The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything Leonardo

500 years ago,

the ruling families of Italy were being torn apart by bloody warfare,

by the thirst for wealth and power.

But there was another rivalry, just as extreme and cut-throat.

It was to see who could host the biggest party...

..and the Duke of Milan had a secret weapon.

His parties were organised by Leonardo da Vinci.

We know him as one of the greatest artists and engineers who ever lived, but in his own time,

his life was shaped by the need to satisfy

these rich and powerful patrons.

APPLAUSE

He lived in dangerous and difficult times,

and set himself an almost impossible task -

to discover everything there was to know.

Don't pity the humble painter -

he can be lord of all things.

Whatever exists in the universe,

he has first in his mind... and then in his hand.

By his art he may be called the grandchild of God.

Our journey of discovery to understand the mind

of one of the most remarkable figures who ever lived

begins not in Italy, but here, in Windsor Castle.

Here, within the Royal Collection are hundreds of Leonardo's original notes and drawings.

For centuries, these incredible papers were scattered and feared lost.

But their miraculous rediscovery makes it possible

to unravel the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci.

They tell the story of one of the great geniuses of Western civilisation -

a man way ahead of his time,

who set out on a journey of discovery,

to understand the laws of nature.

"Everything must be laid bare,

"all the dark and hidden secrets of the world.

"I will do things that no-one in the past would have dared to do.

"I will think new thoughts, bring new things into being."

Hundreds of years before science or engineering caught up with him,

Leonardo dreamed and planned how Man might fly in the skies

or walk on the bottom of the ocean.

His drawings reveal how he designed great machines for war.

He made the first detailed studies of the human embryo.

He investigated how our eyes see.

And by studying fossils,

he exploded the biblical myth of the Creation.

And all this time,

he was creating some of the most beautiful paintings

the world has ever seen.

CHORAL MUSIC

But like the smile of his Mona Lisa,

Leonardo the man has always seemed something of a mystery.

His notes have an air of secrecy about them.

His comments and thoughts in the margins are written backwards,

and can only be read in a mirror.

And the information he gives us is often fragmentary and oblique.

I've spent my life working in the arts,

but to sit here, surrounded by these drawings and notebooks,

is extraordinary. When you immerse yourself in these astonishing pages

you begin to realise the depth and scope of this man's imagination.

His endless curiosity

and the immediacy with which he captures the world around him is startling.

It's as if you can see the workings of his mind,

hear him thinking,

and they are simply beautiful.

We've gone to his own writings and to contemporary sources to dramatise his life.

We've used his original drawings to build and test his machines,

and some of the leading experts on Leonardo are going to help me

find a way into the mind of this extraordinary Renaissance man.

This is Leonardo's story.

We begin here, in Florence, the city where Leonardo made his name.

It was one of the largest cities in Europe,

the centre of the civilised world

and heart of that great revolution in culture called the Renaissance.

It was a time of huge excitement,

an explosion in knowledge, artistic growth and discovery.

It was also a time of conflict and bloody violence.

Life could be short and brutal.

You can get a flavour of this heady mix every year on June 24th,

when Florentines celebrate their patron saint.

After all the glad-handing and the drumming,

the parade eventually makes its way to this site,

adjacent to the old Roman amphitheatre.

Then all hell breaks loose.

COMMAND SHOUTED IN ITALIAN

The climax is an ancient ball game

with no rules other than the survival of the fittest.

30 men from each rival camp fight for the possession of the ball,

originally a pig's bladder.

500 years ago, the spectators would have contained some familiar names,

for instance Botticelli and Raphael

with their numerous mistresses,

Machiavelli, the father of political intrigue,

Michelangelo, the tortured genius always getting into fights,

and two rival dynasties,

the Medicis and the Borgias - the billionaires of their day.

'Leonardo may well have joined the crowd for the ball game,

'but he had an ambivalent attitude to violence

'and the bloodthirstiness of the warring dynasties.'

"Such men like to deal out affliction, terror, death.

"Reflect how cruel it is to take a life.

"I saw a man once in battle, who poured out sweat mixed with blood.

"His heart had burst as he fled from his enemies."

And yet he designed weapons and war machines

for some of the worst tyrants of the age.

