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Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the world's | 0:00:10 | 0:00:12 | |
most brilliant and extraordinary men. | 0:00:12 | 0:00:16 | |
He was endlessly curious, searching for answers in everything he did. | 0:00:16 | 0:00:21 | |
We think of him as the ultimate Renaissance man. | 0:00:22 | 0:00:26 | |
He created a new idea of beauty. | 0:00:26 | 0:00:30 | |
He reinvented the art of painting. | 0:00:30 | 0:00:34 | |
From The Last Supper, tragically deteriorating, | 0:00:34 | 0:00:38 | |
but still full of power and drama... | 0:00:38 | 0:00:41 | |
..to the Mona Lisa, | 0:00:43 | 0:00:44 | |
whose mysterious hint of a smile has intrigued generations. | 0:00:44 | 0:00:49 | |
There are perhaps no more than 15 paintings by Leonardo in the world. | 0:00:53 | 0:00:58 | |
They're scattered in different countries... | 0:00:58 | 0:01:01 | |
..believed until now to be all that remains of Leonardo's work. | 0:01:03 | 0:01:08 | |
But in New York, | 0:01:10 | 0:01:12 | |
locked away at a secret address, is a newly discovered painting | 0:01:12 | 0:01:16 | |
by Leonardo, something that hasn't happened for over 100 years. | 0:01:16 | 0:01:20 | |
The picture has never been filmed until now. | 0:01:23 | 0:01:26 | |
It could be worth £125 million. | 0:01:28 | 0:01:32 | |
Is this the discovery of a painting | 0:01:35 | 0:01:37 | |
thought lost for centuries? | 0:01:37 | 0:01:40 | |
Leonardo is a man for whom the word genius could have been invented. | 0:01:42 | 0:01:46 | |
And yet his reputation as an artist | 0:01:46 | 0:01:48 | |
rests on just a handful of paintings. | 0:01:48 | 0:01:50 | |
And some of them were never finished. | 0:01:50 | 0:01:53 | |
How did Leonardo become the most famous painter ever to have lived? | 0:01:53 | 0:01:57 | |
Many people dream at some point in their lives | 0:02:26 | 0:02:29 | |
of discovering a lost masterpiece. | 0:02:29 | 0:02:31 | |
Few allow themselves | 0:02:32 | 0:02:34 | |
to dream of finding a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci. | 0:02:34 | 0:02:38 | |
No artist has a higher reputation. No artist's work | 0:02:40 | 0:02:44 | |
is more highly coveted. But there's so little of it. | 0:02:44 | 0:02:49 | |
I've come to New York to visit a gallery in a secret location. | 0:02:53 | 0:02:57 | |
And in it is a painting that's just been seen by a handful of experts. | 0:02:57 | 0:03:01 | |
If it's genuine, it will be the discovery of a lifetime! | 0:03:01 | 0:03:05 | |
A painting by the greatest old master of them all. | 0:03:05 | 0:03:09 | |
Hello! | 0:03:15 | 0:03:17 | |
You must be Fiona. Nice to meet you. | 0:03:17 | 0:03:20 | |
Pleased to meet you. Come this way. | 0:03:20 | 0:03:23 | |
'Restorer Dianne Modestini, | 0:03:28 | 0:03:30 | |
'and dealer and art historian Robert Simon | 0:03:30 | 0:03:32 | |
'have been guarding their secret for more than two years'. | 0:03:32 | 0:03:36 | |
Wow. | 0:03:38 | 0:03:40 | |
My goodness. | 0:03:41 | 0:03:43 | |
Gosh! To be that close to it! | 0:03:46 | 0:03:49 | |
Amazing. | 0:03:49 | 0:03:51 | |
'It's a painting of Christ known as Salvator Mundi, | 0:03:52 | 0:03:56 | |
'or the Saviour of the World'. | 0:03:56 | 0:03:58 | |
-It has got a real presence, hasn't it? -Yes. | 0:04:00 | 0:04:04 | |
He begins to really dominate the space, and capture your attention. | 0:04:04 | 0:04:09 | |
-And the gaze, as well. -Yes, the gaze. Yes. | 0:04:09 | 0:04:15 | |
That's not a happy or inviting gaze, he's kind of fixing you | 0:04:15 | 0:04:20 | |
with his stare! Don't you think? | 0:04:20 | 0:04:23 | |
Yes, it's a very intent, very engaging and very powerful image. | 0:04:23 | 0:04:29 | |
I think we've all felt from looking at it that as much as the subject, | 0:04:29 | 0:04:33 | |
obviously, is a religious subject, it's a spiritual quality | 0:04:33 | 0:04:36 | |
that communicates rather than anything strictly religious. | 0:04:36 | 0:04:41 | |
The sense that this is really a man, and kind of a portrait of a man, | 0:04:41 | 0:04:44 | |
as Christ, is very powerful. | 0:04:44 | 0:04:46 | |
When you look at this, now, in its pristine state, thanks to all | 0:04:46 | 0:04:50 | |
your endeavours, what are the bits that really strike you about it? | 0:04:50 | 0:04:56 | |
The hand for example, certainly for me, is just so beautifully done. | 0:04:56 | 0:04:59 | |
Yes. It has an incredible presence that no other picture | 0:04:59 | 0:05:04 | |
I've ever worked on, and I've worked on some very important things, | 0:05:04 | 0:05:07 | |
-has had this effect on me. -Really? -Yes. | 0:05:07 | 0:05:10 | |
If you watch how he emerges at the end of the day, when the light | 0:05:10 | 0:05:16 | |
goes down, which is the kind of light that Leonardo describes | 0:05:16 | 0:05:21 | |
as being ideal for making pictures, he starts to glow from within. | 0:05:21 | 0:05:24 | |
And sort of pulse with life. It's very...it's eerie. | 0:05:24 | 0:05:27 | |
Do you think that you've been spending too long with it?! | 0:05:27 | 0:05:30 | |
Yes! I certainly have spent hundreds of hours! | 0:05:30 | 0:05:33 | |
I've experienced it too, actually! | 0:05:33 | 0:05:36 | |
There are details, if you look even here, this crystal ball, | 0:05:39 | 0:05:43 | |
in which he's portrayed these inclusions. | 0:05:43 | 0:05:45 | |
-The little flaws. -Yes, exactly, | 0:05:45 | 0:05:47 | |
in which everyone is individually light. | 0:05:47 | 0:05:50 | |
Some from the top of it, some in the shadow, it really boggles to see the | 0:05:50 | 0:05:54 | |
degree of study and the degree of ability to be able to render that. | 0:05:54 | 0:05:58 | |
And of course, this enters into Leonardo's own very deep | 0:05:58 | 0:06:01 | |
study of optical effects of light and of science. | 0:06:01 | 0:06:05 | |
'It would be a while before I got into the | 0:06:09 | 0:06:12 | |
'restoration studio to see the evidence, | 0:06:12 | 0:06:14 | |
'to find out if this really is a lost Leonardo'. | 0:06:14 | 0:06:18 | |
'If it is, for some people it would be like finding a new planet! | 0:06:23 | 0:06:27 | |
'It's a measure of the extraordinary | 0:06:29 | 0:06:31 | |
'veneration in which Leonardo is held'. | 0:06:31 | 0:06:34 | |
He is that kind of mysterious, profound artist who seems | 0:06:38 | 0:06:43 | |
to address the mysteries and secrets of life | 0:06:43 | 0:06:49 | |
and to give them such beautiful expression | 0:06:49 | 0:06:51 | |
without ever tying them down. | 0:06:51 | 0:06:54 | |
Something of a cult has grown up around Leonardo. | 0:07:01 | 0:07:07 | |
It's not just art lovers. | 0:07:07 | 0:07:09 | |
Thriller writers and conspiracy theorists are drawn to him, | 0:07:09 | 0:07:13 | |
