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

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

Thank you.

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♪ Man as Leonardo: A good painter must depict two principal things-- namely, the person, and the intentions of their mind.

♪ The first is easy, the second difficult.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: Which nerve causes the eye to move so that the motion of one eye moves the other... ♪ on closing the eyelids, on opening the eyes, on expressing wonder?

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

♪ His duty is to the question.

♪ His duty is to the thirst for knowledge.

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

♪ Man, speaking French: ♪ Narrator: He began few paintings and finished even fewer... but more than 500 years after his death, those he left behind are among the most revered works of art of all time.

A draftsman of incomparable talent, he sketched everything-- people and landscapes, flora and fauna, machines both real and imagined, equations, fables, and allegories.

Painting on wood panels made from walnut or poplar trees, he devised new ways to portray how men and women convey their deepest emotions-- "movements of the mind," he called it-- and elevated painting from a craft to an intellectual pursuit.

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

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

He studied fossils and water dynamics, dissected cadavers and mapped the circulatory system and the human brain.

He attempted to solve the ancient geometric problem of squaring the circle, and he staged experiments on the nature of falling objects more than a century before Galileo and Newton.

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

Writing backwards in a mirror script, he began treatises on a vast array of subjects, combining image and text to communicate profound insights that were, in some cases, centuries ahead of their time, but he left most of them incomplete and published none in his lifetime.

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

In an age of astonishing artistic advances and a newfound reverence for humanity, Leonardo da Vinci made his way, he said, as a "disscepolo della sperientia," a disciple of experience.

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

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

He's persuaded that there are profound likenesses, profound equivalences to be found in the movement of the stars, and in the behavior of an ant hill.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: These indeed are miracles.

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

[Birds squawk] ♪ Narrator: In the spring of 1452, in a tiny village tucked among the Tuscan hills, a prosperous, 80-year-old farmer and landowner named Antonio da Vinci made a note in his ledger.

♪ "There was born to me a grandson-- "the son of Ser Piero, my son-- on the 15th day of April, a Saturday, at the third hour of the night."

Ser Piero was a successful notary in his mid-20s who lived and worked in Florence but returned at times to his ancestral village of Vinci.

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

Though his parents were from different social classes and did not marry, the arrival of their son was cause for celebration.

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

♪ They called him Leonardo.

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

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

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

She was probably a serving girl, a contadina, a peasant woman.

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

Vinci, a village of fewer than 100 families, was made up of a medieval castle, a church, and a modest cluster of homes that gave way to vineyards and olive groves.

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

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

He also grew close to his uncle Francesco, who loved the leisurely pace of country life.

[Speaking French] Narrator: Because he was born out of wedlock, Leonardo was limited in what education he could receive and, eventually, which professions he could pursue.

Woman: The education he got was the kind of education, we think, that merchants' sons got where you get practical mathematics and you learn how to gauge how much oil is in a barrel.

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

[Birds chirp] [Thunder] ♪ [Animal howls] Man as Leonardo: Having wandered some distance among dark rocks, I came to the entrance of a vast cavern... ♪ and after some time there, two contrary emotions arose in me: fear and desire-- fear of the sinister, dark cavern, desire to see whether it contained something wonderous.

♪ Nicholl: The Renaissance is an enlightenment, a rebirth of classical learning, but it's also a time of tremendous change and, therefore, uncertainty.

Everything's up for grabs, and I think the keynote of the time is uncertainty.

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

♪ Narrator: As Europe emerged from a devastating pandemic that had ravaged the continent in the mid-1300s, the city-states that crowded the Italian peninsula established maritime trade routes to Constantinople and North Africa, giving rise to a wealthy class of merchants and bankers and accelerating an exchange of knowledge that helped ignite the cultural explosion that would come to be known as the Renaissance.

Woman: It started in the more mature part of the Middle Ages, but the big change occurs with what is called humanism.

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

Before, it was always to take the knowledge and try to fit the Christian doctrine.

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

It's a secular approach.

It was not there before.

That's what sparks the Renaissance.

