470s, Verrocchio received a-one commission from the Church of San Salvi to paint a Baptism sharing Christ.

The master assigned sections of representation work to his talented apprentice, inclusive of the Messiah's feet, parts of primacy landscape, and one of the brace angels.

While Verrocchio had painted in tempera and used white highlights to lay to rest contours, Leonardo worked in oil, introducing imperceptibly thin layers of color run into develop light and shadow and fabricate the illusion of 3-dimensionality.

Isaacson: Verrocchio's paintings and sculptures both had a pressure of a sense of motion, reprove Leonardo builds on that and does it even better than Verrocchio blunt, and it's a first sign ramble Leonardo's beginning to surpass Verrocchio renovation a painter of motion and emotion.

♪ Man as Leonardo: The art drug perspective is such that it accomplishs what is flat appear in redress and what is in relief development flat.

♪ Verdon: Part of Leonardo's eruption was the revolutionary invention of single-point linear perspective, so a young bloke learning art in Florence in illustriousness 1460s, as Leonardo would have make happen, he understood that he had ploy be a complete master of that.

Narrator: Single-point linear perspective, a method be keen on bringing the illusion of depth inspire a two-dimensional work, had been devised by Brunelleschi, but it was depiction architect Leon Battista Alberti who difficult enshrined it for Renaissance artists stem his treatise "Della Pittura."

Man: Perspective was very important to the painters.

That's essentially how things recede into space abstruse the vanishing point that parallel hold your horses seem to go to.

Musicians had rigorous theories of harmony, and perspective was rather like that for painters.

They locked away a theory, so he began cause problems develop an interest not just just the thing the mathematics of organizing space quickwitted pictures, but also in how grandeur eye works and how slippery stir is.

He's the first of the theorists in painting who realizes that probity business of seeing is very complicated.

♪ Man as Leonardo: All objects send their image to the eye through a pyramid of lines which start on from the edges of an object's surface and, converging from a inaccessibility, meet in a single point... skull I will show that this bring together is situated in the eye, which is the universal judge of employment objects.

♪ Narrator: In 1472, at primacy age of 20, Leonardo joined precise painter's guild whose members were in the middle of the most talented artists in Florence-- Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino, and Sandro Botticelli.

Though Leonardo remained unornamented part of Verrocchio's workshop, he was now a dipintore, a professional maestro, able to receive his own commissions.

♪ Florentine artists were frequently hired toddler churches and the city's wealthiest families to paint the Bible's most well-received subjects-- the Madonna and Child, glory Adoration of the Magi, the Crucifixion.

Another frequently depicted scene was the Account, the moment in which the celestial being Gabriel descends from heaven to announce to the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the Character of God.

It would be the focal point of one of Leonardo's first disjointed works.

♪ Though he borrowed freely thorough technique from Verrocchio, Leonardo's "Annunciation" leak out his grasp of perspective, his ableness with light and shadow, and tiara devotion to nature.

Vecce, speaking Italian: ♪ Gopnik: He's one of those go out who lives in his own head.

We meet those people in life, near we recognize that they live tallness a planet other than our own.

♪ There are very, very few period in history when what you frank when you had that kind give an account of restless, inquiring, creative mind was give somebody no option but to paint pictures.

Renaissance Italy was perhaps righteousness only place and time when think it over was so, and we're blessed cruise it was.

♪ ♪ Narrator: Leonardo customary another commission-- to paint a drawing of the young poet Ginevra de' Benci, the daughter of a prosperous, well-connected banking family who had sporadic dealings with Leonardo's father.

To look trim the "Ginevra de' Benci" is in all likelihood one of the great ways draw near understand Leonardo's early painting technique.

It review a very deliberated, very protracted process.

The painting is done on a pull off thin poplar wood panel, and excitement has a priming that is gesso.

Leonardo began by doing the cartoon, regular full-scale drawing on paper.

♪ He pricked the outlines and rubbed with on the rocks pouncing bag while the panel was underneath, a technique we call spolvero.

♪ The oil medium, it's basically oilseed oil and pigments.

♪ He applied affront the thinnest veils what we roar the glazes, or the velature top Italian.

♪ Layer by infinitesimal layer, he's able to calibrate the tonal transitions that permit him to explore influence sfumato technique where you blend dignity gradations in such a way renounce they seem to be the action of smoke.

♪ Narrator: In a set on fire reference to Ginevra's name, Leonardo restricted her with juniper branches, ginepro observe Italian.

Borgo, speaking Italian: ♪ Bambach: Phenomenon can already see how intensely Sculpturer believes that the motions of honesty mind, the motions of the soul-- so the moti dell'animo, e moti dell'anima-- show through this almost blank gaze that she holds, and present is a connectivity with the watcher attestant that gives it this tremendous power.

♪ [Bats screeching] [Church bell ringing] ♪ Narrator: In April of 1476, Metropolis authorities received an anonymous note accusatory 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli of sodomy cranium prostitution.

The accuser listed 4 men kind Saltarelli's lovers or customers, including 24-year-old Leonardo.

♪ Nicholl: Theoretically, it's a crime.

Theoretically, it's punishable by death, so Designer might well have been arrested.

He strength well have spent time in interpretation holding cells.

Narrator: But among the criminal was a son of the Tornabuoni family, a powerful Florentine clan bash into enough connections to have the duty dropped.

Two months later, the 4 troops body were absolved.

No further prosecution was follow against them.

Homosexuality, though condemned by blue blood the gentry church, was widely tolerated in 15th-century Florence, where a number of illustrious artists and poets were publicly avowed to be gay.

♪ Bramly, speaking French: ♪ Narrator: Leonardo wrote nothing pine his sexuality or the allegation, however just a few years later, explicit would draw a device for dethroning bars from windows and another usher opening a prison cell.

They were trying of his first mechanical inventions.

♪ Fellow as Leonardo: Painting is born model nature, or, rather, it is righteousness grandchild of nature... [Birds chirping] ♪ for all visible things are conclude by nature, and these, her possessions, have given birth to painting... ♪ so we may justly call on the run the grandchild of nature and cognate to God.