fascinated by his obsessive enquiries | 0:07:13 | 0:07:17 | |
into the frontiers of knowledge. | 0:07:17 | 0:07:21 | |
From the secret of flight | 0:07:21 | 0:07:24 | |
to the motions of the moon | 0:07:24 | 0:07:28 | |
to the hidden architecture of the human body, | 0:07:28 | 0:07:33 | |
all minutely noted in his mysterious mirror handwriting. | 0:07:33 | 0:07:37 | |
We've got thousands of pages of writing, we've got | 0:07:39 | 0:07:43 | |
these pictures, not many, to be sure, but he remains elusive, | 0:07:43 | 0:07:48 | |
so there's this strange balance between being known and unknown, | 0:07:48 | 0:07:52 | |
and it's a very precious, precarious balance. | 0:07:52 | 0:07:55 | |
The unknown is sufficiently apparent, that people | 0:07:55 | 0:08:00 | |
can go in and see mysteries where there are no mysteries, in fact. | 0:08:00 | 0:08:04 | |
Is it possible to strip away the myths, the cult of Leonardo, and see | 0:08:06 | 0:08:11 | |
the truth about this flawed, often puzzling man? | 0:08:11 | 0:08:17 | |
The medieval town of Vinci, in Tuscany, in northern Italy. | 0:08:30 | 0:08:35 | |
It was here on 15th April, 1452, that Leonardo was born. | 0:08:40 | 0:08:45 | |
His surname, Da Vinci, literally means, "From the town of Vinci." | 0:08:50 | 0:08:55 | |
Leonardo's start in life wasn't auspicious. | 0:08:58 | 0:09:01 | |
He was illegitimate. | 0:09:01 | 0:09:03 | |
His father came from a respected local family. His mother was | 0:09:03 | 0:09:07 | |
a poor peasant girl - his father's mistress. | 0:09:07 | 0:09:12 | |
Leonardo was born and would always remain something of an outsider. | 0:09:12 | 0:09:16 | |
He never inherited his father's wealth. | 0:09:16 | 0:09:19 | |
He never settled anywhere for too long. | 0:09:19 | 0:09:22 | |
All his life, he moved from place to place. | 0:09:22 | 0:09:26 | |
Leonardo's schooling was basic. | 0:09:31 | 0:09:33 | |
He always called himself an uneducated man. | 0:09:33 | 0:09:37 | |
But he made a virtue of this. | 0:09:39 | 0:09:41 | |
His school room was the Tuscan countryside. | 0:09:41 | 0:09:47 | |
He began to draw. | 0:09:47 | 0:09:49 | |
Over the course of his life, | 0:09:51 | 0:09:53 | |
he would fill hundreds of notebooks with minutely observed drawings | 0:09:53 | 0:09:58 | |
of animals, plants and natural forms. | 0:09:58 | 0:10:01 | |
There's a tenderness and sympathy in these pictures | 0:10:05 | 0:10:10 | |
as well as a remarkable skill. | 0:10:10 | 0:10:15 | |
At the age of 13 or so, Leonardo left this small country town. | 0:10:20 | 0:10:25 | |
He carried with him his love of the landscape, | 0:10:25 | 0:10:28 | |
his fascination with animals, and the wonders of the natural world. | 0:10:28 | 0:10:32 | |
He set off for a new life in a very different sort of place. | 0:10:32 | 0:10:36 | |
Florence in the 1460's was wealthy, | 0:10:45 | 0:10:49 | |
cultured, a magnet for the finest artists, sculptors and architects. | 0:10:49 | 0:10:55 | |
An exciting place to be. | 0:10:55 | 0:10:58 | |
The city was the pinnacle of Renaissance splendour. | 0:10:59 | 0:11:02 | |
What better place for an aspiring young artist to live and learn. | 0:11:04 | 0:11:10 | |
Leonardo had come to work as an apprentice | 0:11:10 | 0:11:13 | |
to a master artist and craftsman, Andrea del Verrocchio. | 0:11:13 | 0:11:16 | |
Artists' studios were busy, crowded, dusty places. | 0:11:22 | 0:11:28 | |
In the workshops of Florence's cathedral, where sculptors | 0:11:28 | 0:11:31 | |
still work in the same way they have for centuries, you can get some | 0:11:31 | 0:11:36 | |
sense of what it was like. Young apprentices learnt everything | 0:11:36 | 0:11:40 | |
from how to clean brushes to how to paint an angel's wing. | 0:11:40 | 0:11:44 | |
Verrocchio's workshop would have been a hive of activity. | 0:11:46 | 0:11:50 | |
As well as producing paintings under the guidance of the master, | 0:11:50 | 0:11:53 | |
he would have produced sculptures in bronze and marble, | 0:11:53 | 0:11:57 | |
works in silver and gold, theatre sets - anything the wealthy | 0:11:57 | 0:12:02 | |
and cultured classes of Florence desired. | 0:12:02 | 0:12:05 | |
But for Leonardo, the city itself became his studio. | 0:12:08 | 0:12:12 | |
He kept a notebook always dangling from his belt, | 0:12:16 | 0:12:19 | |
and he drew the faces he saw around him. | 0:12:19 | 0:12:23 | |
The turns and movement of the human body fascinated him. | 0:12:46 | 0:12:49 | |
In the city's Uffizi Gallery, you can catch the first glimpse | 0:13:03 | 0:13:06 | |
of the hand of Leonardo, the painter. | 0:13:06 | 0:13:09 | |
The moment when Leonardo's master | 0:13:14 | 0:13:16 | |
decided it was time to let his talented pupil pick up a brush. | 0:13:16 | 0:13:21 | |
This is Verrocchio's painting of Christ with John the Baptist. | 0:13:24 | 0:13:30 | |
Except this isn't all Verrochio's work. | 0:13:30 | 0:13:34 | |
There's something very special about the kneeling angel here. | 0:13:34 | 0:13:37 | |
Leonardo had the task of painting the angel when he was 23 or so. | 0:13:37 | 0:13:42 | |
Just look a little bit more closely. | 0:13:42 | 0:13:45 | |
The fact that the angel is three-quarter turned away from us, | 0:13:45 | 0:13:50 | |
gazing raptly, adoringly, at Christ, | 0:13:50 | 0:13:53 | |
that pose was groundbreaking at the time. | 0:13:53 | 0:13:56 | |
Then look at the curls. Fine detail like ripples of water. | 0:13:57 | 0:14:04 | |
You'll see that more and more, and then, the subtlety of the blue | 0:14:04 | 0:14:08 | |
and the shading of the drapes of the material. | 0:14:08 | 0:14:11 | |
Apparently, when Verrochio saw that, as the story goes, | 0:14:11 | 0:14:14 | |
he decided that he should put down his brush | 0:14:14 | 0:14:16 | |
and stop painting altogether, | 0:14:16 | 0:14:18 | |
because he had been surpassed by his apprentice. | 0:14:18 | 0:14:21 | |
Leonardo progressed to more ambitious and complex subjects. | 0:14:27 | 0:14:31 | |
Though this painting in the Uffizi is unfinished, | 0:14:31 | 0:14:34 | |
and at first glance, looks a bit of a mess. | 0:14:34 | 0:14:38 | |
It's so dark and jumbled. | 0:14:38 | 0:14:40 | |
It's hard even to know what's going on! | 0:14:40 | 0:14:43 | |
It's a common religious subject - the moment when the three wise men | 0:14:45 | 0:14:49 | |
come to pay homage to the infant Christ. | 0:14:49 | 0:14:51 | |
Instead of the usual group of static, silent, | 0:14:54 | 0:14:58 | |
reverential worshippers, | 0:14:58 | 0:15:01 | |
there's something completely different going on here. | 0:15:01 | 0:15:03 | |
The only still figure at the centre is Mary and baby Jesus. | 0:15:03 | 0:15:08 | |