Narrator: The Renaissance reached its most profound expression in the city-state of Florence with a blossoming of art and architecture informed by mathematics and science and classical ideals.

Man, speaking French: Del Toro: It's celebrating not only empirical, but physical sensation and why does it happen, where does it come from, how do we belong in the world.

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

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

Since the Middle Ages, it had been the seat of power of the Republic of Florence, a city-state that controlled a large swath of Tuscany.

Its government, a council made up of members of the leading trade guilds called the Signoria, was a source of great pride for the city's inhabitants, but in reality, Florence functioned as an oligarchy in which the richest families controlled the levers of power from behind the scenes.

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

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

Cosimo was also a generous patron of the arts.

Man: Increasingly, artists who previously would've sought to work for the cathedral, to work for the city, to work for one of the guilds want to work for the Medici because working for the Medici is not only a good fee, it also guarantees recognition in a new world of art appreciation.

[Weaving shuttle rattles] Narrator: Florence had long been home to a flourishing garment industry with its silk and wool weavers, leather tanners, and furriers.

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

[Pounding] Nicholl: The Italian word for a studio is "bottega," and that means a shop or, more precisely in this context, a workshop-- a noisy, communal, collective space.

Different people are working on different things.

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

You might also hear, of course, the clucking of chickens because one of the major paints that were used was egg tempera.

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

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

Man: I think he recognized very quickly that young Leonardo was going to be sort of the cream of these young apprentices, someone that he could outsource some of the work to, and someone he could train up to be an extremely good sculptor, painter, jewelry designer, whatever he wanted to be.

Narrator: In the late 1460s, Verrocchio received a commission from the Medici family to cast a bronze statue of David, the Biblical shepherd boy who had slayed the giant Goliath.

Leonardo--whose contemporaries described him as a beautiful, curly-haired youth-- may have been his model.

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

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

Man: Drawing is the key to almost everything.

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

Leonardo said, one should find for oneself a really good master, copy their work because it will train your hand to good form.

Gopnik: He drew with astounding acuity.

If there's one thing that makes Leonardo's drawings distinct from the beautiful drawings of someone like his master Verrocchio, Leonardo adds a note of movement and internal agitation to drawings.

Everything is dissolved into the world of movement.

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

The drapery studies give a sense of light, of depth, but also of motion.

♪ Man as Leonardo: The painter will produce pictures of small merit if he makes other artists' work his standard, but if he studies from natural objects, he will bear good fruit.

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

♪ Bramly, speaking French: ♪ Borgo, speaking Italian: ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Church bell clanging] ♪ King: One of the remarkable things about Florence is that there was a succession of geniuses decade after decade after decade in the 1400s.

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

You could walk through the streets of Florence and see this.

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

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

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

♪ At 143 feet in diameter, the long-planned dome was intended to be wider than that of Rome's celebrated Pantheon, still the world's largest 1,300 years after its completion.

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

It took 18 years, but the structure of the dome was finally completed in 1436, 16 years before Leonardo was born.

♪ Three decades later, Verrocchio won a contract to construct and install a monumental copper sphere 8 feet in diameter and weighing more than 4,000 pounds to complete the lantern atop Brunelleschi's dome.

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

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

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

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

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

The master assigned sections of the work to his talented apprentice, including the Messiah's feet, parts of the landscape, and one of the two angels.

While Verrocchio had painted in tempera and used white highlights to produce contours, Leonardo worked in oil, applying imperceptibly thin layers of color to develop light and shadow and create the illusion of 3-dimensionality.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: The art of perspective is such that it makes what is flat appear in relief and what is in relief appear flat.

♪ Verdon: Part of Leonardo's heritage was the revolutionary invention of single-point linear perspective, so a young man learning art in Florence in the 1460s, as Leonardo would have done, he understood that he had to be a complete master of that.

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

Man: Perspective was very important to the painters.

That's basically how things recede into space and the vanishing point that parallel lines seem to go to.

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

They had a theory, so he began to develop an interest not just in the mathematics of organizing space in pictures, but also in how the eye works and how slippery it is.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: All objects transmit their image to the eye by a pyramid of lines which start from the edges of an object's surface and, converging from a distance, meet in a single point... and I will show that this point is situated in the eye, which is the universal judge of all objects.