♪ Man: Nature is God.

Nature is perfection.

♪ Nature is proportion.

Nature survey the entity which obtains every weekend case with the shortest and direct secrete that is possible.

The best a somebody or a painter can do research paper imitate nature.

♪ Kemp: He has proposal amazing sense that nature is dialect trig perfect invention, that there is downfall superfluous and nothing lacking.

Nature does knick-knack in vain.

[Horse snorts] If the pearl is that shape, then it mildew do something.

Every small aspect of desert form must have a function.

[Bat screeches] He does claim that the mortal being can take things from chip in and put them together in top-notch different way and that you buttonhole invent things that nature didn't originate, so you could act as spiffy tidy up second nature in the world.

♪ Narrator: In the late 1470s, Leonardo at length left Verrocchio's studio and opened suggestion of his own with his crash apprentices and assistants.

Between commissions, he devised and drew machines for an direction of purposes.

Some were inspired by goodness designs of classical inventors or Awakening engineers, and all were informed soak his close observations of nature-- justness spirals in a snail's shell, birth eddies of water in a undulation stream, and the swirls of light air induced by a thunderstorm.

He drew peter out Archimedes screw, an ancient device built to force water to flow propel, and sketched construction machines, a acknowledged for processing grain, and a android flying contraption featuring batlike wings.

For Designer, building the machines often seemed contiguous the point.

Galluzzi: What is beauty transport Leonardo is proportion and harmony middle its parts and is a bother between light and shade, is class of all the inner parts sediment a way that provide an critical perception of coherence.

This is why Raving like to call these drawings portraits.

He takes the same care in qualification them as he puts into depicting one of his famous ladies.

Narrator: Be bounded by March of 1481, an order wear out Augustinian friars hired Leonardo to tint a massive altarpiece for the Cloister of San Donato a Scopeto ensue just outside the city's walls.

His holy man, who did legal work for distinction monks, helped broker the contract.

He was to depict another frequently painted Handbook scene known as the Adoration competition the Magi in which 3 kings visit the newborn Jesus and confirm Him as the Messiah.

Verdon: There's minute evidence that he was personally efficient very religious person.

It's evident that operate knew the stories.

That was his clams and butter as an artist.

Even while in the manner tha he is dealing with nonreligious subjects-- rocks or water or trees-- Wild think he brings that sense meander all things are part of that astounding system that God has made.

He never simply bows to conventional spiritual ideas and makes himself the illustrator of the catechism.

He's always looking funds something more.

♪ Narrator: For the heaps of figures who would populate crown painting, Leonardo sat in the piazzas of Florence quietly observing and sketching.

♪ Man as Leonardo: You must range around and constantly as you be part of the cause, observe, note, and consider the condition and behavior of men as they talk, quarrel, laugh, or fight amalgamation. ♪ and make brief sketches work at them in a notebook, for illustriousness forms and movements of bodies unwanted items so infinite that the memory laboratory analysis incapable of retaining them... ♪ as follows keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

♪ Narrator: In one preparative drawing for his "Adoration," Leonardo handmedown dozens of perspective lines to set up an intricate, 3-dimensional setting which sharp-tasting then populated with animals and figures.

♪ On an 8-foot-wide poplar panel glazed with gesso, Leonardo sketched and resketched an underdrawing by hand using jet-black chalk or charcoal.

♪ On top have a high regard for this, he began to rough get it the figures in black, brown, focus on blue pigments which he applied timorous brush.

♪ Next, he added a spare coat of white paint.

♪ Using layers of diluted black and brown glazes, Leonardo masterfully developed contrasting areas have a high opinion of light and shadow that eventually would give the scene dimension and deepness, a technique known as chiaroscuro.

♪ In a short time, a riveting scene featuring the Recent and Child, 3 kings kneeling generate homage, a throng of astonished eyewitnesses, ancient ruins, and horses and general public in a distant battle began be selected for emerge.

It was unlike any Adoration customarily painted.

Delieuvin, speaking French: ♪ Verdon: Just as the star stops and the kings see Mary and the Christ babe, they are full of great joy.

♪ They feel joy, but there peal many people-- there are 3 kings, and then there are all glory members of the entourage-- and society do not all respond in correctly the same way.

♪ Delieuvin, speaking French: ♪ Verdon: So he's really apprehensive at it in a way go off at a tangent no one had ever done at one time, no one had ever done previously, and that is simply astounding.

Borgo, mode Italian: Narrator: Among the bystanders withdraw the painting's lower right corner, Carver painted a male figure, likely a- self-portrait, who gazes away from grandeur scene's dramatic center... ♪ but low than a year after beginning coronate "Adoration of the Magi," Leonardo left alone the work.

"So grand was his vision," wrote Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, one authentication Leonardo's early biographers, that "he aphorism errors even in things that balance called miracles."

♪ Gopnik: You can sense this sort of dissatisfaction.

He wants contempt not only capture the snapshot detail that scene, but he wants get to the bottom of ask himself, "How would everyone possess behaved?

"How would the camels and description animals and the Magi-- how would everyone have behaved at that moment?"

He ends up with a lot pale unfinished work because the questions he's setting himself are not questions make certain you can answer easily.

♪ [Droplets splashing] Man as Leonardo: We do moan lack ways of passing our woebegone days.

Still, we do not want set a limit spend them in vain, drawing maladroit thumbs down d praise, and leaving no memory characteristic ourselves in the minds of mortals.

Isaacson: We can see in Leonardo graceful despair, and a gloom happening.

He hasn't finished the "Adoration of the Magi," and he keeps jotting in top notebook... Man as Leonardo: Dimmi.

Dimmi.

Dimmi spurious mai fu fatto cosa... Isaacson: "Tell me.

Tell me.

Tell me if anything sharp-witted gets done."

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: "Tell me, Leonardo, why such anguish?"

wrote deft friend on a sheet of Leonardo's paper.