Around her, there is life, vitality, chaos. | 0:15:08 | 0:15:13 | |
And there's even something slightly threatening about the way the crowd | 0:15:13 | 0:15:18 | |
is pressing in on her and the faces, some of them seem rather skull-like. | 0:15:18 | 0:15:24 | |
There are horses in the background rearing, | 0:15:24 | 0:15:28 | |
there appears to be fighting going on. | 0:15:28 | 0:15:31 | |
There's a real sense that the old order has been thrown over. And the new one is about to begin. | 0:15:31 | 0:15:36 | |
There's an interesting detail to the right of the picture. | 0:15:42 | 0:15:45 | |
The one figure who is standing looking away from the action. | 0:15:45 | 0:15:49 | |
Many artists at that time would put a self-portrait in their work, | 0:15:49 | 0:15:52 | |
and it's believed that that is, in fact, | 0:15:52 | 0:15:55 | |
a portrait of Leonardo himself. | 0:15:55 | 0:15:59 | |
If that's true, | 0:16:02 | 0:16:04 | |
it may be the only image we have of Leonardo as a young man. | 0:16:04 | 0:16:09 | |
It's not known why Leonardo didn't finish the work. | 0:16:14 | 0:16:17 | |
But he became notorious for abandoning projects | 0:16:17 | 0:16:20 | |
half way through. It drove his patrons mad with frustration. | 0:16:20 | 0:16:26 | |
Time and time again, Leonardo couldn't or wouldn't finish the job. | 0:16:29 | 0:16:34 | |
His insatiable curiosity meant that he was often distracted | 0:16:34 | 0:16:37 | |
by something new or something different. | 0:16:37 | 0:16:40 | |
And it's a paradox of Leonardo's that a man that was obsessed | 0:16:40 | 0:16:44 | |
with detail and with reproducing that detail in paint | 0:16:44 | 0:16:48 | |
often just left his works unfinished. | 0:16:48 | 0:16:52 | |
I think with the Adoration of the Magi, Leonardo realised that he | 0:16:58 | 0:17:01 | |
had started a picture that he simply didn't know how to finish. | 0:17:01 | 0:17:04 | |
He had bitten off more than he could chew, if you like. | 0:17:04 | 0:17:07 | |
I think he was sometimes intimidated | 0:17:07 | 0:17:09 | |
by what he set out to do. and he got to a point | 0:17:09 | 0:17:12 | |
sometimes where he realised he wasn't going to be able to finish, | 0:17:12 | 0:17:17 | |
that he couldn't arrive at the perfect beauty | 0:17:17 | 0:17:21 | |
that he had in his mind. | 0:17:21 | 0:17:22 | |
In some ways, it's astonishing that he finished anything at all, | 0:17:22 | 0:17:26 | |
given what he wanted for painting, what he thought painting | 0:17:26 | 0:17:30 | |
should be able to achieve. | 0:17:30 | 0:17:32 | |
As he matured as an artist, | 0:17:39 | 0:17:42 | |
Leonardo acquired a reputation for being unreliable, | 0:17:42 | 0:17:45 | |
a bit flaky, even. But an exceptional talent. | 0:17:45 | 0:17:48 | |
Leonardo appeared to be living a charmed life in Florence. | 0:17:52 | 0:17:56 | |
By the age of 20, he had been accepted into the official | 0:17:56 | 0:17:59 | |
Florentine body of painters. | 0:17:59 | 0:18:01 | |
He was described as generous, cultivated, well-dressed, | 0:18:01 | 0:18:06 | |
extremely beautiful, with his hair cascading down | 0:18:06 | 0:18:11 | |
in ringlets to his chest. One poet said he had infinite grace. | 0:18:11 | 0:18:15 | |
But a dark shadow was about to fall across his world. | 0:18:17 | 0:18:21 | |
Renaissance Florence was a small city. | 0:18:29 | 0:18:32 | |
No more than 60,000 inhabitants. | 0:18:32 | 0:18:35 | |
Florentines knew each other's business. | 0:18:35 | 0:18:38 | |
They loved scandal. | 0:18:38 | 0:18:40 | |
They would write anonymous notes to the authorities | 0:18:42 | 0:18:45 | |
denouncing anyone they thought guilty of a crime. | 0:18:45 | 0:18:50 | |
They dropped them into holes in the wall like this, known as | 0:18:50 | 0:18:54 | |
buchi della verita - holes of truth. | 0:18:54 | 0:18:57 | |
In early April 1476, someone dropped a denunciation | 0:18:57 | 0:19:01 | |
into one of these holes. And it read, "To the officers of the night, | 0:19:01 | 0:19:07 | |
"I hereby testify that Jacopo Saltarelli, aged 17, | 0:19:07 | 0:19:11 | |
"who dresses in black, pursues many immoral activities and consents | 0:19:11 | 0:19:15 | |
"to satisfy those persons | 0:19:15 | 0:19:17 | |
"who request sinful things from him". | 0:19:17 | 0:19:20 | |
He means, of course, homosexuality. And it goes on to list | 0:19:20 | 0:19:24 | |
four of Jacopo's lovers or clients, including one "Leonardo da Vinci, | 0:19:24 | 0:19:30 | |
"who works with the painter, Verrocchio". | 0:19:30 | 0:19:33 | |
Homosexuality was common enough in 15th century Florence, | 0:19:37 | 0:19:42 | |
particularly among artists and bohemians. | 0:19:42 | 0:19:45 | |
But it was still a crime, punishable by death. | 0:19:45 | 0:19:48 | |
Leonardo was forced to attend court. | 0:19:48 | 0:19:52 | |
But the charges against him were eventually dropped. | 0:19:52 | 0:19:55 | |
Was Leonardo gay? | 0:19:58 | 0:19:59 | |
Some biographers say his art suggests he was. | 0:20:01 | 0:20:05 | |
The recurring image of a young man with curly hair is arguably based | 0:20:06 | 0:20:10 | |
on a young man called Salai - an apprentice in Leonardo's studio. | 0:20:10 | 0:20:15 | |
He's there in a lot of drawings, seen often in profile | 0:20:18 | 0:20:23 | |
with this slightly decadent profile | 0:20:23 | 0:20:25 | |
and this cascade of ringleted hair. | 0:20:25 | 0:20:30 | |
This was something that Leonardo really loved. | 0:20:30 | 0:20:33 | |
Those angels always have this | 0:20:33 | 0:20:36 | |
cascade of flowing hair - it was a kind of trademark | 0:20:36 | 0:20:39 | |
in his paintings and drawings. | 0:20:39 | 0:20:42 | |
There are one or two comments he makes in his notebooks which | 0:20:44 | 0:20:47 | |
suggest he ran into a bit of trouble, | 0:20:47 | 0:20:49 | |
because his angels were considered a bit too much like the pretty boys | 0:20:49 | 0:20:54 | |
from the street, or the artist models on which | 0:20:54 | 0:20:58 | |
they were no doubt based. | 0:20:58 | 0:21:00 | |
Salai remained at Leonardo's side for the next 30 years | 0:21:03 | 0:21:07 | |
until Leonardo's death - pupil, servant, | 0:21:07 | 0:21:12 | |
confidant, and his lover. | 0:21:12 | 0:21:15 | |
So this is the key relationship, probably, in Leonardo's life. | 0:21:17 | 0:21:21 | |
In Florence, Leonardo was recognised as a supremely accomplished artist. | 0:21:29 | 0:21:34 | |
But it was in another Italian city that he would | 0:21:34 | 0:21:38 | |
achieve greatness. | 0:21:38 | 0:21:40 | |
Milan was the wealthiest city state in Renaissance Italy. | 0:21:54 | 0:21:58 | |
If Florence was a jewel of culture, Milan was a city | 0:21:58 | 0:22:03 | |
of excess, of ostentation. | 0:22:03 | 0:22:04 | |
It's fashion week here in Milan | 0:22:08 | 0:22:10 | |
