The Secret Life of the Mona Lisa Leonardo

In 1506, Leonardo da Vinci left his native Florence

and took to the road in search of work and patrons.

His travels would take him to Milan, Rome,

and, finally, into exile in France.

And for the last 13 years of his life, everywhere he went,

he carried with him one painting...

It was the portrait of a woman.

And it was to become the most famous image in the history of art.

'A good painter has to bring up two things -

'the physical appearance of the subject he's painting,

'but also what is in the mind,

'the intentions of the soul.

'Achieving the first is easy, the second very hard.'

MUSIC: "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole

# Mona Lisa... #

-Mona Lisa.

-# Mona Lisa, Men have named you... #

-Mona Lisa.

-Mona Lisa.

-# You're so like the lady... #

She's a man.

# ..Mystic smile... #

This is Italiano. # Is it only cos you're lonely... #

When I was eight years old, I saw it for the first time.

# For that Mona Lisa... # Leonardo da Vinci.

# In your smile... # It's beautiful, man.

# Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? #

Michelangelo.

# Or is this your way To hide a broken hea-a-a-art?

# Many dreams have been brought To your doorstep... #

This is the story of the most famous work of art

ever created by a human hand.

A painting so valuable, it's impossible to put a price on it.

In the Louvre, in Paris, it's known as painting number 779.

It's a portrait of an unknown Italian lady, who seems to be smiling. Her name - Mona Lisa -

simply means Madonna, Lady Lisa.

Yet from the moment she was painted, 500 years ago,

she's obsessed and intrigued the whole world.

Who was this mysterious lady? How did she become such a superstar?

And what is the secret of her smile?

Wherever you look at this woman,

you have an impression that she is looking at you.

I heard that she was pregnant at the time.

-You heard...?

-She was pregnant.

She was having a baby.

Expecting a baby.

I don't think it's a smile. It's the way her face is formed.

Some people have smiles, some don't. I, if I'm not smiling -

which is probably why I always smile -

will have a mouth that goes down.

People say to me, "Don't worry. It's not the end of the world."

I think she's probably got an expression that is...at peace

with the world around her.

I see a woman that's looking at someone and saying, "You've got me on my worst day of the month!

"What am I doing here?

"And you're trying to get me to smile at you."

That's what I'm seeing.

She's trying her best.

But she's pretty annoyed about it. And I don't blame her.

# Mona Lisa

# Mona-a-a Li-isa-a-a. #

Today, like a Hollywood star, the Mona Lisa has her own bodyguards.

She lives in an air-conditioned concrete box, protected by triple bulletproof glass.

It doesn't seem to deter over six million tourists every year.

So what's the secret of her fascination?

Why has this, of all the images in the world,

gripped the imagination of so many people for the past 500 years?

Kings, emperors and presidents have all paid their respects to her.

On the Mona Lisa's American tour, Kennedy greeted her as the ultimate symbol of Western civilisation.

We citizens of nations unborn at the time of its creation

are among the inheritors and protectors of the ideal

which gave it birth.

For this painting is not only one of the towering achievements

of the skill and the vision of art,

but its creator embodied the central purpose of our civilisation.

She's been exploited and replicated in so many forms,

that it's easy to forget she was once a living, breathing person,

her image and expression caught in one moment of time

and immortalised by the hand of the artist.

This is how I think the Mona Lisa first looked

when Leonardo painted her in 1503.

It's a cleaned-up version of the picture we're familiar with.

To get to this, there have been many changes and stages involved.

I'll show you some of those stages.

This is a board of poplar wood, which the Mona Lisa was painted on.

Everybody thinks people used canvas, but then, they painted on wood.

In the south of Europe, it was poplar, in the north, it was oak.

It's this nice, solid wood that became a masterpiece.

Chalk drawing.

Now almost certainly, Leonardo would have done a chalk drawing

or an image in pen or silverpoint, to give an idea of the look of the portrait, the feel.

The drawing would be transferred by pricking and pouncing.

The little lines would have been joined up by the wet fluid paint.

This will surprise you. A green face, brown dress, blue background.

What's happening here? He's roughing in what goes where colourwise.

We're roughing in the flesh tones over the green, so it comes through.