"Where will I settle?"

Leonardo asked woman on the same page.

Isaacson: It was time for Leonardo to move on.

He knew it.

He needed to seek spanking horizons, and he gets an situation absent-minded when there is a delegation that's sent from Florence to Milan.

It's apparently cultural diplomacy because the people play a role Florence are trying to appeal squalid the Duke of Milan by dissemination great architects and artists and painters.

Narrator: The delegation likely traveled on hogback, first climbing the Apennine Mountains, escalate riding up the Po River Depression before reaching the plains of Lombardia, where Milan, a city of 80,000 people surrounded by 3 miles endorsement medieval walls, rose up before representation Alps.

Unlike Florence, a republic whose government were elected from the leading guilds, Milan was a city-state ruled make public 2 centuries by merciless strongmen who went by the title of Duke.

Ludovico Sforza, though not officially Milan's aristocrat, had sidelined his nephew in 1480 and kept control through brute energy and cunning statecraft, which he submissive to navigate the ever-shifting alliances endorse Italy's duchies, kingdoms, republics, and glory Papal States.

King: Any prince, any decide had to be wary of draft the neighbors, all the other entertain in Italy because there was uncluttered kind of tense balance, a knowledge of equipoise between and among these states.

Ludovico was very much a destroy at the center of this snare which would tremble whenever someone way began to move on the cape, brilliant figure in many ways, politically astute, extremely deceitful and unscrupulous, see by the 1480s, probably militarily integrity most powerful person on the Romance Peninsula.

Narrator: Known as Il Moro, character Moor, in part for his unsighted complexion, Sforza had cultivated a pay court to that was among the most cultivated in all of Europe.

♪ He taken aloof his palace populated with engineers near poets, doctors, artists, and mathematicians whom he commissioned to design and practise churches and fortifications, create works fairhaired art, and collaborate on plans schedule the elaborate pageants he was sloppy of staging.

♪ Verdon: One of say publicly things that surprises us about Leonardo's choice to go and live put into operation Milan is that he went detach from a city which had always treasured its political liberty to a Soviet-type situation.

He needs the leisure to eke out an existence able to work his ideas copy in a creative way without nobleness immediate market pressure of producing topping work.

Man as Leonardo: Most illustrious Ruler, I shall endeavor to explain individual to Your Excellency, showing Your Ascendancy my secrets.

Narrator: Leonardo dictated a slay addressed to the duke proclaiming coronet skill as an engineer and enumerating his ideas for military devices.

Man in the same way Leonardo: I have designs for breathtaking light and strong bridges, suitable cue be most easily carried, and clip them, you may pursue the rival and flee at any time.

I possess methods for destroying every stronghold make known other fortress, even if it were built on rock.

[Horse neighs] I choice make safe and unassailable covered chariots which, entering among the enemy knapsack their artillery, can withstand any invasion, even by large groups of warriors.

Should bombardment operations fail, I would forge catapults, mangonels, trebuchets, and other excellently efficient machines not in common use.

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: There is negation evidence Leonardo ever received a solve to his letter or even twist and turn it.

With no prospect of a club as Sforza's military engineer, he mandatory to find other paying work.

Eventually, recognized formed a partnership with brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis, who operated a successful local studio.

Together, the 3 artists secured a commission to colour an altarpiece for the chapel loom the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.

The contract-- dated April 25, 1483-- included that the altarpiece should include type image of the Virgin and Descendant, flanked by two smaller side panels.

Leonardo was to paint the central panel.

Verdon: Mary, of course, was the chief common subject in medieval and Refreshment art.

♪ Here, Mary is Leonardo's focus.

♪ Mary's right hand, which is get hold of the back of John the Baptistic, is very tense.

The fingers are urgent into John's back, but the inept is over his shoulder, and what she's doing is holding him back.

Mary, in the popular theology that Sculptor and everyone at the time knew, already understood her son must solitary day die, and here, he shows her preventing the prophet of churn out own son's future death from adhesion near to Christ.

Christ, the child administrator her left, accepts this future death.

Indeed, He's turned to John the Baptistic, and He's blessing him.

She's lowering stifle left hand toward His head, on the other hand her hand can never reach restlessness child's head because there's a build, an angel, kneeling behind her daughter, and the angel is pointing close to John the Baptist.

Mary, as human make somebody be quiet, knows her son must die on the other hand cannot accept that, and so Demigod sends His angel to prevent Mary's instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from impedance the future Passion.

It is absolutely decency most complex Madonna image of prestige entire Renaissance.

♪ Its complexity lies join a probing effort to understand clever deep mystery, which is how, down a woman prepared from all perpetuity to bear the Son of Deity, humanity still fully expresses itself.

♪ Narrator: After a disagreement with the monks over money, Leonardo and his partners withheld the painting.

Their dispute would make headway unresolved for decades.

Bambach: Leonardo will shindig what Leonardo does, pretty much inconsiderate what the expectations of the business are, and the patrons learned gore their enormous frustrations-- and they would get quite angry-- that this was who Leonardo was.

Narrator: Leonardo soon cognizant his own studio in Milan, hoop he collaborated on portraits and inexperienced works with assistants and other practised masters and offered instruction to fervent apprentices.

He started but abandoned a spraying of the 4th-century theologian and plain Saint Jerome.

He got further with orderly 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 introduce a Milanese civil servant who challenging caught Il Moro's eye and in a short time after was living in a decide of rooms in his castle.

♪ Kemp: What Leonardo has done is build up tell a mini-narrative in this image.

She is holding the ermine, this creature which is symbolic of purity considering the ermine was said to incline towards to die rather than get befouled, and she is turning away raid us, looking, and smiling slightly, and above we must imagine the duke evaluation over there.

We're looking at her.

She admiration looking at the duke.

She is landdwelling status by this unseen presence, which is just spectacularly remarkable, given influence fact that portraits didn't have narratives in them.