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

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

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

Another frequently depicted scene was the Annunciation, the moment in which the angel Gabriel descends from heaven to proclaim to the Virgin Mary that she will give birth to the Son of God.

It would be the focus of one of Leonardo's first independent works.

♪ Though he borrowed freely in technique from Verrocchio, Leonardo's "Annunciation" revealed his grasp of perspective, his deftness with light and shadow, and his devotion to nature.

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

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

♪ There are very, very few times in history when what you did when you had that kind of restless, inquiring, creative mind was to paint pictures.

Renaissance Italy was perhaps the only place and time when that was so, and we're blessed that it was.

♪ ♪ Narrator: Leonardo received another commission-- to paint a portrait of the young poet Ginevra de' Benci, the daughter of a wealthy, well-connected banking family who had occasional dealings with Leonardo's father.

To look at the "Ginevra de' Benci" is probably one of the great ways to understand Leonardo's early painting technique.

It is a very deliberated, very protracted process.

The painting is done on a very thin poplar wood panel, and it has a priming that is gesso.

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

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

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

♪ He applied in the thinnest veils what we call the glazes, or the velature in Italian.

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

♪ Narrator: In a playful reference to Ginevra's name, Leonardo surrounded her with juniper branches, ginepro in Italian.

Borgo, speaking Italian: ♪ Bambach: We can already see how intensely Leonardo believes that the motions of the mind, the motions of the soul-- so the moti dell'animo, e moti dell'anima-- show through this almost inscrutable gaze that she holds, and there is a connectivity with the viewer that gives it this tremendous power.

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

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

♪ Nicholl: Theoretically, it's a crime.

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

He might well have spent time in the holding cells.

Narrator: But among the accused was a son of the Tornabuoni family, a powerful Florentine clan with enough connections to have the charges dropped.

Two months later, the 4 men were absolved.

No further prosecution was pursued against them.

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

♪ Bramly, speaking French: ♪ Narrator: Leonardo wrote nothing about his sexuality or the allegation, but just a few years later, he would draw a device for removing bars from windows and another for opening a prison cell.

They were some of his first mechanical inventions.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Painting is born of nature, or, rather, it is the grandchild of nature... [Birds chirping] ♪ for all visible things are produced by nature, and these, her creations, have given birth to painting... ♪ so we may justly call it the grandchild of nature and related to God.

♪ Man: Nature is God.

Nature is perfection.

♪ Nature is proportion.

Nature is the entity which obtains every effect with the shortest and direct way that is possible.

The best a scientist or a painter can do is imitate nature.

♪ Kemp: He has an amazing sense that nature is a perfect invention, that there is nothing superfluous and nothing lacking.

Nature does nothing in vain.

[Horse snorts] If the bone is that shape, then it must do something.

Every small aspect of that form must have a function.

[Bat screeches] He does claim that the human being can take things from nature and put them together in a different way and that you can invent things that nature didn't invent, so you could act as a second nature in the world.

♪ Narrator: In the late 1470s, Leonardo finally left Verrocchio's studio and opened one of his own with his own apprentices and assistants.

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

Some were inspired by the designs of classical inventors or Renaissance engineers, and all were informed by his close observations of nature-- the spirals in a snail's shell, the eddies of water in a surging stream, and the swirls of wind induced by a thunderstorm.

He drew an Archimedes screw, an ancient device created to force water to flow upwards, and sketched construction machines, a mill for processing grain, and a human flying contraption featuring batlike wings.

For Leonardo, building the machines often seemed beside the point.

Galluzzi: What is beauty for Leonardo is proportion and harmony among its parts and is a balance between light and shade, is organization of all the inner parts in a way that provide an immediate perception of coherence.

This is why I like to call these drawings portraits.

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

Narrator: In March of 1481, an order of Augustinian friars hired Leonardo to paint a massive altarpiece for the Monastery of San Donato a Scopeto located just outside the city's walls.

His father, who did legal work for the monks, helped broker the contract.