Leonardo extolled the virtues of peace,

but he would help promote the art of war.

Leonardo was born in 1452 in the hills of Tuscany

in the village of Vinci, which gave him his name.

His grandfather made this entry in the civic records -

"On Saturday at three o'clock at night, on April the 15th,

"a grandson of mine was born.

"Son of my son Piero, he was named Leonardo."

Leonardo was born illegitimate. His father, Ser Piero,

had a liaison with Caterina, a local peasant girl.

She was then married off to a man in the next village.

Ser Piero married a woman of his own class and kept the child.

We'll never know how deeply the loss of his birth mother affected him,

but his art would be filled with images of mother figures

and tender childhood moments.

His illegitimacy would shape his future.

He wasn't given a formal education in the classical languages, Latin and Greek,

and all his life he would be stung by criticism of his lack of book learning.

His schooling stopped with the abacus school -

adding and subtracting with an abacus.

This turned out to his advantage as he was not bound by book learning.

Knowing very little Latin and having to study it late in life,

he didn't know what he was SUPPOSED to think,

and could therefore able to look for himself.

Always in his life, he privileged observation over received wisdom.

"I cannot quote from eminent authors

"as they can, these trumpeters and reciters of the works of others.

"I do know that all knowledge is vain

"and full of error when it is not born of experience,

"and so experience will be my mistress."

Unlike better-educated Florentines who wrote everything down in words,

Leonardo had to draw his knowledge.

He actually had to use the capacity of his hand

to draw what he wanted to find out.

His REAL school, from his earliest years,

was the natural world around him.

"I was never as happy as when exploring the Tuscan countryside as a child,

"observing nature. She is the source of all true knowledge.

"She has her own logic, her own laws.

"She has no effect without cause.

"She has no invention without necessity."

He became obsessed by the movement of water,

the cycles of growth in plants,

the behaviour of living creatures,

and most of all, the wonder of flight.

"It comes to me almost like a dream -

"the very first recollection of my infancy.

"I was in my cradle, and a great hawk flew down to me.

"It opened my mouth with its tail,

"and its feathers struck me several times inside my lips.

"That bird seems to me now to have pointed me to my destiny."

Throughout his life, he watched and obsessively drew birds in flight,

and he began to work out the principles of aerodynamics.

The next step was dramatic and seemingly impossible -

to devise a way for Man to take to the air.

His notebooks are full of diagrams and drawings of flying machines.

Sometimes apparent doodles in the margins point the way to astonishingly modern ideas,

like this early concept for a parachute.

I think it's rather charming - Leonardo says, "If you build this parachute just like I tell you,

"I guarantee that it'll return a man safely to Earth from any altitude."

If Leonardo had tested his parachute,

he'd probably have done so from a tall building or cliff.

The results with this model are far from encouraging.

We found three Leonardo enthusiasts who for a long time

had wanted to build and test the parachute.

Most people thought it was one of da Vinci's fantastic ideas,

but they didn't think it would work.

Most people only saw this drawing with a man hanging under a pyramid.

But we thought we wanted to do it the right way

so the best person to go to was Professor Martin Kemp.

In the course of my career I get contacted by a fair number

of what I call the Leonardo loonies, who come with crazy ideas,

and they said they were going to build this and test it.

I thought, you know, "This is interesting, but slightly crazy."

We wanted to try as faithfully and as closely as possible

to build the parachute that da Vinci

would have built had he had the time or the inclination.

"If a man has a tent 12 braccia wide and 12 high covered with cloth

"he can throw himself down from any great height

"without hurting himself."

Why should he design a parachute? Where could he use it?

Getting down quickly from high places would be useful

if you're besieged in a castle.

There are other people who worked on parachutes,

and one of them has streamers coming out behind it,

-so you can imagine...

-Remind me not to try that one!

You can imagine in a festival, the crowds being amazed

at people leaping off the ramparts with banners streaming out behind.

We don't know.

One aspect of the design is worrying -

there appears not to be a hole in the top of the parachute,

which could make it extremely dangerous.

There must be all sorts of risks. It could lurch to the side

and spill out its air.

Most parachutes have holes in the top, so if it did that

and you collapse inside it, it doesn't bear thinking about.