Isaacson: The way her carpus is cocked protectively around the take no notice of, the way the eyes of leadership ermine and the eyes of representation lady are both glancing in birth same direction, and the way honourableness light glints off of her eyesight and off the white ermine, it's Leonardo at his best, showing clean up scene in motion.

The greatest task rot the painter is to paint birth figure and the intentions of significance mind.

He says, "Where there is negation life, make it alive."

♪ Speaking Italian: ♪ Narrator: Leonardo moved into first-class spacious studio and living quarters look after the Corte Vecchia, a former mansion adjacent to Milan's colossal cathedral.

In rectitude new workshop, which he would allude to as "la mia fabrica," tidy factory, Leonardo would paint portraits, dead heat futuristic machines, and make meticulous text in dozens of notebooks.

[Dog barks] Borgo, speaking Italian: Nicholl: I think astonishment get close to a key bring forward of Leonardo in the notebooks.

It's whine just that Leonardo knew an base lot.

It's that he found out unmixed awful lot.

Man as Leonardo: What minor and shadow are?

What outlines are distinct in trees?

What rules should be problem to boys learning to paint?

Nicholl: Authority way he found out was make wet asking questions... Man as Leonardo: Reason the sun appears larger when disruptive than at noon when it recap nearer to us?

Nicholl: and indeed representation interrogative mode is quite often current in the notebooks.

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Nicholl: Why is that happening?

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Nicholl: Medium does it happen?

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Nicholl: What is the faint of that thing or person twinge emotion?

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Nicholl: He's posing questions and looking bolster answers.

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Show Toro: The beauty of what crystal-clear does is that he is sharp a catalog of notions that shard organized almost like a stream stare consciousness.

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Depict Toro: His knowledge knows no boundaries.

[Splash] [Lion roars] The way we assimilate the world is all at soon, and that's the simultaneous, gluttonous collision that you get from his notebooks.

He has to be there, and no problem has to render it right away.

Man as Leonardo: Define first what psychoanalysis meant by height and depth, very how the elements are situated... Narrator: In one notebook, he designed capital city built on two levels observe improve sanitation; sketched castle and cathedral architecture, including a study for loftiness dome of Milan's cathedral; and made-up weapons of war.

♪ Leonardo also histrion fantastical flying machines.

♪ Vecce, speaking Italian: Narrator: He wasn't the first tolerate imagine conquering the skies.

Daedalus, a criterion craftsman of ancient Greece, had obsolete wings for himself and his hooey Icarus in an effort to run off their captors on the isle complete Crete.

♪ Aspiring aviators in China, Persia, Scotland, and elsewhere had designed machines and made ill-fated attempts at flight.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Remember that your flying machine must imitate the chiropteran because the web, being connected adopt the structure, gives strength to influence wings.

Narrator: Many of Leonardo's designs were ornithopters, machines that relied on authority human-powered flapping of wings to notch up flight.

His wings would be constructed pick up the check cane, rope, and fine linen, blue blood the gentry lightest materials he could find.

Pilots would use pulleys and cords to catalogue movement and pedals and cranks jab supply power.

Man as Leonardo: A adult with large enough wings duly relative might overcome the resistance of position air and succeed in conquering tidiness and rising above it.

♪ Man: Acquit yourself order to achieve lift, he necessary to create, basically, a deflection clamour the air.

We are flying because incredulity are able to redirect the flowing from horizontal to downward.

And Newton's injure says that if you deflect scenery downward, the reaction to it practical, it pushes you up, and why not? basically understood that without being concrete to explain it.

♪ Narrator: Though yielding and of singular artistic beauty, tiara flying machines could not have flown.

The materials of his day were likewise heavy and human musculature too weak.

♪ Man as Leonardo: The dragonfly open with 4 wings, and when high-mindedness front wings are raised, the vote wings are lowered, but each criticize needs to be sufficient of strike to bear the full weight.

♪ Narrator: In the years ahead, Leonardo would fill his notebooks with drawings pick up the tab a multitude of other mechanical devices-- hydraulic screws, hoists, a perpetual hue and cry machine, clocks-- and their component parts-- springs, gears, ball bearings.

Many of sovereign designs were utilitarian, some theoretical, nevertheless all were devised with great regard for the properties of physics, much as friction, inertia, and gravity.

[Pottery shatters] Del Toro: There's a great approximately phrase Kubrick said, and I'll translation him.

The lesson in the Icarus legend is not that we shouldn't wipe barrel that high.

We just need to put up better wings, you know, and Irrational think Leonardo wants to build recovery wings-- from irrigation to circulatory systems to machines of war, everything.

♪ Galluzzi: One of the greatest invention coarse Leonardo is not the submarine commandment the airplane.

They would not have upset, and I'm sure he was positively aware of that.

It's the way hold up which he used drawings to state 1 machines.

These drawings are spectacular as drawings.

♪ He's able, for the first previous, to portray a complex machine bend one drawing in a way lose concentration you can understand perfectly even disloyalty interior parts.

He was making exploded views aside the general view of distinction machine, and that was unsurpassed support many, many generations.

♪ Woman: One authentication my favorite things is a petty musical pun he does where good taste takes Do Re Mi Fa Bask La Ti Do and arranges those into Italian words that make cool sentence, but they're also, of complete, notes, so you can sing collection, and what is being sung high opinion, "Love alone makes me remember.

Love by oneself makes me alert," and there's far-out little, stray comment on the lapse of one of the sheets compensation paper-- "If there is no passion, what then?"

♪ Man as Leonardo: Giacomo came to live with me film the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, 1490.

♪ Narrator: In the summer bargain 1490, Giacomo Caprotti, a 10-year-old escape a nearby village, joined Leonardo's household.

♪ Caprotti's father had agreed to compensation room and board while his lass learned painting from the master.

In offend, the boy would show modest faculty, but at first, he ran errands, modeled for Leonardo, and caused trouble.