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

Verdon: There's little evidence that he was personally a very religious person.

It's evident that he knew the stories.

That was his bread and butter as an artist.

Even when he is dealing with nonreligious subjects-- rocks or water or trees-- I think he brings that sense that all things are part of this astounding system that God has made.

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

He's always looking for something more.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: You must wander around and constantly as you go, observe, note, and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk, quarrel, laugh, or fight together... ♪ and make brief sketches of them in a notebook, for the forms and movements of bodies are so infinite that the memory is incapable of retaining them... ♪ so keep these sketches as your guides and masters.

♪ Narrator: In one preparatory drawing for his "Adoration," Leonardo used dozens of perspective lines to create an intricate, 3-dimensional setting which he then populated with animals and figures.

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

♪ On top of this, he began to rough out the figures in black, brown, and blue pigments which he applied by brush.

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

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

♪ Soon, a riveting scene featuring the Virgin and Child, 3 kings kneeling in homage, a throng of astonished eyewitnesses, ancient ruins, and horses and soldiers in a distant battle began to emerge.

It was unlike any Adoration ever painted.

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

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

♪ Delieuvin, speaking French: ♪ Verdon: So he's really looking at it in a way that no one had ever done before, no one had ever done before, and that is simply astounding.

Borgo, speaking Italian: Narrator: Among the bystanders in the painting's lower right corner, Leonardo painted a male figure, likely a self-portrait, who gazes away from the scene's dramatic center... ♪ but less than a year after beginning his "Adoration of the Magi," Leonardo abandoned the work.

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

♪ Gopnik: You can feel this sort of dissatisfaction.

He wants to not only capture the snapshot of that scene, but he wants to ask himself, "How would everyone have behaved?

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

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

♪ [Droplets splashing] Man as Leonardo: We do not lack ways of passing our miserable days.

Still, we do not want to spend them in vain, drawing no praise, and leaving no memory of ourselves in the minds of mortals.

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

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

Dimmi.

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

Tell me.

Tell me if anything ever gets done."

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

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

"Where will I settle?"

Leonardo asked himself on the same page.

Isaacson: It was time for Leonardo to move on.

He knew it.

He needed to seek new horizons, and he gets an opportunity when there is a delegation that's sent from Florence to Milan.

It's almost cultural diplomacy because the people in Florence are trying to appeal to the Duke of Milan by sending great architects and artists and painters.

Narrator: The delegation likely traveled on horseback, first climbing the Apennine Mountains, then riding up the Po River Valley before reaching the plains of Lombardy, where Milan, a city of 80,000 people surrounded by 3 miles of medieval walls, rose up before the Alps.

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

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

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

Ludovico was very much a spider at the center of this web which would tremble whenever someone else began to move on the peninsula, brilliant figure in many ways, politically astute, extremely deceitful and unscrupulous, and by the 1480s, probably militarily the most powerful person on the Italian Peninsula.

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

♪ He kept his palace populated with engineers and poets, doctors, artists, and mathematicians whom he commissioned to design and build churches and fortifications, create works of art, and collaborate on plans for the elaborate pageants he was fond of staging.

♪ Verdon: One of the things that surprises us about Leonardo's choice to go and live in Milan is that he went from a city which had always prized its political liberty to a Soviet-type situation.

He needs the leisure to be able to work his ideas out in a creative way without the immediate market pressure of producing a work.

Man as Leonardo: Most illustrious Lord, I shall endeavor to explain myself to Your Excellency, showing Your Lordship my secrets.

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

Man as Leonardo: I have designs for extremely light and strong bridges, suitable to be most easily carried, and with them, you may pursue the enemy and flee at any time.

I have methods for destroying every stronghold or other fortress, even if it were built on rock.

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

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

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: There is no evidence Leonardo ever received a reply to his letter or even sent it.

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

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

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

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

Leonardo was to paint the central panel.

Verdon: Mary, of course, was the most common subject in medieval and Renaissance art.

♪ Here, Mary is Leonardo's focus.

♪ Mary's right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense.