and there's something about the buzz and the glamour and the excitement | 0:22:10 | 0:22:14 | |
that brings to mind why Leonardo came here all those years ago. | 0:22:14 | 0:22:17 | |
It was a place to see and be seen, it was all about spectacle. | 0:22:17 | 0:22:20 | |
He came here not as a painter, but as a musician | 0:22:20 | 0:22:23 | |
and not just any musician, but with a lira di braccio, | 0:22:23 | 0:22:26 | |
which was a kind of violin made out of solid silver | 0:22:26 | 0:22:29 | |
in the shape of a horse's head. | 0:22:29 | 0:22:31 | |
It was quite an entrance! | 0:22:31 | 0:22:33 | |
Leonardo's patron in Milan | 0:22:35 | 0:22:37 | |
was the Duke Ludovico Sforza, an immensely powerful | 0:22:37 | 0:22:41 | |
and dangerous man. | 0:22:41 | 0:22:42 | |
Leonardo saw him as a means to an end, | 0:22:45 | 0:22:48 | |
a way of pursuing his own developing ideas. | 0:22:48 | 0:22:52 | |
He brought with him an extraordinary letter of introduction. | 0:22:56 | 0:23:00 | |
This is Leonardo presenting himself for employment | 0:23:03 | 0:23:07 | |
to the Duke of Milan. | 0:23:07 | 0:23:08 | |
It's a CV - but not what you'd expect. | 0:23:08 | 0:23:11 | |
It's calculated to appeal to a 15th century despot. | 0:23:11 | 0:23:15 | |
It starts with a bit of flattery - he writes, "Senor mi ilustrisimo", | 0:23:15 | 0:23:20 | |
"my most illustrious Lord", | 0:23:20 | 0:23:22 | |
and then Leonardo effectively goes on to sell himself | 0:23:22 | 0:23:26 | |
as an inventor and maker of fantastical weapons! | 0:23:26 | 0:23:30 | |
There's a whole list of them here. | 0:23:30 | 0:23:33 | |
He talks about, "Ponti leggerissimi forti", | 0:23:33 | 0:23:36 | |
bridges which are very light and strong. | 0:23:36 | 0:23:38 | |
"I can make an infinite variety of methods of attack and defence." | 0:23:38 | 0:23:44 | |
It's only at the end, almost as an afterthought, | 0:23:44 | 0:23:48 | |
that he refers to himself as an artist. He says, "I can further | 0:23:48 | 0:23:51 | |
"execute sculpture in clay, marble and bronze. | 0:23:51 | 0:23:55 | |
"Also in painting, I can do as much as anyone else, | 0:23:55 | 0:23:58 | |
"whoever that may be". Now, was he really that modest | 0:23:58 | 0:24:03 | |
about his own talents or was it that he thought of all his talents, | 0:24:03 | 0:24:07 | |
his painting was the thing that | 0:24:07 | 0:24:08 | |
would least appeal to the Duke of Milan at the time? | 0:24:08 | 0:24:11 | |
Whatever he meant, | 0:24:16 | 0:24:18 | |
the letter reveals the dazzling diversity of Leonardo's | 0:24:18 | 0:24:22 | |
interests and talents. Designing machines of war. | 0:24:22 | 0:24:26 | |
Studying the motion of water. | 0:24:28 | 0:24:31 | |
Mapping the geometry of the human body, | 0:24:35 | 0:24:38 | |
relating it to the perfect forms of the circle and the square | 0:24:38 | 0:24:42 | |
in the famous drawing known as the Vitruvian Man. | 0:24:42 | 0:24:47 | |
That person in the circle, | 0:24:52 | 0:24:54 | |
as well as expressing certain ideas of proportion and harmony | 0:24:54 | 0:24:57 | |
and therefore being a rather abstract composition, | 0:24:57 | 0:25:01 | |
that person is undoubtedly a real person. | 0:25:01 | 0:25:04 | |
You can see his feet sort of pressing against the edge | 0:25:06 | 0:25:09 | |
of the circle, you can see the muscles straining as he puts | 0:25:09 | 0:25:13 | |
his arms out in the sort of flying position, as it seems to be. | 0:25:13 | 0:25:16 | |
And then, very much, you have very specific features, | 0:25:19 | 0:25:24 | |
a rather saturnine figure with long hair, parted in the middle, | 0:25:24 | 0:25:27 | |
and these eyes boring out. | 0:25:27 | 0:25:31 | |
And if you look hard at the face of the Vitruvian Man, | 0:25:34 | 0:25:38 | |
which people strangely enough don't often do, because they're so | 0:25:38 | 0:25:42 | |
aware of it as a sort of emblematic figure, kind of a logo almost | 0:25:42 | 0:25:46 | |
of the Renaissance as it's used, | 0:25:46 | 0:25:47 | |
that people don't tend to suddenly think, | 0:25:47 | 0:25:49 | |
"Well, who is this guy?" Well, I think the answer is it's | 0:25:49 | 0:25:53 | |
a self-portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci. | 0:25:53 | 0:25:55 | |
Who better to express the sort of | 0:25:55 | 0:25:57 | |
secrets of human proportion than the philosophical artist, scientist, | 0:25:57 | 0:26:03 | |
Leonardo Da Vinci himself. | 0:26:03 | 0:26:04 | |
In the court of Ludovico Sforza, | 0:26:09 | 0:26:12 | |
Leonardo was employed on a surprising range of projects. | 0:26:12 | 0:26:16 | |
He didn't make his main living by being paid to paint pictures. | 0:26:18 | 0:26:21 | |
He made his living at the court. | 0:26:21 | 0:26:23 | |
He was paid at the court to do great festival designs. | 0:26:23 | 0:26:27 | |
He was paid at the court to do military designs, | 0:26:27 | 0:26:29 | |
and when he was asked to do these great designs | 0:26:29 | 0:26:33 | |
for weddings or whatever, I think | 0:26:33 | 0:26:35 | |
he got very involved with it and he could always see possibilities. | 0:26:35 | 0:26:39 | |
I suspect he would have groaned initially, | 0:26:39 | 0:26:41 | |
and then suddenly become captivated by the project. | 0:26:41 | 0:26:44 | |
But Leonardo was also experimenting with painting portraits. | 0:26:50 | 0:26:53 | |
I must say, I don't warm to this young lady. | 0:26:54 | 0:26:58 | |
She looks decidedly frosty. | 0:26:58 | 0:27:00 | |
So why is she so admired? | 0:27:01 | 0:27:04 | |
The portrait of Ginevra de' Benci is curiously unlovable. | 0:27:07 | 0:27:10 | |
She really stares at us with | 0:27:10 | 0:27:12 | |
a quite sort of chilly, menacing gaze. I think what Leonardo | 0:27:12 | 0:27:15 | |
was trying to do was to make her very remotely beautiful, | 0:27:15 | 0:27:19 | |
was to raise her beauty above a kind of ordinary human level | 0:27:19 | 0:27:24 | |
to something that was poetic and almost otherworldly. | 0:27:24 | 0:27:28 | |
I think she comes over as | 0:27:28 | 0:27:30 | |
rather as if she's carved from marble rather than | 0:27:30 | 0:27:34 | |
like a living, breathing human being and I think he moved on | 0:27:34 | 0:27:38 | |
a great deal in his subsequent portraits. | 0:27:38 | 0:27:40 | |
One picture in particular | 0:27:45 | 0:27:48 | |
would take the art of portrait painting to new heights. | 0:27:48 | 0:27:52 | |
It's thought by some to be Leonardo's unsung masterpiece. | 0:27:52 | 0:27:55 | |
But it's left Italy forever, now hanging 700 miles away in Poland. | 0:27:57 | 0:28:05 | |
I've come to see a painting | 0:28:19 | 0:28:21 | |
that some experts believe is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa. | 0:28:21 | 0:28:26 | |