The background and the sky now. The marvellous blue, ultramarine sky.

Mona Lisa.

'Painting excels because it does not fade, as music does, as soon as it is born.

'It endures and keeps all the appearance of being alive, though it's confined to one surface.

'It preserves the transient beauty of mortals

'and endow it with a permanence greater than the works of nature.

'For these are the slaves of time.

'Even when death has destroyed nature's original,

'painting preserves the image of divine beauty.'

To find the first ever mention of the Mona Lisa

in any historical document, we have to travel 150 miles from Paris to Amboise, in the Loire valley.

Leonardo came to live and work here near the end of his life at the invitation of King Francis I.

This is the fine house the king gave him to live in.

On October 10th 1517,

two travellers on the grand tour came to pay their respects to the great painter.

They were Cardinal Louis of Aragon and his secretary, de Beatis.

This is what de Beatis recorded in his diary -

"Leonardo showed the Cardinal three pictures. One was a Florentine lady

"painted from life at the request of Giuliano de' Medici.

"It was absolute perfection. This I have seen with my own eyes."

By 1530, the Mona Lisa found her way into the royal collection.

Unfortunately, King Francis decided she would look particularly good on the walls of his bathroom.

She was kept there for many years. Experts believe that the craquelure on the surface

is partly due to the steam from the royal ablutions.

From the bathroom to the bedroom, the king also possessed

this curious striptease version of the Mona Lisa, called the Monna Vanna.

'What could possibly connect this and Leonardo's masterpiece?'

Its origins are obscure, but it's clearly related to the portrait of Mona Lisa,

except she's not wearing anything.

There is a rather unusual taste at the court of Francis I

for nude portraits of respectable women.

There's one of two women in the bath pinching each other's nipples.

This is a way of celebrating their fecundity,

because breast milk is a symbol of the way that you create children.

So the Monna Vanna may fit in best with the taste of the French court.

The Monna Vanna was probably the work of Leonardo's favourite pupil, Salai.

The Mona Lisa was locked away till the people of France decided they didn't want a monarchy any more.

When the French Revolution began in 1789,

the aristocracy was sent in their thousands to the guillotine.

Soon, King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, would be executed.

The royal collections were plundered and the palace of the Louvre became a people's museum.

It was there the Mona Lisa was put on public view for the first time.

When Napoleon came to power and was crowned emperor of France,

one of his first demands was to have the Mona Lisa removed from the Louvre and placed in his bedroom

in the Tuileries, thus reviving the tradition of the royal collection.

He kept her there for nearly a decade and called her Madame Lisa.

His fascination with Leonardo continued as he invaded Italy.

There he found Leonardo's drawings and notebooks.

He took those back to France, too.

He said, "All men of genius are French,

"no matter what their country of birth."

After the fall of Napoleon, the Mona Lisa returns to the Louvre,

and starts its life as a tourist attraction in the French capital.

Then, 100 years on, on August 21st 1911, in the early hours of the morning,

she becomes the leading player in a story of crime, politics and extortion.

The thief had spent the Sunday night hiding in the building.

While the security guard was asleep,

he slipped out through a back door into the courtyard,

and then made his escape along one of the quays of the River Seine.

'Visitors to the Louvre were undeterred.

'For some time after, they queued up to contemplate the blank space where the Mona Lisa had once hung.'

The theft made headline news around the world.

A massive police hunt was launched.

Among those suspects brought in for questioning

was a radical young Spanish artist called Pablo Picasso.

'But by this time, the Mona Lisa was a long way away.'

On November 11th 1913, Alfredo Geri, a Florentine antiques dealer

received a letter offering him the Mona Lisa for half a million Lira -

today, about a million pounds. The letter was signed "Leonardo."

Signore, ecco La Gioconda.

A month later, the mysterious Leonardo instructed Signor Geri

to meet him at this hotel in the Via Panzani.

Geri took with him Giovanni Poggi, a Leonardo expert and the director of the Uffizi Museum.

The two men then made their way to the man's room on the second floor of the hotel.

What happened next, Signor Geri recalled as the most exciting moment of his life.