The safest solution would be to introduce the modern concept

of a hole in the apex of the parachute,

but the team decided to put their faith in Leonardo.

It's an experiment. You build da Vinci's parachute close as you can

to his wonderful and very clear drawing.

They would rely solely on the porous coffin material to let the air flow through.

I wonder if he ever thought someone would actually be stupid enough to try it!

To ensure that we have perfect weather conditions,

Adrian decides to do the drop in Africa, and from a hot-air balloon

at 10,000 feet -

a little more ambitious than the castle ramparts

that Leonardo might have intended 500 years ago.

KEMP: He believed that Man MIGHT be able to fly.

It's almost divine inspiration, if you like.

But with the Earth 10,000 feet below,

Adrian's putting his life in Leonardo's hands.

Mr da Vinci, come fly with me.

Here we go.

Well, Mr da Vinci, so far, I'm flying.

Mr da Vinci, maybe you were right!

Mr da Vinci, you kept your promise.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Leonardo drew this parachute in the 1480s,

a staggering 300 years before the first successful parachute jump.

His grasp of science and his understanding of the laws of nature

enabled him to design many concepts that would not be realised

until the 20th century.

Nowadays we don't see artists as having an interest in pushing the boundaries of engineering,

but in the Renaissance world, art and science went hand in hand.

For a very long time it was fashionable to think of Leonardo

as someone who popped into the 15th century like a bolt from the blue,

but even an imagination as fertile and unusual as his

was shaped by the people around him and by the times he lived in.

A generation of architects, builders and craftsmen

had worked on the great Cathedral of Santa Maria in Florence -

the most technologically advanced structure of the Renaissance.

The grand finale was the winching up of a great golden globe

to top the Duomo, the largest unsupported dome ever built.

It was a spectacular event. The entire population

of Florence turned out to watch.

To a young boy like Leonardo it was a constant proof that engineering -

a combination of art and science -

really could capture the imagination of the public in a most extraordinary way.

Young Leonardo arrived here in the mid-1460s.

To a boy from the Tuscan hills, it must have been a revelation.

The city was a vast construction site, a hothouse of talent

and the embodiment of a new age of discovery.

There was no place on Earth more exciting to be.

Leonardo's father brought him to the studio

of one of the most successful artists of his day -

Andrea del Verrocchio.

This was the very workshop that had made the famous golden globe.

When his father showed Verrocchio the drawings his son had been doing from an early age,

Leonardo was taken on as an apprentice.

In those days, an artist was an artisan -

a practical salesman making things to order for clients.

Verrocchio did a great line in gilded baskets.

There was nothing precious about these studios or the work done.

Painters are on the same scale,

let's say, as tailors, saddle makers.

Not so much a dime a dozen,

but they're craftsmen in this period,

not the high-status elite that Leonardo would aspire to be later.

His apprenticeship lasted several years. He grew up in the studio.

He was impatient from the start. He wanted to create masterpieces.

In his early 20s, he finally got his big chance.

Verrocchio had won a commission to paint the baptism of Christ.

As usual, he painted the main figures and left background details and characters

to his assistants.

Leonardo was assigned the figure of an angel in the left-hand corner.

What he would do with it would stun his fellow students AND the great master Verrocchio himself.

The traditional method of painting at the time was to use egg tempera.

This is how Leonardo would have been taught.

Nearly all small-scale pictures were painted with tempera paint.

-An egg...

-A free-range egg?

-A free-range egg, yes.

There was a writer in the 15th century,

called Cennini, who said the best eggs are country eggs,

especially for painting country-type people with ruddy complexions.

I just want the yolk.

We don't want the yolk sac.

We'll mix it with some distilled water,

which in Leonardo's day would have been rainwater.

Now we've got white wine vinegar.

This will be enough for a day's painting.

Add a bit of the ultramarine blue.

That's your paint.

This paint dries extremely quickly.

That's why it has to be applied in a special way.

It's a shading known as hatching.

You build up tone gradually.

You build up light and dark by crisscrossing these lines.

So egg tempera is hard work and the results can look dull and lifeless.

As he starts on his angel figure,

the young Leonardo makes a momentous decision.