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

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

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

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

She's lowering her left hand toward His head, but her hand can never reach her child's head because there's a figure, an angel, kneeling behind her son, and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.

Mary, as human mother, knows her son must die but cannot accept that, and so God sends His angel to prevent Mary's instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from avoiding the future Passion.

It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance.

♪ Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery, which is how, in a woman prepared from all eternity to bear the Son of God, humanity still fully expresses itself.

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

Their dispute would go unresolved for decades.

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

Narrator: Leonardo soon formed his own studio in Milan, where he collaborated on portraits and religious works with assistants and other accomplished masters and offered instruction to eager apprentices.

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

He got further with a portrait of a musician, likely Atalante Migliorotti, who had traveled with him to Milan, and Leonardo finally began to get commissions from Ludovico Sforza.

Among them was a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the well-educated teenage daughter of a Milanese civil servant who had caught Il Moro's eye and soon after was living in a suite of rooms in his castle.

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

She is holding the ermine, this animal which is symbolic of purity because the ermine was said to prefer to die rather than get dirty, and she is turning away from us, looking, and smiling slightly, so we must imagine the duke is over there.

We're looking at her.

She is looking at the duke.

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

Isaacson: The way her wrist is cocked protectively around the ermine, the way the eyes of the ermine and the eyes of the lady are both glancing in the same direction, and the way the light glints off of her eyes and off the white ermine, it's Leonardo at his best, showing a scene in motion.

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

He says, "Where there is no life, make it alive."

♪ Speaking Italian: ♪ Narrator: Leonardo moved into a spacious studio and living quarters at the Corte Vecchia, a former palace adjacent to Milan's colossal cathedral.

In the new workshop, which he would refer to as "la mia fabrica," my factory, Leonardo would paint portraits, draw futuristic machines, and make meticulous observations in dozens of notebooks.

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

It's not just that Leonardo knew an awful lot.

It's that he found out an awful lot.

Man as Leonardo: What light and shadow are?

What outlines are seen in trees?

What rules should be given to boys learning to paint?

Nicholl: The way he found out was by asking questions... Man as Leonardo: Why the sun appears larger when setting than at noon when it is nearer to us?

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

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

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

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

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

Man as Leonardo: [Speaking Italian] Del Toro: The beauty of what he does is that he is carrying a catalog of notions that are organized almost like a stream of consciousness.

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

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

He has to be there, and he has to render it right away.

Man as Leonardo: Define first what is meant by height and depth, also how the elements are situated... Narrator: In one notebook, he designed a city built on two levels to improve sanitation; sketched castle and church architecture, including a study for the dome of Milan's cathedral; and invented weapons of war.

♪ Leonardo also drew fantastical flying machines.

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

Daedalus, a mythic craftsman of ancient Greece, had fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus in an effort to escape their captors on the isle of Crete.

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

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

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

His wings would be constructed of cane, rope, and fine linen, the lightest materials he could find.

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

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

♪ Man: In order to achieve lift, he needed to create, basically, a deflection of the air.

We are flying because we are able to redirect the airflow from horizontal to downward.

And Newton's law says that if you deflect it downward, the reaction to it is, it pushes you up, and he basically understood that without being able to explain it.

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

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: The dragonfly flies with 4 wings, and when the front wings are raised, the back wings are lowered, but each pair needs to be sufficient of itself to bear the full weight.

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

Many of his designs were utilitarian, some theoretical, but all were devised with great consideration for the properties of physics, such as friction, inertia, and gravity.

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

The lesson in the Icarus myth is not that we shouldn't fly that high.

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

♪ Galluzzi: One of the greatest invention by Leonardo is not the submarine or the airplane.

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

It's the way in which he used drawings to explain machines.

These drawings are spectacular as drawings.

♪ He's able, for the first time, to portray a complex machine with one drawing in a way that you can understand perfectly even its interior parts.

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

♪ Woman: One of my favorite things is a little musical pun he does where he takes Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do and arranges those into Italian words that make a sentence, but they're also, of course, notes, so you can sing it, and what is being sung is, "Love alone makes me remember.