"At first, all we could see was dirty, festering old clothes,

"but then we noticed the trunk had a false bottom.

"As it came into view, we had the conviction this WAS

"the authentic work of Leonardo da Vinci."

Poggi had been told by the Louvre

to look for a splinter mark on the back of the panel. It was there.

It confirmed that this was the real Mona Lisa.

BELLS CHIME

"The smile of the Mona Lisa was again alive in Florence."

Florentines are proud that the picture was recovered here,

because they felt at last the Mona Lisa had come home.

This was, after all, Leonardo's native city,

the place he trained as an artist and where he first began to work on his most famous picture in 1503.

Leonardo the thief was also a Florentine.

A house painter, whose real name was Vincenzo Perugia.

He claimed to be a patriot who had stolen the Mona Lisa so she could be returned to her motherland.

POLICE SIRENS WAIL

He was tried. He got six months -

a very lenient sentence, incidentally.

And in a way, he became famous.

When he died, he had an obituary in the press -

"The Man Who Stole The Mona Lisa."

The Italian government was in an embarrassing situation.

It was when Italy was trying to build an empire in Africa.

The government was under pressure -

"This is our painting. Leonardo was Italian. Mona Lisa is Italian.

"Let's keep it." It was shown in Rome, Florence and Milan.

It travelled, and crowds flocked.

TRAIN HORN SOUNDS

Unfortunately, the French wanted their painting back.

She's then taken back to Paris in the train

and welcomed by a huge crowd at the train station.

For three days there is an exhibit with her and the crowds flocked.

With interest, every little thing can be built up.

One should add that other paintings had been stolen before

and did not receive such publicity.

So there was something about the Mona Lisa, but particularly something about Leonardo.

By 1500, Leonardo had returned to Florence after 17 years in Milan,

but it was no longer safe for him there.

His patron had been deposed and imprisoned by the French army.

By now, he was absorbed with his inventions and experiments.

He wasn't painting any more.

When he came to live at the Servite Monastery,

the monks expected some paintings in return for his board.

But as one priest, Father Pietro, noted,

"Leonardo was, by now, weary of the brush."

Then in 1503, something happened to rekindle Leonardo's interest in painting.

A woman arrives in his studio for him to paint her likeness,

and Leonardo agrees. He begins work on the portrait that will obsess him for the rest of his life.

So what happened, then, to make him change his mind?

Part of the reason may simply have been money.

This is the Santa Maria Nuovo, a monastery and a hospital which also served as a bank.

Leonardo kept his savings here,

and quite remarkably, his bank statements from those crucial months in 1503 still survive.

He was withdrawing 50 florins every few months and not paying anything back in.

He had an expensive household to maintain,

so it's possible he took on the commission of the Mona Lisa

simply to get some quick and ready cash.

Even if he was short of money, why would he take on this commission

and turn down work from some of the richest patrons of the day?

What's remarkable about Leonardo is that more than anybody of his time,

and more than anybody for decades after, he worked for himself.

He did what interested him.

It's not that he didn't need to make a living - he did. He needed income.

More than he wanted to satisfy his patrons, whoever they were,

he wanted to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity,

his own aesthetic needs.

The patrons for him were enablers and inconveniences, at worst.

From patrons you first get flattery, then hard work, then ingratitude and recriminations.

The most obvious thing that patrons wanted from their portraits

was to establish their identity.

But in the case of the Mona Lisa,

Leonardo deliberately avoided even this basic requirement.

In his other portraits, Leonardo left some clue or symbol,

so that people could identify the sitter.

This is the earliest of them.

The subject is by a juniper bush,

because in Italian, juniper or ginepro, is a play on her name.

Ginevra de'Benci.

And in his exquisite portrait of Cecilia Gallerani,

the ermine she's holding is a mascot of her lover,

the Duke of Sforza.

But in the Mona Lisa,

he left no clue in the picture at all

and there is no mention of her in any of his writings.

She's simply a mysterious woman sitting in a landscape.

He may not have wanted to reveal her name,

but his secret inspired one of the greatest quests in the history of art -

to discover the Mona Lisa's true identity.

One person who would have loved to have had her portrait painted in oil

by Leonardo da Vinci is Isabella d'Este, the Marchioness of Mantua.