The painting has so far been done the traditional way, with tempera.

But he's going to paint HIS figure in oils.

Oil paint had been used before, in the Netherlands,

but was virtually unknown in southern Europe.

So, in contrast to working with tempera,

you're able to have this range of colours or of tones all taken from ultramarine.

-Yes.

-That pigment.

-Simply ultramarine blue and white.

It's a lovely medium.

It's just so gorgeous,

so sort of rich and nice, sort of buttery paint.

It was an astonishing gamble for the young Leonardo to take.

But it paid off.

The tempera version is on the right and on the left is the oil version.

You took about the same time, a week or so, to do each of them.

-But they are strikingly different.

-Oh, yes.

The whole effect of the paint is totally different.

Much richer colours in the oil version,

-much duller in the tempera.

-And much more depth there.

-There's the sense there's something going on under it.

-Yes.

And there's subtlety you can build into the lights and darks

in the oils you can't do in the tempera.

Here in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, we can see this first flowering of Leonardo's talent.

And here it is - The Baptism of Christ.

It's a conventional biblical theme, Christ being baptised by St John,

but the picture has been transformed by the hand of the young Leonardo.

Your eye doesn't naturally go to the centre of the picture,

but to that impish, beautiful angel on the left of the picture.

It was a defining moment in art.

Tempera was the past, Leonardo had seen the future.

In southern Europe, painting in oils would become the norm.

Leonardo's first biographer, Vasari, adds a footnote to the story.

He tells us that Verrocchio, having seen what had been done,

told the apprentices that from now on,

Leonardo would paint all the faces

and that he, Verrocchio, having been surpassed, would not paint again.

It was largely a male world that the young Leonardo had entered in Florence.

Artists invariably explored the beauty of the male figure.

The female nude was quite rare.

The great master Verrocchio was homosexual.

He and his students lived together in the workshops,

under the same roof.

Indeed, the city of Florence was famous for its culture of male companionship and sexuality.

But it was a twilight world and it could be a dangerous one.

Florence after dark could be rough and rowdy.

Homosexuality among young, unmarried men was commonplace.

And Leonardo didn't always choose his friends wisely.

In a city of 40,000,

there were 400 allegations of sodomy in one year.

If you were caught, the punishment was severe.

On the walls of the city, you could find the notorious boca de verite -

the mouth of truth.

Citizens who wanted to make anonymous accusations against their fellows could post them here.

And one of these accusations, in April 1476,

named Leonardo da Vinci.

SHOUTS AND WHISTLING

He was out on the town with three friends.

They were arrested for consorting with a teenage prostitute.

According to writings of the time,

many people questioned their guilt.

Sodomy was a crime in 15th-century Florence,

and were you convicted, you could even be burnt at the stake.

Leonardo endured weeks of anxiety

whilst the evidence against him was being collected.

We know just how desperate he felt

because he wrote on a piece of paper, "I am without any friends."

And on the other side of that same piece of paper, he writes...

If there is no love...

..what then?

By sheer good fortune, one of Leonardo's companions

happened to be the son of a powerful nobleman.

And this probably helped a great deal in getting them off with a very light sentence,

which is recorded in each case. They were absolved with the condition of a slight beating.

After his trial and humiliation,

Leonardo became more circumspect and careful, perhaps even afraid.

Periodically there were religious revivals in Italy

and homosexuals were indeed burnt at the stake.

Being a genius gave you some latitude, but not immunity.

In 1481, he got a major commission for the monastery of San Donato.

It was to paint the Adoration of the Magi,

the moment when the Wise Men first encounter the infant Jesus.

Now, I know that "revolutionary" is an overused word,

but with this picture, Leonardo has really earned it.

Many of his contemporaries had tackled this subject,

but no-one had ever brought to it this raw power and emotion.

While others are painting stock figures with stock expressions,

he's depicting real people.

Just look at these faces.

You can believe these people felt real joy and wonder and pain.

To find them, he went into the streets of Florence.

They're scattered throughout his notebooks -

real, ordinary people, the good, the bad and the ugly.

He transforms them into actors in this drama of wonderment.

Even the animals show their own amazement.

And there's another thing this painting tells you about Leonardo,

it stares you in the face. It isn't finished.