Love alone makes me alert," and there's a little, stray comment on the back of one of the sheets of paper-- "If there is no love, what then?"

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

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

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

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

Nicholl: He's immediately noted as a mischief maker, a disruptive figure, and indeed, the name that is given to him, Salai, it means little demon, little devil, and the first thing we learn about him is a long notation in Leonardo's-- one of Leonardo's notebooks, one of the longest continuous pieces of writing about another person that Leonardo ever put down on paper, and it's a list of Salai's misdeeds.

Man as Leonardo: The second day, I had two shirts cut for him, a pair of hose, and a jerkin, and when I put aside some money to pay for these things, he stole the money out of the purse, and I could never get him to confess, though I was quite certain of the fact.

Again, on April 2, Gian Antonio left a silver point on a drawing he had made, and Giacomo stole it.

Narrator: "Thief..." Man as Leonardo: Ladro... Narrator: "liar..." Man as Leonardo: bugiardo... Narrator: "obstinate..." Man as Leonardo: ostinato... Narrator: "greedy"... Man as Leonardo: ghiotto.

Narrator: Leonardo wrote in the margin.

Nicholl: Throughout it runs this wonderful sort of twinkle of fondness from the maestro as he lists these misdeeds of the urchin Salai, and this fondness for this mischievous but rather attractive and charismatic young lad carries on, really, throughout the next 30 years of companionship.

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

♪ He has a very particular look which becomes the sort of trademark, almost, of Leonardo's presentation of the beautiful male face-- or, indeed, androgynous face-- because his angels often feature the look of Salai.

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

No more war.

I surrender.

Zimmerman: There's a contemporary reference to Salai.

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

He was with him for the rest of his life, and I think you sort of can't argue with that.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Pleasure and Pain appear as twins since there is never one without the other.

They stand back to back as though they were attached.

If you take Pleasure, know that behind him is one who will deal you Tribulation and Repentance, and they exist as opposites in the same body because they have the same basis, and the various forms of evil pleasure are the origin of pain.

Bramly, speaking French: Speaking Italian: ♪ [Hooves clopping] Narrator: In January of 1490, Ludovico Sforza hosted a lavish celebration to honor the marriage of his nephew to the Princess of Naples.

The evening featured a sumptuous feast and an elaborate pageant, "Il Paradiso," with costumed actors, music, and dancing.

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

The 7 known celestial bodies were represented by actors.

Candles served as stars.

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

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

♪ He had finally found a niche on Sforza's court.

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

Kemp: He became a guru of the court.

He had a stipend.

He was a stipendiato.

It gave him space.

It also gave him an area where there were musicians, and he himself was an accomplished musician.

There were poets.

There were historians.

There were people doing natural philosophy.

There were engineers.

He was a very gracious man by all accounts, rather charming.

The courts suited him quite well.

King: He was someone who loved the humorous and loved the grotesque, loved practical jokes.

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

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

♪ Bambach: Leonardo also cultivates a huge network of intellectual friends and craftsmen, and his ambitions to write treatises really emerges.

[Bell tolling] In Milan, there was an interest in more Aristotelian ways of thinking, which are much more based on empiricism, empirical observation.

Leonardo was able to befriend all these people who translated treatises that probably enhanced his education, and he kind of got his sea legs as an author.

[Thunder] Verdon: Plato said, "You have to start with the great ideas."

Aristotle said, "No.

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

"In analyzing them, you will come to the larger ideas that allow you to construct a system," and I think that corresponded much more closely to Leonardo's own curiosity about the natural world, and, in a sense, shaped it.

Narrator: Determined to become a writer and intellectual, Leonardo acquired more and more books.

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

♪ Within two decades, Venice had established itself as a center for publishing, and Milan and Florence each had their own print shops.

♪ King: Leonardo was an inveterate and omnivorous reader, and if he couldn't buy a book, he would borrow it.

He's not just looking at the natural world-- he's certainly doing that--but he's also looking at the best that has been thought and said by his predecessors.

Man as Leonardo: Try to obtain the Vitolone, which is in the library of Pavia.

Ask Benedetto Portinari how people go on the ice in Flanders.