When he visited her, he did at least two charcoal sketches.

Brief, rapid, bravura performance sits there.

Left one with her, and took the other on his travels to Florence.

Now for the next two years, she's in constant negotiation,

pleading with him to finish the portrait

or send the sketch back, or send her SOMETHING from his hand.

She was so desperately keen, she even pleaded with Cecilia Gallerani to borrow HER portrait by Leonardo,

so she could work out her own instructions to the painter.

Isabella was a bit of a pain.

She sent lengths of string of how big the figures should be.

Even for people being used to told what to paint,

this was going a bit far.

I think Leonardo probably found her rather oppressive.

'But there's no shortage of other possibilities.'

Visitors to Leonardo's house in 1517 thought the model was Isabella Gualanda,

the exotic mistress of his old patron, Giuliano de'Medici.

There's further possibility in the august figure of Constanza Davalos.

From a warmongering dynasty,

she was a military commander in her own right.

There's an Italian poem which names Constanza as the veiled lady

in a portrait by an artist called Vinci.

Finally, there's a Florentine housewife, Lisa Gherardini,

named by Leonardo's biographer, Vasari.

The best way to clear up this confusion is by going to Milan.

'I wanted to look through documents related to the painting's history

'that might help identify the most likely sitter.'

There are problems with all four candidates.

Medici mistresses flaunted their status with jewels.

Not for them, the restrained taste of the Mona Lisa.

And the well-endowed Grand Duchess was well over 40 and a widow

when the Mona Lisa was painted, so she's unlikely.

As for the vain, imperious Isabella d'Este,

if she really had persuaded Leonardo to paint her portrait,

wouldn't she have made absolutely sure the whole world knew about it?

There are also doubts about Lisa Gherardini.

Italian scholars find it hard to believe Leonardo

would have chosen to paint a middle-class housewife.

After centuries of uncertainty, a vital piece of evidence

has only just come to light in the Milan State Archive.

It's a probate document, detailing the estate of one Gian Giacomo Caprotti, who was murdered in 1525.

And we know Gian Giacomo as Salai, the little devil,

Leonardo's lifetime companion.

The original is too delicate to handle, but from this photocopy,

it's clear why scholars regard it as a crucial piece of the Mona Lisa jigsaw.

It's a list of all Salai's possessions.

One entry, in particular, is absolutely fascinating.

It refers to a picture... "quadro dicto La Honda" ..called La Honda.

It's valued at 505 lira. A small fortune at the time.

A price which could only be attached to a Leonardo masterpiece,

that he left to Salai.

The plot thickens because there's a second document.

In this document the abbreviation "La Honda" is scratched out

and replaced with "La Gioconda."

We know that the married name

of one of Leonardo's sitters, Lisa Gherardini, was Lisa del Gioconda.

So after 500 years, the mystery of the Mona Lisa's identity has finally been resolved.

Salai's inventory confirms Lisa del Gioconda,

the Florentine housewife was indeed the Mona Lisa.

This is one of the most amazing discoveries.

You sit in the Milan archives day after day after day.

It's a freezing cold place.

And you're reading all this Latin, and then suddenly,

you've got it. You've got a document which tells you finally something you didn't know before.

So who was Lisa del Gioconda?

By tracking down marriage and birth certificates,

we've managed to discover some tantalising details.

She lived here in the Via della Stufa with her husband, Francesco, a silk merchant.

She was the daughter of a middle-class landowner,

got married at 16 and was Francesco's third wife.

His two other wives died tragically in childbirth.

Lisa herself lost a daughter, but she did have two other children.

What she meant to Leonardo, we'll probably never know.

If this was meant to be a portrait of a respectable housewife,

then it's very odd. Quite unlike any other picture of its time.

It's here, at the Uffizi galleries in Florence,

that you can get a clear idea of how radical the Mona Lisa must have seemed in its day.

Just three decades earlier,

masters like Piero della Francesca, had to abide by social conventions.

The whole point of these portraits was to show off your status.

So they wore their best clothes,

their jewels, their finery, so they could be seen in all their glory.

It was very much a man's world, and here you have the man.