He spent seven months doing this picture.

He was expected to deliver it in 20 months, but what did he do?

He withdrew, he never completed the picture.

This was to become a pattern

that would shape his life and his reputation.

We don't know for sure why he gave up on The Adoration.

What we do know is that around this time he packed and left the city.

In 1481, he left Florence and headed for Milan.

It was a quantum leap from culture to commerce -

a city of new money, a boom town, run by a family of mercenaries.

They were called the Sforzas. The new head of the clan was Lodovico

and they were among the most feared and hated dynasties in Milan.

Milan's the wannabe nouveau riche version of Florence.

It doesn't have the same cultural and civic tradition.

The Sforza are a very new team of mercenaries -

a family who are basically trying to drag the city into the Renaissance.

The previous duke has been stabbed 37 times by his own courtiers.

This is NOT a city which loves its rulers.

The Sforza were regarded as jumped-up sons of shoemakers,

so when Lodovico comes in, he's looking to boost his image.

Lodovico was an even bigger snob than the rest of his family.

He surrounded himself with genealogists and astrologers

as well as artists and engineers.

He was both dangerous AND deluded.

He commissioned a family tree which he insisted showed his lineage

going back not to royalty, but to the gods.

Splendid news, Your Excellency.

The astrologer confirms that on your mother's side, your great-uncle was related to a prince of Sicily.

Don't be ridiculous. Look again.

Yes, Your Excellency.

This is da Vinci, the Florentine.

So now Leonardo had to sell himself to the duke.

He had to appeal both to his enormous vanity

and to his military and strategic needs.

His future would depend on the outcome.

Excuse me, my Lord, I am not only a musician,

but I've studied the works of those claiming to be engineers of warfare

and I believe I can surpass the best of them.

I can match any man in designing buildings, both public and private.

I can create aqueducts to transport water throughout your land.

-Do the Medici have aqueducts?

-Yes, Your Excellency.

Good. I'll have aqueducts.

And a covered vehicle of iron where soldiers can penetrate through enemy lines and destroy them,

-replacing the need for elephants.

-Your excellency...

there's a line to the brother-in-law of the King of Spain.

Not good enough. Keep looking. ..Go on.

I can make bridges that are light and strong,

that are easily transported when you are pursuing an enemy.

Also, I have devised a means for besieging a castle

by first of all drying up the water in the moat...

Leonardo was put to work, but not as a military engineer.

He was paid a low wage, less than the court dwarf,

to design the drainage for the duchess's bathroom and to install a form of central heating.

"Draw up a plan to show the bath of the duchess.

"To warm the water, add three parts of warm to four parts of cold.

"How to release the water flow

"and remember the commission to paint the rooms."

'So from plumbing, he moves to interior decoration.

'He has to paint the walls of a magnificent reception room.

'The result is, of course, spectacular.'

In this room, he's brought together his twin passions

of nature and architecture

and created a canopy of trees.

He's painted the illusion of a whole forest above our heads -

tree trunks on the walls, intricate leaf patterns.

It must have enthralled Lodovico's guests.

This is Leonardo, the court magician - a master of spectacle.

For the duke's famous parties,

Leonardo was impresario, stage manager and producer all in one.

He designed the elaborate costumes and masks and mechanical novelties to delight the guests.

These events were about prestige and power.

The more lavish the spectacle, the more they enhanced Lodovico's glory.

That's a great spectacle the duke has promised.

All this time and throughout his whole life, Leonardo was also working for himself,

pushing the boundaries of science and discovery with astonishing diversity,

more than any single person before or since.

In his notebooks, he makes daily lists of things to do.

"Construct glasses to see the moon magnified,

"find out how to install bombards and ramparts by day and night,

"how to square the triangle, analyse the movement of the tongue of the woodpecker

"and describe the jaw of the crocodile,

"the Frenchman has promised to tell me the dimensions of the sun,

"and how do they run on ice in Flanders?"

The versatility he showed in his years in Milan was amazing.

He allowed nothing to limit the scope of his imagination - no horizon, no boundaries.

"Do you see how the eye embraces the beauty of the whole world?

"It is the window of the soul.