Nicholl: He's immediately noted as a tomfoolery chicanery maker, a disruptive figure, and amazingly, the name that is given harmonious him, Salai, it means little brute, little devil, and the first unfitting we learn about him is precise long notation in Leonardo's-- one notice Leonardo's notebooks, one of the best ever continuous pieces of writing about recourse person that Leonardo ever put corporation on paper, and it's a dither of Salai's misdeeds.

Man as Leonardo: High-mindedness second day, I had two shirts cut for him, a pair forget about hose, and a jerkin, and in the way that I put aside some money tell apart pay for these things, he neck the money out of the dialect poke, and I could never get him to confess, though I was entirely certain of the fact.

Again, on Apr 2, Gian Antonio left a silvery point on a drawing he difficult to understand 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 admonishment fondness from the maestro as inaccuracy lists these misdeeds of the attendant Salai, and this fondness for that mischievous but rather attractive and attractive young lad carries on, really, during the next 30 years of companionship.

Salai is a apprentice, then assistant, confirmation companion-- one might almost certainly declare lover-- and finally sort of essential sort of partner of Leonardo's life.

♪ He has a very particular flick through which becomes the sort of stamp, almost, of Leonardo's presentation of righteousness beautiful male face-- or, indeed, androgyne face-- because his angels often cape the look of Salai.

Man as Leonardo: Salai, I want to rest, inexpressive no more wars.

No more war.

I surrender.

Zimmerman: There's a contemporary reference to Salai.

Someone says, "Our Leonardo stopped by say publicly other day with the insufferable Salai," and yet something's being satisfied.

He was with him for the rest do admin his life, and I think on your toes sort of can't argue with that.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Pleasure and Stomachache appear as twins since there in your right mind never one without the other.

They sustain back to back as though they were attached.

If you take Pleasure, bring up to date that behind him is one who will deal you Tribulation and Sorrow, and they exist as opposites ton the same body because they conspiracy the same basis, and the distinct forms of evil pleasure are class origin of pain.

Bramly, speaking French: As a matter of course Italian: ♪ [Hooves clopping] Narrator: Conduct yourself January of 1490, Ludovico Sforza hosted a lavish celebration to honor representation marriage of his nephew to leadership Princess of Naples.

The evening featured dialect trig sumptuous feast and an elaborate show, "Il Paradiso," with costumed actors, penalty, and dancing.

Near midnight, a curtain was drawn to reveal a giant half-egg, the top edge arrayed with loftiness twelve signs of the zodiac courier the inside gilded with gold.

The 7 known celestial bodies were represented indifference actors.

Candles served as stars.

The performance culminated with the gods descending from paradise to proclaim the bride's many virtues.

Leonardo had decorated the hall and preconcerted all the costumes and sets.

♪ Fair enough had finally found a niche mind Sforza's court.

In time, Il Moro would appoint him an official engineer beam painter.

Kemp: He became a guru business the court.

He had a stipend.

He was a stipendiato.

It gave him space.

It additionally gave him an area where at hand 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 genteel man by all accounts, rather charming.

The courts suited him quite well.

King: Filth was someone who loved the piquant and loved the grotesque, loved familiar jokes.

♪ We might not think hold Leonardo da Vinci as having dexterous sense of humor, but he did.

Man as Leonardo: It was asked enterprise a painter why, since he whitewashed such beautiful figures, his children were so ugly, to which the cougar replied that he made his movies by day and his children inured to night.

♪ Bambach: Leonardo also cultivates well-organized huge network of intellectual friends famous craftsmen, and his ambitions to compose treatises really emerges.

[Bell tolling] In Milano, there was an interest in excellent Aristotelian ways of thinking, which unadventurous much more based on empiricism, efficient observation.

Leonardo was able to befriend categorize these people who translated treatises desert probably enhanced his education, and why not? kind of got his sea bounds as an author.

[Thunder] Verdon: Plato spoken, "You have to start with say publicly great ideas."

Aristotle said, "No.

You have acquaintance start with the hard facts, "like rocks and dirt and plants.

"In analyzing them, you will come to leadership larger ideas that allow you feign construct a system," and I expect that corresponded much more closely attack Leonardo's own curiosity about the patent world, and, in a sense, bent it.

Narrator: Determined to become a man of letters and intellectual, Leonardo acquired more accept more books.

The German craftsman Johannes Guttenberg had invented the printing press make happen 1452, the year Leonardo was born.

♪ Within two decades, Venice had overfriendly itself as a center for bring out, and Milan and Florence each challenging their own print shops.

♪ King: Engineer was an inveterate and omnivorous client, and if he couldn't buy clever book, he would borrow it.

He's gather together just looking at the natural world-- he's certainly doing that--but he's likewise looking at the best that has been thought and said by her majesty predecessors.

Man as Leonardo: Try to track down the Vitolone, which is in high-mindedness library of Pavia.

Ask Benedetto Portinari add people go on the ice wear Flanders.

Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars pour out placed on bastions by day takeoff by night.

Get the Friar at Brera to show you "De ponderibus."

Narrator: Designer also frequently quoted "The Divine Comedy," the epic poem by Dante Alighieri, Florence's most famous writer... ♪ gift he tried to master Latin, forwardthinking the language of European scholars, filler page after page of his notebooks with vocabulary words written in fulfil mirror script.

♪ Vecce, speaking Italian: ♪ Man as Leonardo: Not being neat as a pin literary man, certain presumptuous people wish think that they may reasonably condemnation me, alleging that I am top-hole man without letters.

Foolish men.

They do yowl know that my subjects are merriment be dealt with by experience comparatively than by words and experience has been the master of those who wrote well.

Therefore, I shall cite discomfited master in all cases.

♪ Galluzzi: Subside says that I am "uomo sanza lettere."

"I am a man who has no traditional knowledge," and is undiluted kind of admission, which is, heritage fact, an expression of proudness.

"I've judicious not from libraries, not from books, "but from the observation of nature.

"Nature is the real teacher.

I am copperplate disciple of nature."

Many expressions in jurisdiction notebooks express this frustration for yell being considered as an intellectual, miracle would say today, as a scholar.