The owner, essentially, of the wife who is the possession.

She has to be modest, chaste, virtuous, that's what's expected.

Loose hair was a sign of eroticism, so it was frowned upon.

You can see that her hair was trussed up and decorated.

Certainly not allowed to flow in any way.

In the materialistic culture of 16th-century Florence -

EVERYTHING was about keeping up appearances.

By comparison, Leonardo decides to throw away the rule book.

Far from being fashionable, her dress is plain and timeless.

Lisa is a married woman, but she wears no wedding ring.

Indeed, there's no jewellery, no adornment of any kind,

apart from a simple gold braid on her neckline.

We're told nothing about her family's wealth or social position.

Her loose hair would have been seen as implying loose morals,

the curls falling sensually over her shoulders.

And there's another radical innovation - her pose.

Traditionally, Renaissance paintings have been profile.

It's like me standing like this, and you'd only see the profile.

What Leonardo does is as if he's calling Lisa.

He calls Lisa, Lisa turns towards him, looks at him, looks at you.

And has the upper part of her body looking somewhere else.

It's a snapshot. It's in the middle of the movement.

He's been able to do that,

and thus introducing into portrait painting

something which existed in sculpture, in a single portrait.

This was such an achievement that Raphael and others started imitating it.

Nowadays, when a photographer takes a picture of you,

they say, "Please, don't look at the camera, look slightly away."

They try to disturb the staticity of the pose,

and in so doing, they reproduce Leonardo's great discovery.

And, then, there's her gaze.

But is she looking directly at us or through us?

Is she looking past us?

Over our shoulder, at something we can't see?

Leonardo understood the compulsion we feel when we meet someone

to read their character from their face.

He challenges us to interpret her thoughts, to capture, in his words,

"The motions of her mind and the passions of her soul."

But he teases us.

He draws a veil of ambiguity across her features.

And, then, of course, there's the riddle of that smile.

# Mona Lisa

# Mona Lisa, men have named you

# You're so like the lady

# With the mystic smile

# Is it only cos you're lonely They have blamed you?

# For that Mona Lisa strangeness

# In your smile?

# Do you smile to tempt a lover

# Mona Lisa?

# Or is this your way

# To hide a broken heart?

# Many dreams... #

One of the reasons that the smile fascinates people is because they can't quite make it out.

I think something of this is to do with the fact that it's lopsided.

Look at this, if I cover this side of the picture, that looks severe.

If I turn it round and cover this side of the face...

Now she looks like she's smiling.

And you see that the smile is also mirrored by the landscape,

because the landscape seems lopsided, too.

On the left, you see the water lower in the frame,

and on the right, it seems to be higher in the frame,

protruding from the right-hand side of the picture.

Leonardo did nothing by accident. He liked optical effects.

This must have been intentional. It gives you a sense of unease.

What is she smiling at? What does she have that we don't have?

What does she know about our thoughts that we don't?

Leonardo was a man listening to voices unheard by other people.

The smile, to me, is saying,

"I know things that you will never know.

"I understand you and the world in ways

"that you will never conceive of."

It's his message to the world.

It's essentially his message to himself at the same time.

That's why I think, in this portrait,

he's painting biography and autobiography at the same time.

Leonardo's mother was a peasant girl, Caterina,

who'd had a brief liaison with his father, Ser Piero.

She was married off to another man,

but she's said to have wet-nursed Leonardo for at least 18 months.

Then he was brought up by his stepmother, Dona Albiera.

Both woman are said to have been deeply affectionate and loving.

This separation from his birth mother

suggested another interpretation of the Mona Lisa

to the founding father of psychoanalysis.

We begin to suspect the possibility

that it was his mother who possessed the mysterious smile,

the smile that he had lost,

that fascinated him so much when he found it in the Florentine lady.

In Leonardo's later painting, the Virgin And St Anne,

Freud saw the same smile - the Mona Lisa smile on both women.

As he saw it, both mother figures.

Both of these women adored him,

which becomes, in the classical Freudian sense,

the perfect situation in which a child, a male child, is likely to become homosexual.

Leonardo was in the sense of what we talk about being gay. He was gay.

He probably slept with men. I think that all the evidence,

in terms of his life and his art.