And to think it was almost completely unknown to the Western | 0:28:26 | 0:28:30 | |
art world until the start of the 20th Century! | 0:28:30 | 0:28:34 | |
In 1798, it was bought by a Polish prince. | 0:28:37 | 0:28:40 | |
In its long life, it's been walled up in a palace, | 0:28:43 | 0:28:46 | |
hidden in a hotel cellar, and survived two world wars. | 0:28:46 | 0:28:52 | |
It formed part of Hitler's private collection of looted art. | 0:28:52 | 0:28:55 | |
Its present home is the Royal Castle in Warsaw. | 0:28:59 | 0:29:03 | |
The portrait is of Ludovico's elegant young mistress, | 0:29:05 | 0:29:09 | |
Cecilia Gallerani. | 0:29:09 | 0:29:11 | |
It's become known as The Lady with the Ermine. | 0:29:12 | 0:29:16 | |
An Italian poet writing when this was painted | 0:29:19 | 0:29:22 | |
said that Cecila appeared so lifelike, | 0:29:22 | 0:29:24 | |
it was almost as if she was listening. | 0:29:24 | 0:29:27 | |
And when you look at her pose, see if I can get this right... | 0:29:27 | 0:29:30 | |
..it's as if someone's just caught her attention | 0:29:31 | 0:29:34 | |
just outside the frame. | 0:29:34 | 0:29:36 | |
And this was revolutionary. No one else was painting like this, | 0:29:40 | 0:29:43 | |
getting the body in that kind of movement. | 0:29:43 | 0:29:45 | |
Look at her hand - you can see under the skin | 0:29:49 | 0:29:51 | |
the bones and the muscles and the tendons. | 0:29:51 | 0:29:55 | |
Just look at her face. | 0:29:56 | 0:29:58 | |
Young, modest, but intelligent and alert. You can see that! | 0:29:58 | 0:30:02 | |
And that's why I love this painting. | 0:30:02 | 0:30:04 | |
And then what about the ermine or the stoat that she's holding? | 0:30:07 | 0:30:10 | |
I mean, what's that all about? It's certainly not a pet. | 0:30:10 | 0:30:13 | |
But to anyone at the time, | 0:30:13 | 0:30:16 | |
the symbolism of the ermine would have been immediately apparent. | 0:30:16 | 0:30:19 | |
The ermine was the symbol of purity, of chastity. | 0:30:19 | 0:30:22 | |
The story was that the ermine would rather die | 0:30:22 | 0:30:25 | |
than let its pure white coat be soiled. | 0:30:25 | 0:30:27 | |
But also, this was about sex, because the ermine | 0:30:27 | 0:30:31 | |
was the symbol of Cecilia's lover, of Ludovico Sforza. | 0:30:31 | 0:30:36 | |
And when you look at him... | 0:30:36 | 0:30:37 | |
Look, he's muscular, he's got his claws digging into her arm, | 0:30:37 | 0:30:41 | |
he looks as if he might take a nip out of her at any moment. | 0:30:41 | 0:30:44 | |
This is about sex and about power. | 0:30:44 | 0:30:46 | |
Back in Milan, in 1495, Leonardo began work on a painting | 0:31:00 | 0:31:04 | |
that would confirm him as the greatest artist of his age. | 0:31:04 | 0:31:09 | |
The monastery of Santa Maria della Grazia was funded | 0:31:11 | 0:31:14 | |
by Leonardo's patron, Ludovico Sforza. | 0:31:14 | 0:31:17 | |
He commissioned Leonardo to paint a huge picture | 0:31:20 | 0:31:23 | |
for the monks' dining room. | 0:31:23 | 0:31:25 | |
The result would bring triumph, but also tragedy. | 0:31:28 | 0:31:31 | |
It's visited by thousands of people every year. | 0:31:35 | 0:31:38 | |
Their time limited to just 15 minutes in the presence | 0:31:40 | 0:31:43 | |
of the masterpiece. | 0:31:43 | 0:31:44 | |
It's approached through a series of airlocks. | 0:31:48 | 0:31:51 | |
It's more like a hospital, protecting the patient | 0:31:55 | 0:31:59 | |
from contamination. | 0:31:59 | 0:32:01 | |
But the stage management of the entrance and the exit to this work | 0:32:10 | 0:32:14 | |
is very important. | 0:32:14 | 0:32:16 | |
Because this is a deliberately dramatic work of art. | 0:32:16 | 0:32:20 | |
It's such a famous image, | 0:32:35 | 0:32:38 | |
but nothing prepares you for seeing it in the flesh. | 0:32:38 | 0:32:40 | |
Leonardo's epic painting shows the Last Supper, | 0:32:43 | 0:32:47 | |
the meal Christ shares with his disciples | 0:32:47 | 0:32:49 | |
just before his death. | 0:32:49 | 0:32:51 | |
And in it, Leonardo has taken everything he has learned | 0:32:52 | 0:32:55 | |
from the portraits about revealing the life within | 0:32:55 | 0:32:59 | |
and choreographed it on a huge scale. | 0:32:59 | 0:33:03 | |
He's painted the precise moment when Christ says, | 0:33:07 | 0:33:10 | |
"One of you will betray me." | 0:33:10 | 0:33:13 | |
And the reaction of the disciples is frozen in time. | 0:33:13 | 0:33:16 | |
But you can see that bombshell ripple out through the painting, | 0:33:16 | 0:33:20 | |
in their faces, in their body language and, very Italian, | 0:33:20 | 0:33:24 | |
in their hands. | 0:33:24 | 0:33:25 | |
This is not some traditional, flat, | 0:33:37 | 0:33:40 | |
rather sterile religious image, | 0:33:40 | 0:33:43 | |
this is human drama on a scale larger than life. | 0:33:43 | 0:33:48 | |
It's realistic, it has perspective, passion. | 0:33:48 | 0:33:52 | |
It's like a story in widescreen. | 0:33:52 | 0:33:54 | |
But the painting we see today... is the ghost of what it was. | 0:33:59 | 0:34:05 | |
Because only 20% of the original remains. | 0:34:05 | 0:34:08 | |
So what happened? | 0:34:08 | 0:34:10 | |
The clue is in the way Leonardo chose to work - | 0:34:14 | 0:34:17 | |
unorthodox and eventually disastrous. | 0:34:17 | 0:34:20 | |
Paintings on walls, frescoes, have to be painted quickly | 0:34:22 | 0:34:26 | |
onto wet plaster. | 0:34:26 | 0:34:27 | |
But Leonardo knew he was anything but a fast worker. | 0:34:29 | 0:34:33 | |
He chose to work in oil paint on plaster that had already dried. | 0:34:35 | 0:34:40 | |
The result? Within a few decades, the picture began to deteriorate. | 0:34:40 | 0:34:44 | |
Several desperate attempts have been made over the centuries | 0:34:47 | 0:34:51 | |
to salvage it. | 0:34:51 | 0:34:52 | |
Leonardo's slow, painstaking approach to painting | 0:35:49 | 0:35:53 | |
brought the monks to a frenzy of impatience. | 0:35:53 | 0:35:56 | |
Eye witnesses sent to spy on him | 0:35:57 | 0:35:59 | |
reported he would sometimes work from dawn to dusk | 0:35:59 | 0:36:03 | |
and then do nothing for days, except stand and look. | 0:36:03 | 0:36:06 | |
The detail of Leonardo's painting can never be recovered. | 0:36:13 | 0:36:18 | |
But a key to what it looked like | 0:36:18 | 0:36:20 | |
can be found surprisingly close to home. | 0:36:20 | 0:36:23 | |
In the chapel of Magdalen College in Oxford, | 0:36:35 | 0:36:38 | |
and quite unknown to most people, hangs Britain's last supper. | 0:36:38 | 0:36:43 | |
It was painted in Leonardo's day, thought to be by a pupil | 0:36:55 | 0:36:59 | |
of Leonardo, copied from the original, | 0:36:59 | 0:37:01 | |