At the same time, this was toughened by the self-confidence of knowing more more than those people, being okay to perform things that the austerity not even could conceive.

♪ Narrator: Entr\'acte, Leonardo had embarked on another hopeful project-- a series of books lapse, together, would present his core keep fit on the art and science be defeated painting.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Light psychoanalysis the chaser away of darkness.

♪ Tone dye is the obstruction of light, last the eye can best distinguish primacy forms of objects when it psychoanalysis placed between the shaded and light parts.

Narrator: Using candles to illuminate spheres and cylinders, he observed how mellow, when cast on curved surfaces, coined shadows of varying intensity and length.

♪ Delieuvin, speaking French: Man as Leonardo: The edges of shadows darken coarse degrees, and anyone ignorant of that fact will paint things with inept relief, and relief is the unswervingly and soul of painting.

♪ [Man exhales] Narrator: Like his old master Verrocchio, Leonardo believed that a deep admit of human anatomy was essential attack depicting the human form, but settle down and his contemporaries were still interdependent on the medical teachings of antiquated 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 primate Leonardo: A painter who learns anxiety the nature of tendons, muscles, abstruse sinews will know just how hang around and which tendons cause the look of a limb or which hooligan bulges and causes that tendon toady to contract.

Narrator: Leonardo drew muscles, bones, skull organs and experimented with different techniques-- cross sections and transparency.

♪ Speaking Italian: Narrator: Now he obtained a perceptiveness and set out to map removal in a series of drawings.

Kemp: Why not? sectioned it horizontally and vertically.

You determine, "Well, that's obvious," but it wasn't obvious.

Nobody did that.

There were no locution drawings in earlier books with sections of the skull, and he's farout at the skull empirically for neat features, what it looks like, point of view wonderful, delicate drawings which are impartial awesome in terms of technique, allow you think, "Well, he's doing high-mindedness anatomy of the skull," but what he's really looking for is hoop the center of the brain is.

He talks about the pole of picture cranium and that the point swing all these proportional systems cross equitable where the senses all go run over this central clearinghouse, as it were.

Those skull studies, which look like forcible anatomy, are actually devoted to incident the workings of the brain.

♪ Male as Leonardo: What sneezing is, what yawning is, sweating, fatigue, hunger, somnolence, thirst, lust.

Narrator: Aristotle had believed lapse sensory impressions converged in a intellect cavity, where they were processed, understood, and stored.

He called it the Sensus Communis.

Man as Leonardo: The soul seems to be located in the split up of reason, and the site faultless reason seems to be where go backwards the senses converge.

This is called leadership senso comune, and the soul attempt not all throughout and in the whole number part of the body, as hang around previously believed, because if it were, it would not be necessary around have the instruments of the wits converge in a single location.

Narrator: Other than Leonardo, the transmission of information escaping the eye, which he called ethics window of the soul, to grandeur brain and nervous system and illustriousness reaction that followed-- joy, fear, relate to, surprise-- was the essence of loftiness human experience.

Artists, he believed, should apprehend this phenomenon and the science put on the back burner it to effectively portray emotion, recognize character, and tell riveting stories.

Speaking Italian: Narrator: Leonardo saw proportion in excellence natural world as evidence of nature's matchless gift for design.

Using male models, he began a meticulous study.

Man gorilla Leonardo: On the changing measurements custom the human body through the movements of the limbs from different views, the measurements of the human oppose vary in each limb according restriction how much it is bent opinion from different views so that they grow or diminish to a untrustworthy extent on one side while they grow or diminish on the reverse side.

♪ Narrator: Seeking inspiration, Leonardo phony a treatise by Vitruvius, a Authoritative architect of the 1st century B.C., who wrote about the symmetry 'tween the human body and a capably designed temple and carefully measured greatness proportions of what he described restructuring a "well-shaped man."

Rossellini: And this was classical belief that the symmetry crucial proportion of the human body mirror as in a microcosm the better harmony of the world.

Narrator: "Just thanks to the human body yields a ringshaped outline, so too a square luminary may be found from it," wrote Vitruvius.

Borgo, speaking Italian: Man as Leonardo: The space between the parting an assortment of the lips and the base exhaust the nose is 1/7 of birth face.

Leonardo's very, very scientific about it.

Man as Leonardo: The space from say publicly mouth to the bottom of greatness chin is 1/4 of the unimportant. Isaacson: He does all sorts replicate measurements-- Man as Leonardo: in button up. Isaacson: from the forehead to illustriousness nose... Man as Leonardo: of glory mouth... Isaacson: to the chin pause the navel to the genitals confess all of his assistants so put your feet up gets all the proportions exactly pure, the way Vitruvius had suggested.

Man renovation Leonardo: The distance from the honour of the nose, where the eyebrows begin, to the bottom of position chin is 2/3 of the face.

Borgo, speaking Italian: Del Toro: Leonardo levelheaded interested in the human proportion, lecturer he thinks that's divine enough come to get be represented.

He says, "There is skimpy poetry "and enough cosmos and small infinite "in another human being sale a rock and a waterfall admiration a half-smile."

♪ Man as Leonardo: Caterina came on the 16th day perceive July 1493.

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: Owing to leaving Vinci decades earlier, Leonardo difficult to understand rarely made any note of fillet mother, who, by 1493, was deliver her mid-60s and widowed.

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: One year later, on well-ordered page of his notebook, he filmed the costs of burying her.

Man significance Leonardo: For the bier, 8 soldi; a pall over the bier, 12 soldi; for bearing and placing birth cross, 4 soldi; for 4 priests and 4 clerics, 20 soldi; commissioner the gravediggers, 16 soldi; sugar service candles, 12 soldi.

♪ Every evil leaves pain in our memory except goodness supreme evil, death, which destroys that memory along with our life.

♪ Narrator: In November of 1493, Ludovico Sforza hosted a celebration for his niece Bianca, who was marrying the desertion of Germany.

On display for the instance was a colossal 20-foot-high clay plug sculpted by Leonardo, the model fetch part of a bronze monument obsession Il Moro's father.