Most of the drawings are of men and it's centred around the midriff.

Look at the care and the detail and the obsession

with the ideal male form.

It is repeated and drawn over again and again and again,

which doesn't compare to the way the female form is represented.

Leonardo's faces often seemed to have some kind of sexual ambiguity.

And here is that smile again on his most androgynous figure -

the portrait of St John.

He, too, seems to have some secret knowledge,

some understanding of what lies hidden in the darkness.

What of Lisa del Gioconda herself?

While she sat for Leonardo, did she, too, have a secret?

One that might explain the mystery of her smile.

It's my personal thought that she is pregnant.

In the first place, if you look at her hands, she's supposed to be a young woman in her early 20s.

There's no question she has swollen fingers as you look at the picture,

or that she's holding her hands in an attitude

we're accustomed to seeing in women far advanced in pregnancy.

In 1502, 1503, Lisa del Gioconda was expecting a child - second child.

They were moving into a new house the next year,

so it may be prosaic that this was to celebrate her pregnancy.

Although it's perfectly obvious that Leonardo wasn't physically attracted to women,

he was fascinated by them, both as an artist and a scientist.

Most men of his time believed

that the male was responsible for the act of procreation.

Leonardo realised that the man's role was quick and easy,

whereas the woman's was complex and mysterious.

He was convinced that women were key to the process of creation.

Leonardo's notebooks reveal

that after painting the Mona Lisa during the day,

he would come to the hospital at Santa Maria Nuovo,

and spend the night cutting up female corpses.

He wanted to learn everything, not just about the surface of the body,

but what lay underneath.

Leonardo was the first anatomist to document the female body.

This astonishing drawing is called The Great Lady.

In the margins, some of Leonardo's characteristic notes to himself,

ideas that become the foundation for a new science - embryology.

Begin with the formation of the infant,

put in such parts as are successively composed

according to the duration of the pregnancy

and how it is nourished until birth.

Leonardo makes the first drawings of a human foetus in the womb.

He was making this, and he'd been doing the dissection at the time that he was painting the Mona Lisa.

That seems so extraordinary to me.

This dissection was not a dissection.

It was a synthesis of everything he was learning about the human body.

It's almost the most remarkable anatomical drawing ever made.

These are drawings about what makes a living body a living body.

And one of the things he's most interested in in anatomy

is the cycle of life, death, and maturity.

He's doing Leda at the same time, this painting about generation.

Here is this wonderful image of a bird -

we know his obsession with flight - mating with a woman

and producing babies from eggs.

What a subject for Leonardo. This is absolutely perfect.

It's all the mysteries of generation all in one package.

If you put, as we've done literally, this together

and think that Leonardo, a great sculptor of things in his mind,

in a sense saw this inside her body.

You suddenly think, "Wow! That is how he looked at it!"

He thinks he's really getting to the mystery of life -

the cyclical nature of the death of things and the birth of things.

This then refracts back beautifully into the landscape

and the notion of the cyclical change of things.

How landscape changes over vast periods of time.

When you see a scene of the primeval or primordial world

behind the person being portrayed,

it immediately puts you in mind of creation,

of early forms that will evolve into what we are today.

In the foreground, you are looking at a woman who represents exactly the same thing.

It strikes me as it's a very unstable picture.

You have these towering mountains behind. They're overhanging.

They look like they might fall down. The lakes are very full.

They might come tumbling over the dam and wash away the bridge.

I do wonder whether what he's depicting here

is how he imagined the Arno Valley would have looked

in previous times.

There is some clear evidence in the notebooks

that he thought there used to be a lake where Florence stood.

There is a lake lower down the valley.

Maybe this is what he's seeing with these two lakes.

He's imagining what the landscape used to look like.

So what's going on here?

How does the Mona Lisa connect with the primeval landscape behind her?

It's time to get out of the city and go back to where it all began -

the Tuscan landscape where Leonardo spent his childhood.

The valley of the River Arno wasn't just his playground, it was his laboratory.

Here he studied the principles of flight,

the dynamics of water, of light and perspective.

So is the apparently fantastical landscape behind the Mona Lisa real or imaginary?