possibly approved by the master himself. | 0:37:01 | 0:37:04 | |
Details which have disappeared forever from Leonardo's picture | 0:37:10 | 0:37:14 | |
can be seen clearly in this one. | 0:37:14 | 0:37:16 | |
The food on the table... | 0:37:19 | 0:37:21 | |
..the sandaled feet of the disciples... | 0:37:25 | 0:37:28 | |
..and most dramatically the face of Simon, | 0:37:31 | 0:37:35 | |
stubborn and disbelieving. | 0:37:35 | 0:37:37 | |
In 1499, Leonardo left Milan. | 0:37:47 | 0:37:51 | |
His restless, inquiring nature took him off in pursuit of new, | 0:37:51 | 0:37:55 | |
often wildly ambitious projects. | 0:37:55 | 0:37:57 | |
In Venice, he tried to persuade the authorities | 0:38:00 | 0:38:03 | |
to let him build underwater defences for the city. | 0:38:03 | 0:38:06 | |
In Rome, he worked on designs for grand villas and statues. | 0:38:08 | 0:38:12 | |
He dreamed up a scheme to divert the waters of the river | 0:38:16 | 0:38:19 | |
around Florence to make it navigable. | 0:38:19 | 0:38:21 | |
Eventually, he settled back in Florence, | 0:38:25 | 0:38:27 | |
the city that had made him a painter. | 0:38:27 | 0:38:31 | |
But things had changed here. | 0:38:31 | 0:38:33 | |
In a city already crowded with talent, a new star had emerged, | 0:38:36 | 0:38:40 | |
whose talents as a painter and sculptor | 0:38:40 | 0:38:42 | |
threatened to eclipse Leonardo's. | 0:38:42 | 0:38:45 | |
He was arrogant and aggressively ambitious. | 0:38:45 | 0:38:48 | |
His name was Michelangelo | 0:38:48 | 0:38:50 | |
and the two men would become fierce rivals. | 0:38:50 | 0:38:53 | |
In 1501, Michelangelo won the commission | 0:38:59 | 0:39:02 | |
to build a colossal statue for the city, of David, | 0:39:02 | 0:39:06 | |
the slayer of Goliath. | 0:39:06 | 0:39:08 | |
Leonardo was piqued and unimpressed. | 0:39:08 | 0:39:11 | |
The two artists couldn't have been more different. | 0:39:12 | 0:39:15 | |
Whereas Michelangelo's figures are virile supermen, | 0:39:15 | 0:39:19 | |
all muscle and swagger, | 0:39:19 | 0:39:21 | |
Leonardo was always after delicacy and subtlety. | 0:39:21 | 0:39:25 | |
He even had a go at figures like that, saying their bulging muscles | 0:39:25 | 0:39:28 | |
made them look ridiculous - like "un sacco di noci", | 0:39:28 | 0:39:31 | |
a bag of nuts. | 0:39:31 | 0:39:33 | |
Leonardo was much in demand, | 0:39:41 | 0:39:43 | |
as military engineer, map maker, architect, designer. | 0:39:43 | 0:39:47 | |
And though he was celebrated as a painter, he was notorious | 0:39:48 | 0:39:52 | |
for late delivery. | 0:39:52 | 0:39:54 | |
One man wrote of him, "Leonardo is better than anyone. | 0:39:54 | 0:39:58 | |
"But he won't leave a picture alone." | 0:39:58 | 0:40:01 | |
It was a quality that got him into trouble more than once. | 0:40:01 | 0:40:04 | |
At the age of 54, he received a summons from some rich patrons | 0:40:04 | 0:40:08 | |
in Milan - "Come back and finish our painting." | 0:40:08 | 0:40:12 | |
The painting in question | 0:40:16 | 0:40:17 | |
is a mysterious reimagining of the Madonna and child. | 0:40:17 | 0:40:21 | |
Once again, Leonardo brought to a conventional subject | 0:40:24 | 0:40:27 | |
an unusual approach. | 0:40:27 | 0:40:28 | |
He places them in a strange cavern of rocks, | 0:40:30 | 0:40:33 | |
a remote deserted place | 0:40:33 | 0:40:35 | |
suggesting a world before time began. | 0:40:35 | 0:40:38 | |
Instead of the bright, sharp colours of the day, | 0:40:41 | 0:40:44 | |
he creates an atmosphere of shadows and subtle shifts | 0:40:44 | 0:40:48 | |
of light and shade. | 0:40:48 | 0:40:50 | |
Before Leonardo, people were very, very interested | 0:41:00 | 0:41:03 | |
in line, in contour. | 0:41:03 | 0:41:06 | |
Leonardo, on the other hand, believed | 0:41:06 | 0:41:08 | |
in dissolving those contours to make something | 0:41:08 | 0:41:11 | |
which was...which was really modelled from light and shade. | 0:41:11 | 0:41:14 | |
And he used a technique called sfumato, which literally means | 0:41:14 | 0:41:18 | |
smoked or smoky. So that's about | 0:41:18 | 0:41:20 | |
those misty transitions of light and shade | 0:41:20 | 0:41:23 | |
which he applied to a face like the Virgin in the Virgin Of The Rocks. | 0:41:23 | 0:41:28 | |
It was really an entirely revolutionary process | 0:41:28 | 0:41:31 | |
and was born from the fact that he understood | 0:41:31 | 0:41:34 | |
the way in which light fell on objects | 0:41:34 | 0:41:37 | |
like no other artist before him. | 0:41:37 | 0:41:39 | |
The painting now hangs in the National Gallery in London. | 0:41:46 | 0:41:49 | |
It's being restored for a major Leonardo exhibition there. | 0:41:51 | 0:41:56 | |
The restoration is a terrifyingly delicate business. | 0:41:56 | 0:41:59 | |
Just how much do you tinker with a Leonardo? | 0:42:02 | 0:42:06 | |
On the one hand, it's a restoration of a Renaissance painting. | 0:42:08 | 0:42:12 | |
On the other hand, it is a Leonardo, which is no small thing. | 0:42:12 | 0:42:16 | |
The retouching I am doing is quite reversible | 0:42:16 | 0:42:20 | |
and separated from the actual paint of Leonardo | 0:42:20 | 0:42:23 | |
by a modern varnish layer. | 0:42:23 | 0:42:26 | |
Leonardo was really exploring the possibilities of using oil paint | 0:42:29 | 0:42:33 | |
to do this kind of modelling from light to dark | 0:42:33 | 0:42:38 | |
in a consistent way. I think he's exploring the difference | 0:42:38 | 0:42:42 | |
between quite dark, very dark and extremely dark, | 0:42:42 | 0:42:45 | |
in a way that other artists up to then hadn't really done. | 0:42:45 | 0:42:48 | |
One of the things that I think is essential about Leonardo - | 0:42:50 | 0:42:54 | |
you can see when you look closely at this picture - | 0:42:54 | 0:42:56 | |
is the way that he didn't seem to like to produce | 0:42:56 | 0:42:59 | |
a definitive answer to anything. Contours are always being adjusted, | 0:42:59 | 0:43:03 | |
nothing is quite final. | 0:43:03 | 0:43:05 | |
There's often the possibility of just a slight change, | 0:43:05 | 0:43:09 | |
a little modification here, a twist there, | 0:43:09 | 0:43:13 | |
a line a little different than it was. | 0:43:13 | 0:43:15 | |
And the fact that so many of his works are unfinished | 0:43:17 | 0:43:19 | |
speaks to that kind of psychological tendency. | 0:43:19 | 0:43:23 | |
I think he always saw another possibility, | 0:43:23 | 0:43:26 | |
another way of doing something. | 0:43:26 | 0:43:28 | |
Leonardo would never lose his habit of seeing other possibilities. | 0:43:50 | 0:43:54 | |
He spent many months here at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata | 0:43:57 | 0:44:00 | |
in the centre of Florence. | 0:44:00 | 0:44:02 | |