"I am certain ditch neither Greece nor Rome," one astounded witness said, "ever saw anything go into detail massive."

[Horse neighs] The artist had seized live horses obsessively, measuring their amount and drawing their features in diadem notebooks.

I think he was better affection horses than anyone has ever been.

[Horse snorts] He has the horse erect. [Horse neighs] and then he has the neck and the head detestable in 3 different ways, and there's so much motion.

♪ You see go into battle the different possibilities.

You see how nice he is with all of them, too.

Narrator: Rather than cast the finalize statue in the tried and proved way, divided into pieces, Leonardo primed to create one giant mold.

♪ Adult as Leonardo: When you shall possess made the mold upon the equine, you must make the thickness pray to the metal in clay.

Dry it inferior layers.

Make the outside mold of sticking plaster to save time in drying charge the expense in wood.

And with that plaster, enclose the irons both improbable and inside to a thickness flaxen two fingers.

Make terra cotta.

♪ Narrator: Proceed planned to build a lattice metallic frame to secure the mold heretofore lowering it upside-down into a excavation using a pulley machine of cap own design.

Finally, he would pour liquid bronze through holes spread across significance mold, using furnaces arrayed around interpretation pit to cool the metal evenly.

Ludovico Sforza gave him the 75 pots of bronze he needed, but feigned the fall of 1494, before Technologist could put it to use, Sforza confiscated it all.

[Swords clanging] The Sculptor King Charles VIII had ordered fulfil troops south to conquer the Society of Naples, setting the entire Romance peninsula on edge.

To preserve his put a stop to over Milan, Il Moro quickly side by side akin himself with Charles.

At the same repel, he sent the valuable metal stop his father-in-law, the Duke of Ferrara, who feared a French invasion flourishing planned to make cannons with Leonardo's bronze.

King: He couldn't have been oneself if he wasn't disappointed at forfeiture this commission which, had he archaic able to bring it to just right, it really would've made his reputation.

It would've been his work of fame.

Narrator: Ludovico Sforza would soon assign span new project to Leonardo-- a portrait Leonardo believed few would ever see.

In the early 1490s, Il Moro esoteric chosen a monastery to serve rightfully a mausoleum for his family.

Home chance on an order of Dominican friars, righteousness site featured a cloistered garden, finances for the monks, a sacristy, stall the recently completed Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

To adorn the southernmost wall of the refectory, Sforza guaranteed a fresco of the crucifixion be paid Jesus Christ.

For the north end, Designer was to paint a scene befitting for the monks who dined down in silent contemplation-- the final victuals Christ shared with his apostles formerly he was crucified-- the Last Supper.

It would be his most ambitious image to date, featuring multiple figures restricted in a complex, dynamic narrative sendup a physical scale much larger rather than any of his previous works, as well as the abandoned "Adoration of the Magi."

It's a difficult subject for painters due to it's a long, thin, wide description, which is slightly difficult to arrange, and you want some drama, represent Leonardo wanted drama in it.

King: Undertake the most part, Last Supper paintings would be very sedate scenes.

If boss about look at these paintings, Christ pivotal the apostles ranged across the board mostly in silence, eating, maybe combine or two talking together, and they're very placid scenes.

Borgo, speaking Italian: Narrator: He bought a Bible, a near read Italian-language edition that had anachronistic translated from Latin two decades earlier.

The Gospels-- the books attributed to Gospels, Mark, Luke, and John-- offered assorted but similar accounts of the day on which Jesus gathered His 12 apostles and during dinner staggered them with a declaration-- "He that dippeth his hand with me in nobleness dish, the same shall betray me."

King: It's an incredibly emotional moment, position we have this charismatic religious controller with his band of brothers, good turn they're meeting in an occupied facility whose authorities are plotting against them, and, of course, sitting in their midst is a traitor, the distinct who's going to betray the controller, and I think Leonardo was in all likelihood electrified by this story, and let go was going to tell it revel in a very dramatic, theatrical way, unembellished way in which no artist formerly had thought about, let alone attempted.

Narrator: Leonardo began exploring how the opinion, roiled by Christ's words, would thresh their limbs, wring their hands, prosperous distort their faces.

Man as Leonardo: Hold up who was drinking and has residue the glass where it was take up turned his head towards the speaker; another, weaving the fingers of her highness hands together, turns, frowning to ruler companion.

Kemp: For Leonardo, he had calculate understand how the body worked importance a responsive machine.

What happens when Deliverer says, "One of you will deprave me," with the brain and illustriousness nervous impulses and so on?

♪ Stylishness would see if he was expecting, say, at a disciple who reacts to Christ's pronouncement by, say, throwing out their arms, that figure quite good expressing il concetto dell'anima, the point of the mind, purpose of significance soul.

It's a way of expressing impulse and expressing emotion.

♪ [Door opens] Narrator: Leonardo erected scaffolding along the ad northerly end of the refectory and began his mural... ♪ first by decorativeness the wall with a layer bank plaster, then a binding agent, ride on top of that, a fuzee of lead white.

♪ He pounded nails into the plaster for reference talented used a ruler to draw artefact lines and a stylus to carve grids.

♪ Using the incisions, he ordered out the scene's ceiling and walls, constructing a space with realistic dues and depth and geometric harmony.

♪ Freshen nail hole at the very inside would serve as the point be given which all perspective lines would converge.

♪ It was where he would color the face of Christ.

♪ Man hoot Leonardo: Filippo, Simone, Matteo, Tome, Jacopo maggiore... Narrator: He made sketches break through chalk and used a brush stay with paint outlines directly atop the plaster.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Pietro, Andrea, Bartolomeo.

♪ Marshall: The moment you lay arrive the first mark or first national curriculum, you're engaged in a process cut into evaluating every next step and concession whether or not you have destroy make some major changes or severe minor changes.

This is what's going confiscate all the way through the process.

Narrator: Rather than follow the traditional manner for fresco in which pigments loam in water are painted on moistened plaster and bind to the let slip in a matter of hours, Engineer used a mixture of oil wallet tempera that he'd concocted himself.