30 miles from Florence, the Buriano Bridge crosses the River Arno.

Is this the bridge behind the Mona Lisa?

What we do know for sure is that Leonardo knew the bridge and the surrounding area intimately.

The Buriano had a vital, strategic importance to the city of Arezzo.

A year before beginning the Mona Lisa, Leonardo was sent here

as a military engineer to the infamous warlord, Cesare Borgia.

And only minutes away from the Buriano Bridge, there was another connection with the Mona Lisa.

This epic landscape is known to locals as the valley of hell.

These primeval rock formations rise hundreds of feet out of nowhere to form a ridge

running some 30 miles along the Arno River.

The rocks appear frequently in his notebooks

and there are similar forms in the backgrounds of other paintings.

The Virgin Of The Rocks.

The Virgin And St Anne.

Little rivulet streams have carved their way down through these rocks,

and formed the amazing shapes you see today.

And that's, I'm sure, what Leonardo understood had happened.

The Mona Lisa gives a very clear sense of time passing,

particularly in the landscape in the background.

You have a clear depiction of the geological cycle.

You have the river starting up in the mountains.

These very jagged, unstable mountains.

It wends its way down bringing the sediments with it, until it eventually gets to the sea.

Leonardo had this idea that it was taken back up to the mountains again

and would start again.

So you have this continuity,

this continual cycle of geological time forever.

In Leonardo's time, the natural world was regarded as a wilderness,

best avoided by God-fearing people.

But Leonardo was not God-fearing.

Like his contemporary, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo was an explorer.

He had an insatiable curiosity to observe the unknown world.

'I came one day to the mouth of a great cavern.

'I had never been here before, never been aware of its existence. I stood for a time,

'peering in to see what forms had been created there by nature, but the darkness of the cave was deep.

'I felt fear and desire. Fear of the mysterious cavern,

'desire to see whether there might be any marvellous thing within its walls.'

Look.

-What is it?

-It's a whale.

I think.

How many years this beast has ploughed through the oceans.

Chasing the tuna fish, buffeting the ships,

creating great storms in its wake.

'Oh, time, swift destroyer of all things living,

'how many kings, how many peoples

'have you brought low since this creature was flung here to die?

'Its bare bones become the columns to support a mountain.'

He's at the mouth of the cave and he's afraid to go in,

but his curiosity is pulling him in.

Ironically, what does he find when he gets in there?

He finds the fossil of a great fish, very likely a whale,

and the beginnings of the Earth.

Everything is tied in in his work.

The search for the maternal power of generation,

and then the perpetuation of a species.

Here's another sea creature. A thousand more.

These shellfish once lived underneath the ocean.

How do you think they got up here, on the top of a mountain?

-The Great Flood?

-No.

The Bible says fossils were carried onto the mountains by Noah's flood.

But to Leonardo, this was nonsense because fossils were found in many different layers of rock.

Did the Great Flood sweep them up in a mass and line them up in rows?

So what he realises is that actually it was just a coming and a going of the sea.

The sea would wash over the land at some point and deposit these fossils

and then wash away and the fossils wouldn't be deposited.

Therefore, you would gradually build up these layers

and this was incredibly important

because it was another 150 years before this theory -

we call it "The Law Of Superposition" -

before people realised that that's what actually happened.

Such heretical observations were unpublishable,

but they provided Leonardo with a new theory of creation.

"Only observation", he said "is the key to understanding."

His observations told him the Earth wasn't created in six days,

that it took thousands if not millions of years of geological changes,

of atmospheric changes, of biological changes.

To him, there was no question about the way the Earth had evolved.

It evolved the same way a human being evolved.

Drawing together all these threads,

it seems to me that the Mona Lisa provides us with a snapshot

of the mature Leonardo's mind,

a distillation of all he discovered through a lifetime's observation into the secrets of nature.

All his life, Leonardo had wanted to control nature.

He mapped town and countryside, planned to divert great rivers.

He cut through mountains, built bridges, all to rearrange an order - God's creation.

But order had its flipside in disorder and chaos.

Leonardo knew that nature could be both unpredictable and terrifying.

It strikes me as it's an unstable picture. Towering mountains.