"It informs the arts.

"It is the foundation of science.

"It measures the distance of the stars. It discovers the elements.

"It is the inventor of architecture AND the divine art of painting."

Leonardo was one of the first to investigate how our eyes see,

but to do this, he had to invent a method for dissecting them.

His notes read like a recipe.

"To study the interior without spilling its watery humour,

"place the whole eye in the white of an egg and boil until solid,

"then slice both the egg and the eye transversely

"and you will find that no part of it will drain away."

At this time, it was thought that the eye sent out rays of light to illuminate what was in front of it.

Leonardo realised that it was the other way around.

We see because light penetrates the eye and informs the brain.

He tested his own ingenuity against the method and materials of his age.

He invented epic schemes of engineering and mechanics -

machines to dredge and excavate huge tracts of land.

He investigated new methods of agriculture and irrigation.

He designed machines for transportation and warfare.

This is an early idea for a gunboat.

He even planned an early form of automobile, powered by a spring motor,

but he still hadn't managed to get any of his grand designs off the ground.

There was one project that appealed to Sforza's vanity

and Leonardo's artistic ambitions -

a proposal for an immense statue for a horse to be cast in bronze.

It would haunt Leonardo for the next 16 years.

Meanwhile, his constant researches go on.

He studies the effect of sunlight and shade.

"Light is the chaser-away of darkness.

"Shade is the obstruction of light.

"Everything in nature is shaped by them."

His understanding of shadow and light would transform European painting forever.

Here, in The Virgin Of The Rocks, in these luminous faces,

he achieves an emotional intensity which takes the breath away.

During this time in Milan,

Leonardo took on a young boy as apprentice, Giacomo Caprotti.

"Giacomo had come to live with me on St Mary Magdalene's Day,

"the 22nd July 1490.

"The second day he was here I'd had some clothes made for him

"and when I put aside the money I had to pay for them, he stole the money.

"The first night, he'd eaten enough for two,

"broken his glass, spilt the wine and smashed a cruet."

You'll be the cause of my early death.

"I decided from that day to call him Salai, 'the demon'."

He was completely indulgent of the boy.

That's how the relationship works. They have huge fights.

Leonardo forgives him. He loves his fecklessness.

That's part of the attraction, that he is a disreputable, but eminently forgivable, loveable young man.

Salai, I want to make peace with you. No more war.

I give in.

That relationship is the most constant one in Leonardo's life,

culminating in Salai's inheritance

of many of Leonardo's pictures.

Salai seems to occupy this critical emotional space in Leonardo's life.

He doesn't have a wife, doesn't have children, doesn't want them.

He has to put his emotions somewhere

and this curly-haired, mischievous little boy is where they end up.

Leonardo's household was increasing. Salai was an expensive addition.

The duke was still paying the bills,

but he must have seen his Florentine genius

as something of a liability.

Leonardo has managed to complete one major commission for Sforza -

a painting of his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani.

It's one of the great portraits of the Renaissance.

It's as if she lives and breathes. You've done well, da Vinci.

To other matters. You wrote this six years ago.

"A great horse of bronze to the immortal glory of the house of Sforza." Six years.

Yes, Your Excellency. The work is underway. I have here the plans for the horse.

23 feet from the height of the horse's head to the base.

-The drawings are impressive.

-It cannot be done.

-Even the master crafters of antiquity never managed it.

-It can.

The great horse was a project which had captured the imagination of the whole Renaissance world.

Many aspired to it. Only Leonardo was mad enough to take it on.

It would bring fame and glory, but this was no ordinary commission.

It was to be a monument 24 feet high - a huge, prancing horse -

to be cast from 60 tons of bronze.

A metal rod will pass through the arm...

-It's impossible to cast on such a scale.

-I will devise a new method.

I will create one huge cast buried deep beneath the earth, but first I will make a clay cast, your...

We will see the clay model, but no more delays.

As more time went by, Leonardo's grand design still hadn't happened,

in spite of his confidence.

And again the months turned into years.

He's studying like crazy. He's talking to bronze casters,

he's talking to bell makers and to cannon makers.

Those are the people who are familiar with large-scale pourings.

It dovetails perfectly with Leonardo's ambitions.