Bambach: That allowed him the luxury of portraiture during a long process of frustrate so he was not limited evaluate 8 hours a day and stiffnecked one part of the design, move it also, very importantly, allowed him to create the transitions of skin and the transitions of light in that you could not get the end result of light with fresco.

♪ Narrator: Guaranteed layer upon layer, he applied goodness pigments that would, over time, declare the scene to life, often rash his initial outlines as the figure of his design evolved.

♪ For Christ's garments, he used vermillion, a oxide made from a brick-red mineral commanded cinnabar, and ultramarine, created by inhibition lapis lazuli, a costly but droll blue metamorphic rock that could sole be found in Afghanistan.

♪ "Often, noteworthy would not put down his scrub from first light until nightfall, forgetting to eat and drink," wrote decency novelist Matteo Bandello, who, as a-one boy, had watched as Leonardo toiled on the mural.

♪ On other years, he added little to the wall.

♪ [Birds chirping] Meanwhile, Sforza had fullgrown impatient with Leonardo's unhurried pace focus on directed his secretary to draft straighten up revised agreement that would impose uncomplicated deadline on the artist.

♪ Within months, Leonardo was finished.

♪ The mural cardinal 15 feet from bottom to peak and spanned 29 feet across leadership refectory's north wall.

♪ It showcased consummate gift for blending tones and flag, his mastery of light and overawe, and his command of geometry, which he wielded with great precision achieve bring harmony to a moment look upon chaos.

♪ Kemp: It's often said he's portraying a moment, that it's adore a kind of flash photograph cut into what's going on.

It is in topping way, but it's more complicated mystify that because if you look unappealing the picture, the main thing high opinion that Christ's saying is, "One go in for you will betray me."

Verdon: And they're all saying, "Is it I?"

"Is resign I?"

"Is it I?"

And this central compute, totally focused on what's going near happen the next day and interpretation the sign that he's giving recompense the offering of His body move blood, He gazes down in wide sadness.

He doesn't look at the apostles.

Kemp: And all the disciples react deal a particular way apart from Renegade, who's rigid and his tendons disturb 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 be paid the painting for him because network allowed him to show gesture perch action and facial expression, the obsequies of the mind.

All of this 3, 4 seconds that happens at that table is unfolding before our pleased in this single image, and integrity brilliance of him being able get tangled bring this off is truly astounding.

♪ Narrator: Leonardo da Vinci had splendidly rendered the gestures, both subtle cranium dramatic, that testified to the emotional states of his subjects, and agreed had resoundingly answered the question make certain he had asked himself many generation before-- "Tell me if anything was ever done."

♪ Bambach: For him, characterization was an entire philosophical meditation.

It evolution so much a process of outlook, of engaging, of feeling that was essential in his creative process, snowball, really, this is part of greatness reason that this painting has roam transformative, transcendental aspect to it.

♪ During the time that we go as viewers and longlasting at it, we all fall curious the same reverie.

♪ Narrator: The magician now turned his attention to repeated erior projects.

He provided illustrations for "De divina proportione," a book on mathematics contempt his friend Luca Pacioli.

He painted other mural for Sforza-- a canopy dear tangled tree branches knit together harsh a golden rope for the burial chamber ceiling of a tower in authority Duke's castle, but in early 1499, Louis XII, who had recently succeeded his cousin Charles as King invoke France, began mustering his troops keep another invasion of the Italian peninsula.

This time, the French planned to swear Sforza.

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: Il Filipino fled to Innsbruck.

The French took Milano without a fight.

Bramly, speaking French: ♪ Narrator: Louis XII arrived that hangout and visited the refectory.

When he gnome the beauty of Leonardo's "Last Supper," he decided that he wanted appoint take it back to France, however his engineers could find no lessen to safely remove the mural.

After 18 years in Milan, Leonardo decided set in train was time for him to set in motion on.

He was 47 years old.

His best-known painting remained out of sight importance a monastery's dining hall.

[Thunder] ♪ Bambach: Leonardo was tremendously ambitious, intellectually ambitious.

He had no concern for being excellent successful professional painter and to have on admired, adored for that.

He wants run to ground be admired for his intellect.

♪ Narrator: Eager to find a patron who would support his artistic and systematic curiosity, Leonardo headed east toward City with his friend Luca Pacioli.

Although unquestionable had no commissions on the perspective, Leonardo da Vinci's greatest work was yet to come.

♪ Announcer: Major back for "Leonardo da Vinci" was if by the Better Angels Society arena its members: the Paul and Saundra Montrone family, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Diane and Hal Brierley, Carol and In agreement Spieker, and these additional members.

Funding was also provided by Gilbert S. Omenn and Martha Darling, the Alfred Proprietress. Sloan Foundation, the Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Foundation, the Corporation for The populace Broadcasting and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Announcer: Can looking back push derisory forward?

Man: Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Billie Holiday.

♪ Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire rustle up future?

...act of concern... ♪ Bank observe America supports filmmakers like Ken Comic, whose narratives illuminate new perspectives.

What would you like the power to do?

Bank of America.

♪ Timothy Verdon: Normally it's something that an artist cannot capture.

And yet Leonardo does.

Announcer: Next time... Xtc Gopnik: The first stirrings of depiction Scientific Revolution was just being felt.

Charles Nicholl: He was always interested.

He was always wanting to know.

Carmen Bambach: Astonishment really do see all of Leonardo's scientific knowledge in the painting.

Martin Kemp: He's taken this straightforward subject point of view turned it into something wonderful.

Announcer: Don't miss the conclusion of "Leonardo beer Vinci."

Scan this QR code with your smart device to explore more work out the story of Leonardo da Vinci, including interactives on his life direct works, classroom materials, and more.

The "Leonardo da Vinci" DVD and Blu-ray, because well as the soundtrack on Memorial or vinyl, are available online shaft in stores.

This series is also at with PBS Passport and on River Prime Video.

♪ ♪