They look like they might fall down, tumble down...

-Unease about the picture...

-Biggest cataclysmic changes imaginable.

The River Arno has always been unpredictable and subject to often devastating floods.

As recently as the '60s, it caused terrible destruction to buildings and works of art in Florence.

Leonardo himself had witnessed as a child one of the worst of all deluges.

One he recalls years later...

"The air was darkened by the heavy rain driven aslant by the cross winds.

"The fire rent and tore the clouds asunder.

"What fearful noises were heard as thunder violently shot through it

"to strike anything that lay in its course.

"What wailing as terrified beings flung themselves into the waters.

"How many mothers wept for their dead children?

"Their arms raised to heaven as the hills collapse into the depths of a flooded valley."

Leonardo even produces a record of the aftermath.

Furniture, books, the detritus of everyday life,

heaped up after the terrible flood subsided.

The deluge drawings are, in a sense, the ultimate reflection

of this idea that there is a superior force.

And these are vast forces.

What happens in the human heart, in the mind

are all little microcosmic reflections of these vast forces.

So it's a complete spectrum.

Near the end of his life, there are visions showing insight that however much you understand the forces,

there is an awesome dimension which is outside human ability to control.

"The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters

"is expressive of what in the ways of 1,000 years

"men had come to desire?

"She is older than the rocks among which she sits.

"Like the vampire, she's been dead many times

"and learned the secrets of the grave.

"What was the relationship of a living Florentine to this creature?

"By what strange affinities had the dream and the person

"grown up thus apart, and yet so closely together?"

Leonardo never delivered the portrait of Lisa del Gioconda.

He carried it with him for the last 16 years of his life.

Even into exile.

At the age of 61, Leonardo left Italy never to return.

Younger, more fashionable artists, like Raphael and Michelangelo

were now regularly gaining the most glamorous commissions.

His journey ended at the French town Amboise, in the Loire Valley.

If Leonardo was underappreciated in his homeland,

he was certainly welcomed by the French king.

Francis I was determined to import the glories of the Renaissance.

In recognition of Leonardo's unique status,

he gave him a manor house next door to the royal castle.

Leonardo's last years weren't easy.

He suffered a stroke, which meant he lost the use of his right hand.

But his increasing infirmity didn't matter to the French king,

who treasured every moment he was able to spend with such a wise man.

Many believe that this tunnel in Leonardo's house,

was directly connected to the royal castle in Amboise,

and that Francis I used it to visit Leonardo at night.

They would talk through the night, the old man and the young king.

At last, towards the end of his life,

Leonardo, often misunderstood and taken for granted,

had found a patron who understood the nature of his genius.

In his last years, Leonardo tried to pull together thousands of pages of notes and drawings

into a grand encyclopaedia.

But the task of compiling the observations of a lifetime,

like so many of his ambitious schemes, remained unfinished.

'Well, I thought I was learning how to live.

'I've really been learning how to die.

'As a day well-spent brings happy sleep, so a life well-used

'brings contented death.'

Leonardo died here in his room in Clos-Luce on 2nd May 1519.

He was 67 years old.

He's said to have died in the arms of the French king.

This is how the painter Ingres imagined the scene 300 years later.

The great architect Benvenuto Cellini,

who also served Francis I, wrote this...

"I have to record the words the king spoke to me.

"That he believed there had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo.

"Not so much about painting, sculpture, and architecture,

"as that he was a very great philosopher."

It's taken 500 years for many of Leonardo's ideas to become reality.

We can only begin to understand the sheer scale of his achievements.

When he began his restless journey through life,

the painter was regarded as little more than a lowly craftsman.

Leonardo changed all that.

In one painting, the Mona Lisa, all the passions and preoccupations of a lifetime come together.

The Mona Lisa is the first great psychological portrait.

It's Leonardo's attempt to capture the essence of life itself.

It's not a mystery that's easily resolved,

but he's caught an instant AND an eternity.

Like a magician, he's made the invisible visible.

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.

# Mona Lisa

# Mona Lisa, men have named you

# You're so like the lady with the mystic smile

# Is it only cos you're lonely

# They have blamed you

# For that Mona Lisa strangeness... #

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