It's an extraordinary civic project to work on something

which has fascinated him - the figure of a horse,

how to represent a realistic horse.

In his notebooks, he made hundreds of beautiful studies of wild horses

and of those in the duke's stables,

but still the technical problems of the monument itself hadn't been resolved.

-We will make a clay cast...

-We will see the clay model. No more delays.

Your excellency will not be dissatisfied.

Leonardo finally produced the full-size clay model for Lodovico.

It was regarded as a masterpiece in its own right

and a technical miracle,

but it would never be cast in bronze.

In his notes, Leonardo writes again and again of his hatred of violence,

but still, alongside his drawings from nature,

there are plans for some of the most inventive and fearsome of war machines.

Here's what he writes about man's inhumanity to man.

"If you think destroying wonderful works of nature is criminal,

"consider how much worse it is to kill a man.

"Let not your rage and malice destroy a single life."

There's an ambiguity in his view. He calls war "beastly madness".

He's a humane man, but is fascinated by the application of force,

that if he can channel the forces of nature into these amazing machines,

he will create something amazing.

Perhaps the most intriguing of all his designs

was what appears to be a forerunner of the tank,

which wasn't invented until the First World War, 400 years later.

We asked the Royal Armoured Corps to build and test Leonardo's tank.

This is an initial drawing and, of course, when he had designed and developed it,

it would have evolved, because you have to develop it. This is an initial design!

We've given the Army a flat-pack kit of the tank to assemble.

It'll be made of wood and steel.

The first big challenge is to build Leonardo's gears.

What is, basically, the technology which is going to drive this tank?

The technology is just sheer arm power.

You've got these sweating men inside this infernal machine,

doing this with lantern gearing systems, to get it to move.

One, two, three, go! >

Keep it going! Keep it going!

Keep it going! Keep it going! >

You're NOT going fast enough! Keep it going! Come on! Come on! ..Hold it there! Hold it there!

Despite the brute force of half a dozen men, the prototype is not moving.

It appears that Leonardo's design had one fundamental error.

-We've sussed out the problem.

-Where did he go wrong?

He's got the gears in the wrong place on the wheels.

If this is the rear of the vehicle, he has the gears on the front.

-If we take that as the front, he's got them on the rear.

-Right.

So, as you turn the crank,

-both wheels go opposite ways.

-So the front wheel goes backwards, and the back wheel frontwards?

-Yes.

-How do we solve it?

-We'll need to move one of the gears.

So both wheels go in the same direction?

That sounds like a pretty good idea to me! Let's get the welder on that!

With Leonardo's grasp of mechanics, he would surely have known this.

But maybe he'd overlooked it, or not addressed it.

This is only a preliminary sketch.

And, with the gears moved to the other side of the wheel,

the tank is ready to go.

The design itself is ingenious. Again, Leonardo seems to have taken

his inspiration from nature.

One thing's for sure - the shell shape provides perfect protection.

That causes enemy projectiles to glance off...

Leonardo designed the tank to carry 20 cannon, which would have created havoc at close range.

He even suggested cannon which could be loaded from within the tank,

rather than outside, but this would depend on the tank actually moving!

-Listen up!

-Get going!

With the Army's application and practical knowledge of engineering,

the tank is a success!

Once you've broken the ranks and they're breached, you can get other people through.

I think he envisaged literally that. They break a hole in the ranks of the enemy, and create mayhem

within their own space.

Leonardo had again designed something hundreds of years before its time.

His invention would have been an astonishing achievement, bringing him the recognition and the status

he yearned for, but, like so many of his ideas, he was never given the chance to try it out.

By 1495, Leonardo had been working for Lodovico Sforza for 13 years.

Despite Leonardo's unreliability,

the duke now decided to entrust him with a commission which was both precious and personal.

The monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie was a place Lodovico loved.

He sought consolation here after his wife's death.

He even ate with the monks in the refectory.

And it was in their dining room that he asked Leonardo to paint the scene of the Last Supper.

The subject had been painted many times -

Christ's last meal with his disciples -

and invariably with formality and respect,

a line of pious faces surrounding the figure of Christ.

But Leonardo wanted to do something quite different.