The monks would certainly have appreciated a painting from him. | 0:44:02 | 0:44:05 | |
But one who visited him at work in his studio reported, | 0:44:06 | 0:44:10 | |
"He scarcely seems interested in picking up a brush." | 0:44:10 | 0:44:13 | |
Leonardo's attention had been seized by new kinds of exploration, | 0:44:16 | 0:44:20 | |
including the study of the human body. | 0:44:20 | 0:44:23 | |
From dissections he made in the city's hospitals, | 0:44:29 | 0:44:32 | |
he analysed the architecture of the body... | 0:44:32 | 0:44:35 | |
..and noted the minute workings of its internal organs. | 0:44:37 | 0:44:40 | |
The anatomical drawings are incredibly beautiful | 0:44:45 | 0:44:49 | |
and he would regard the inside of the body as at least as beautiful | 0:44:49 | 0:44:53 | |
as the outside. | 0:44:53 | 0:44:55 | |
So if he draws, say, the branching of the air passages in the lung, | 0:44:55 | 0:44:58 | |
it becomes like a coral. It's a beautiful structure, | 0:44:58 | 0:45:02 | |
and that's not a loose analogy | 0:45:02 | 0:45:05 | |
because he saw branching in nature as all the same thing. | 0:45:05 | 0:45:09 | |
How a tree branches, how our vessels branch, how rivers come together, | 0:45:09 | 0:45:13 | |
these are all systems which are essentially the same. | 0:45:13 | 0:45:16 | |
During these intense philosophical investigations, | 0:45:20 | 0:45:23 | |
painting seems to have been forgotten. Until... | 0:45:23 | 0:45:28 | |
One day Leonardo received a request to paint a portrait. | 0:45:28 | 0:45:32 | |
It probably came from Francesco del Giocondo, | 0:45:32 | 0:45:35 | |
a merchant in silk and cloth, | 0:45:35 | 0:45:36 | |
and he wanted Leonardo to paint a portrait of his wife. | 0:45:36 | 0:45:40 | |
Nothing unusual in that - | 0:45:40 | 0:45:42 | |
a perfectly ordinary, everyday subject. | 0:45:42 | 0:45:45 | |
What Leonardo could not have imagined is that this would be | 0:45:45 | 0:45:49 | |
the painting that defined him. | 0:45:49 | 0:45:52 | |
It would become the most famous painting in the world. | 0:45:52 | 0:45:56 | |
As so often with Leonardo, you can see glimpses of future masterpieces | 0:45:58 | 0:46:02 | |
in his sketchbooks. | 0:46:02 | 0:46:04 | |
The merchant, Del Giocondo, never actually received the portrait | 0:46:13 | 0:46:17 | |
of his wife which he'd commissioned. | 0:46:17 | 0:46:20 | |
When Leonardo left Italy for the last time in 1516, | 0:46:21 | 0:46:24 | |
he took it with him. | 0:46:24 | 0:46:26 | |
He had an invitation from the young French king, Francis I. | 0:46:33 | 0:46:36 | |
Francis saw in Leonardo a mentor and a genius | 0:46:38 | 0:46:41 | |
who would adorn his court. | 0:46:41 | 0:46:44 | |
But Leonardo never stopped working on his portrait of the wife | 0:46:50 | 0:46:54 | |
of a Florentine merchant. | 0:46:54 | 0:46:56 | |
She now hangs in the Louvre Museum in Paris. | 0:47:01 | 0:47:04 | |
She's known, of course, as the Mona Lisa. | 0:47:06 | 0:47:09 | |
I've come here for a private audience with her | 0:47:10 | 0:47:13 | |
to try and see why she has become the most iconic image | 0:47:13 | 0:47:17 | |
in the world. | 0:47:17 | 0:47:18 | |
It's not obvious. | 0:47:25 | 0:47:27 | |
On first impressions, she's very small, very dark | 0:47:28 | 0:47:33 | |
and very yellow. | 0:47:33 | 0:47:35 | |
I know this is the most famous painting in the world | 0:47:37 | 0:47:40 | |
and is considered a work of genius, but I just don't quite get it. | 0:47:40 | 0:47:44 | |
What is so good about the Mona Lisa? | 0:47:44 | 0:47:47 | |
How did Leonardo manage to create this mysterious | 0:48:50 | 0:48:53 | |
and captivating woman? | 0:48:53 | 0:48:55 | |
It is uncanny. | 0:48:59 | 0:49:01 | |
It lives in a very extraordinary way. | 0:49:01 | 0:49:03 | |
This is... You know, it sounds kind of pretentious | 0:49:03 | 0:49:06 | |
but there is no other way of describing it. | 0:49:06 | 0:49:09 | |
The figure seems not just to be inert pigments on a surface, | 0:49:09 | 0:49:12 | |
but seems to be living and breathing. | 0:49:12 | 0:49:15 | |
Now, the way that Leonardo did that is not by some kind of mystery, | 0:49:21 | 0:49:25 | |
he did it by technique and he did it by mixing in the flesh, | 0:49:25 | 0:49:31 | |
in these key areas, these very subtle, | 0:49:31 | 0:49:34 | |
thin layers of paint, called glazes. | 0:49:34 | 0:49:37 | |
Just a little, thin stain of colour, a lot of oil | 0:49:37 | 0:49:40 | |
and just little dispersed bits of pigment. | 0:49:40 | 0:49:42 | |
So he lays that down on top of a white priming. | 0:49:42 | 0:49:46 | |
Then he'll lay another stain down, | 0:49:46 | 0:49:48 | |
then another one and another one, sometimes adding a bit of shadow, | 0:49:48 | 0:49:52 | |
sometimes a little bit of highlight, but basically he's relying upon | 0:49:52 | 0:49:56 | |
the light coming through from the white panel. | 0:49:56 | 0:49:59 | |
So he's using this transparency and it means the light comes through | 0:49:59 | 0:50:05 | |
and is very subtle, very elusive and you don't have fixed edges. | 0:50:05 | 0:50:10 | |
He doesn't draw the edge of a nose as a line. | 0:50:10 | 0:50:14 | |
It's very ambiguous, very elusive. | 0:50:14 | 0:50:17 | |
That is uncanny, it's spine tingling. | 0:50:17 | 0:50:20 | |
Leonardo spent the last years of his life at the court | 0:50:30 | 0:50:33 | |
of the French King. | 0:50:33 | 0:50:35 | |
Relieved of all pressure to deliver paintings, free to follow | 0:50:39 | 0:50:42 | |
wherever his curiosity led him. | 0:50:42 | 0:50:44 | |
I think at the end of his life, | 0:50:47 | 0:50:49 | |
Leonardo was, if anything, more of a celebrity than a painter. | 0:50:49 | 0:50:53 | |
And when he moved to France, it was not necessarily | 0:50:54 | 0:50:58 | |
because King Francis wanted somebody who was going to paint | 0:50:58 | 0:51:02 | |
enormous fresco cycles in the various chateaux that he owned. | 0:51:02 | 0:51:08 | |
I think it was more that he wanted to be seen to offer protection | 0:51:08 | 0:51:12 | |
to perhaps the greatest man in Christendom, of the day. | 0:51:12 | 0:51:16 | |
His last self portrait seems to show the face of a man | 0:51:20 | 0:51:23 | |
who has spent a lifetime enquiring into everything. | 0:51:23 | 0:51:27 | |
He died on 2nd May, 1519, at the age of 67, | 0:51:30 | 0:51:34 | |
in the arms, so the story goes, of the French king. | 0:51:34 | 0:51:38 | |
Francis declared he, "Did not believe that a man had been born | 0:51:42 | 0:51:46 | |
"who knew as much as Leonardo." | 0:51:46 | 0:51:48 | |
Leonardo left several of his paintings to his favourite, Salai. | 0:51:54 | 0:51:57 | |
Among them was the Mona Lisa. | 0:51:59 | 0:52:00 | |