His idea was to capture one moment in time -

the most alive, the most dramatic of all -

when Jesus announces to his disciples that one of them

will be his betrayer.

It's a hugely ambitious scheme and, though Leonardo has the vision for it, it requires practical expertise

in fresco painting that he doesn't have.

-There doesn't seem to be any evidence that Leonardo did fresco work before this?

-No, there's none.

Basically, it's a kind of high-class decorating.

I mean, there's a very complicated process.

You have several layers of plaster, built up over a few weeks.

The last one, the intonaco, is the wet surface of the plaster that you paint into.

How long would it have taken him to prepare a huge surface like this

-for the Last Supper?

-I would say a confident and experienced fresco

painter would be able to do it in two or three months, maybe less,

but Leonardo was (a) not experienced, and (b)

not very prone to doing anything quickly!

The normal approach would have been to copy preparatory drawings onto the damp plaster,

using a technique called pricking -

tracing the sketch onto the plaster.

You have to be careful with it, as you have to move and work quickly,

but that doesn't suit him, does it?

It's wrong for what we understand of Leonardo's psychology. This technique must have maddened him.

The idea of a fresco is to plan it in advance.

You don't mess around once you've started - you carry on.

You had to lay enough plaster for one day's work,

and then the clock starts ticking.

You had to paint wet pigment into the plaster while it's still active.

So you can understand why he'd just stand and look at the picture and not dare go for it

until he'd decided what to do?

Yeah. You can't fuss with this stuff. You just get on with it.

As we know, "getting on with it" was not Leonardo's forte

at the best of times. But he found a solution.

He decided not to do the fresco the usual way.

Instead, he invented a plaster he could paint on when dry.

This allowed him to take his time.

Unfortunately, the duke insisted on regular progress reports.

Many a time, Your Excellency,

I've seen him arrive early and spend the entire day on the platform,

until sunset, never laying down his brush, without eating or drinking.

Then, three or four days would pass without him even touching the work.

Yet, every day, he'd spend several hours just...looking...

considering...then suddenly leave and go elsewhere.

It is as the fancy takes him!

But Leonardo WAS hard at work. He was out in the streets, sketching,

seeking out the right faces, the right gestures,

to bring alive each disciple.

One twists the finger of his hands. Another, with his hands spread,

shows his palms. Another turns with stern brows to his friend.

-How can you be so slow?

-I devote two, three hours a day to the work.

How can that be if you never go there?

For one whole year, I have gone every day,

morning, noon and night, to the Borghetto, to try to find a face to express the villainy of Judas.

If all else fails, I could use as a model the face of the Abbot,

who complains about me to Your Excellency!

For 36 months, I have had six mouths to feed - my pupils, my serving girl...

I've earned 50 ducats for a sketch.

We will see you receive money, but the painting must be finished!

In spite of Lodovico's warnings, the Last Supper was to take another year of work,

and of constant complaints from Leonardo, begging for back salary.

But he HAD found his Judas and, at last, early in 1498,

the Last Supper was finished.

You obey nothing, da Vinci, but the demands of your own imagination.

And you're right.

You have surpassed yourself.

I always said it would be a great success!

Tragically, the experimental technique

of painting on dry plaster,

which allowed him time to capture the living moment,

almost led to his masterpiece being lost forever.

A few years after it was finished,

tiny, almost imperceptible cracks appeared under the paint's surface.

Deep in the plaster, moisture was rising and doing damage.

There have since been numerous attempts at restoration,

some of which did more harm than good.

But something of the power of the original remains. It IS a ghost,

but it's a magnificent ghost.

But, as they gazed at the work in 1498, they could have not have guessed its fate, or their own.

Massing nearby were the thousands of French troops dedicated to the overthrow of Sforza.

And, as for the dream of that fabulous bronze horse,

the 60 tons of bronze that Sforza had set aside for it was melted down and forged into cannon.

And the great clay model was used

as target practice by the invading French troops.

Within months, Leonardo would flee Milan. He would be forced to work for patrons

who made Sforza look like an angel.

There would be conflict, too, with a new Pope in Rome,

and he would find his position as the most famous painter in Italy

challenged by a rival who hated and despised him -

a rival called Michelangelo.

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