She won't be travelling to London for the exhibition. | 0:52:05 | 0:52:08 | |
Instead, the buzz will be about a picture | 0:52:08 | 0:52:11 | |
that most people will never heard of... | 0:52:11 | 0:52:13 | |
..the newly discovered Salvator Mundi. | 0:52:14 | 0:52:17 | |
It's an amazing story. | 0:52:22 | 0:52:24 | |
It's been known for centuries that Leonardo painted | 0:52:29 | 0:52:32 | |
such a picture. | 0:52:32 | 0:52:34 | |
Until now, it was thought lost. | 0:52:34 | 0:52:36 | |
This is how the picture looked before it was restored, | 0:52:39 | 0:52:42 | |
dismissed as a crude copy, buried in a private collection, | 0:52:42 | 0:52:47 | |
last sold for £45 in 1958. | 0:52:47 | 0:52:51 | |
I went to the restoration studio to see the evidence for myself. | 0:52:56 | 0:53:00 | |
What had led restorer Dianne Modestini to believe | 0:53:03 | 0:53:07 | |
she had discovered a lost Leonardo? | 0:53:07 | 0:53:10 | |
First of all, X-rays revealed what lay beneath | 0:53:11 | 0:53:13 | |
the surface of the painting. | 0:53:13 | 0:53:16 | |
That's the face, isn't it? | 0:53:16 | 0:53:18 | |
Yes, which you can just barely make out the features. | 0:53:18 | 0:53:21 | |
What about these cracks? What are they up there to the left? | 0:53:21 | 0:53:26 | |
-That's the crack in the wood. -Just missed his face. | 0:53:26 | 0:53:29 | |
Imagine it had gone through the middle! | 0:53:29 | 0:53:32 | |
Yeah, miraculous. Just missed the face. | 0:53:32 | 0:53:35 | |
You see, it all came from this knot. | 0:53:35 | 0:53:38 | |
-Oh, a knot in the wood? -There was a knot in the wood. | 0:53:38 | 0:53:41 | |
It had this defect. | 0:53:41 | 0:53:43 | |
Leonardo was very never very careful about his wooden supports. | 0:53:43 | 0:53:47 | |
Given how meticulous he was about everything else, | 0:53:47 | 0:53:50 | |
-that's quite surprising. -It's very surprising. | 0:53:50 | 0:53:53 | |
-So the wood has basically warped and split from that knot. -Yes. | 0:53:53 | 0:53:56 | |
One of the things you must have been looking for, which is | 0:53:56 | 0:53:59 | |
a classic clue to whether or not a picture is an original, | 0:53:59 | 0:54:02 | |
-is a pentimento, it's called, isn't it? -That's right. | 0:54:02 | 0:54:05 | |
Which is where an artist has had a number of goes | 0:54:05 | 0:54:08 | |
at painting something in a particular way before settling | 0:54:08 | 0:54:11 | |
on painting a hand in a particular way or a drape of cloth. | 0:54:11 | 0:54:14 | |
-And you can see him trying to work it out on the canvas. -Yes. | 0:54:14 | 0:54:17 | |
It doesn't look like there are any here in the X-ray. | 0:54:17 | 0:54:20 | |
No, we don't see any in this X-ray, but where we do see them | 0:54:20 | 0:54:23 | |
is in the infrared reflectogram. | 0:54:23 | 0:54:26 | |
So what are we looking at here? | 0:54:30 | 0:54:33 | |
Here we can see quite clearly, I think, | 0:54:33 | 0:54:35 | |
that there's a first idea for the thumb. | 0:54:35 | 0:54:39 | |
Oh, yes! So it was more upright. | 0:54:39 | 0:54:42 | |
It was more upright. | 0:54:42 | 0:54:45 | |
But this was the moment that gave us a clue and gave us some hope, | 0:54:45 | 0:54:49 | |
which wouldn't have entered our minds previously, | 0:54:49 | 0:54:52 | |
that we might be dealing with a lost original. | 0:54:52 | 0:54:55 | |
As it became clearer to you that this could well be | 0:54:59 | 0:55:02 | |
an original Leonardo, did you have a moment where you thought... | 0:55:02 | 0:55:06 | |
..if I do the wrong thing here... | 0:55:08 | 0:55:10 | |
this could all rest on your shoulders. | 0:55:10 | 0:55:14 | |
Yeah, I couldn't let myself think about that. I couldn't. | 0:55:14 | 0:55:18 | |
I would never have dared to touch it. | 0:55:18 | 0:55:20 | |
The discovery of a different first design for the thumb | 0:55:25 | 0:55:29 | |
was an incredible breakthrough. | 0:55:29 | 0:55:31 | |
No one painting a mere copy would experiment in this way. | 0:55:33 | 0:55:37 | |
When the picture was finally shown to leading Leonardo experts, | 0:55:42 | 0:55:45 | |
they examined everything - its history, its hidden details, | 0:55:45 | 0:55:50 | |
the paint itself. | 0:55:50 | 0:55:51 | |
I walked in to the conservation studios where it was being displayed | 0:55:53 | 0:55:57 | |
at that point and you get that tingle and you think, | 0:55:57 | 0:56:01 | |
"Ah, this is..." | 0:56:01 | 0:56:03 | |
But then I always have a gravitational pull. | 0:56:03 | 0:56:06 | |
I say, "Don't believe it!" | 0:56:06 | 0:56:08 | |
A Leonardo painting hasn't come along like that | 0:56:08 | 0:56:11 | |
since the early 20th century, | 0:56:11 | 0:56:13 | |
so one every 100 years is kind of rare. | 0:56:13 | 0:56:16 | |
There is that long process of research where you're putting | 0:56:18 | 0:56:22 | |
the counter arguments and saying, | 0:56:22 | 0:56:24 | |
"Let's look for what's wrong with it." | 0:56:24 | 0:56:27 | |
And in this case, I couldn't find anything wrong. | 0:56:27 | 0:56:30 | |
So the verdict is in. It's the real thing. | 0:56:35 | 0:56:38 | |
Getting the Salvator Mundi | 0:56:45 | 0:56:46 | |
and all the other paintings to London, | 0:56:46 | 0:56:50 | |
poses a massive challenge... | 0:56:50 | 0:56:53 | |
especially the huge copy of the Last Supper in Oxford. | 0:56:53 | 0:56:56 | |
Moving the picture is a two-day operation. | 0:57:01 | 0:57:03 | |
Once it's lowered from the walls, | 0:57:03 | 0:57:06 | |
it's removed from the wooden stretchers | 0:57:06 | 0:57:08 | |
that keep the canvas taut. | 0:57:08 | 0:57:10 | |
The canvas is carefully rolled around a drum, painted side outwards | 0:57:15 | 0:57:19 | |
to stop it cracking. | 0:57:19 | 0:57:21 | |
Then it's off to the National Gallery to take its place | 0:57:28 | 0:57:31 | |
alongside work by Leonardo himself. | 0:57:31 | 0:57:34 | |
Never before will so many Leonardo paintings | 0:57:41 | 0:57:44 | |
and drawings have been assembled in one place. | 0:57:44 | 0:57:48 | |
And almost certainly, they never will be again. | 0:57:48 | 0:57:51 | |
So valuable, so delicate, | 0:57:53 | 0:57:56 | |
it's unlikely anyone would dare risk moving them again. | 0:57:56 | 0:57:59 | |
When you strip away the cult that has grown up around Leonardo, | 0:58:04 | 0:58:08 | |
his sheer skill and vision as a painter | 0:58:08 | 0:58:12 | |
still tower above all others. | 0:58:12 | 0:58:14 | |
But there is also mystery. | 0:58:16 | 0:58:18 | |
He's an artist who continues to intrigue and baffle and astonish. | 0:58:18 | 0:58:24 | |
And that enduring mystery has earned him a unique place in our history. | 0:58:24 | 0:58:29 | |
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd | 0:58:44 | 0:58:46 | |
E-mail [email protected] | 0:58:46 | 0:58:48 |