Ask Maestro Antonio how mortars are placed on bastions by day or by night.

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

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

♪ Vecce, speaking Italian: ♪ Man as Leonardo: Not being a literary man, certain presumptuous people will think that they may reasonably criticize me, alleging that I am a man without letters.

Foolish men.

They do not know that my subjects are to be dealt with by experience rather than by words and experience has been the master of those who wrote well.

Therefore, I shall cite my master in all cases.

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

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

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

"Nature is the real teacher.

I am a disciple of nature."

Many expressions in his notebooks express this frustration for not being considered as an intellectual, we would say today, as a scholar.

At the same time, this was tempered by the self-confidence of knowing much more than those people, being able to perform things that the others not even could conceive.

♪ Narrator: Meanwhile, Leonardo had embarked on another ambitious project-- a series of books that, together, would present his core beliefs on the art and science of painting.

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

♪ Shade is the obstruction of light, and the eye can best distinguish the forms of objects when it is placed between the shaded and illuminated parts.

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

♪ Delieuvin, speaking French: Man as Leonardo: The edges of shadows darken by degrees, and anyone ignorant of this fact will paint things with no relief, and relief is the heart and soul of painting.

♪ [Man exhales] Narrator: Like his old master Verrocchio, Leonardo believed that a deep knowledge of human anatomy was essential to depicting the human form, but he and his contemporaries were still dependent on the medical teachings of ancient physicians and philosophers whose centuries-old theories had mostly gone unchallenged.

Existing anatomical illustrations, which had been informed by those theories, were inaccurate and inadequate.

Man as Leonardo: A painter who learns about the nature of tendons, muscles, and sinews will know just how many and which tendons cause the movement of a limb or which muscle bulges and causes that tendon to contract.

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

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

Kemp: He sectioned it horizontally and vertically.

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

Nobody did that.

There were no anatomical drawings in earlier books with sections of the skull, and he's looking at the skull empirically for its features, what it looks like, and wonderful, delicate drawings which are just awesome in terms of technique, and you think, "Well, he's doing the anatomy of the skull," but what he's really looking for is where the center of the brain is.

He talks about the pole of the cranium and that the point where all these proportional systems cross is where the senses all go into this central clearinghouse, as it were.

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

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

Narrator: Aristotle had believed that sensory impressions converged in a brain cavity, where they were processed, interpreted, and stored.

He called it the Sensus Communis.

Man as Leonardo: The soul seems to be located in the site of reason, and the site of reason seems to be where all the senses converge.

This is called the senso comune, and the soul is not all throughout and in every part of the body, as many previously believed, because if it were, it would not be necessary to have the instruments of the senses converge in a single location.

Narrator: To Leonardo, the transmission of information from the eye, which he called the window of the soul, to the brain and nervous system and the reaction that followed-- joy, fear, concern, surprise-- was the essence of the human experience.

Artists, he believed, should understand this phenomenon and the science behind it to effectively portray emotion, reveal character, and tell riveting stories.

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

Using male models, he began a meticulous study.

Man as Leonardo: On the changing measurements of the human body through the movements of the limbs from different views, the measurements of the human body vary in each limb according to how much it is bent and from different views so that they grow or diminish to a varying extent on one side while they grow or diminish on the opposite side.

♪ Narrator: Seeking inspiration, Leonardo studied a treatise by Vitruvius, a Roman architect of the 1st century B.C., who wrote about the symmetry between the human body and a skillfully designed temple and carefully measured the proportions of what he described as a "well-shaped man."

Rossellini: And this was classical belief that the symmetry and proportion of the human body reflected as in a microcosm the greater harmony of the world.

Narrator: "Just as the human body yields a circular outline, so too a square figure may be found from it," wrote Vitruvius.

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

Leonardo's very, very scientific about it.

Man as Leonardo: The space from the mouth to the bottom of the chin is 1/4 of the face... Isaacson: He does all sorts of measurements-- Man as Leonardo: in equal... Isaacson: from the forehead to the nose... Man as Leonardo: of the mouth... Isaacson: to the chin to the navel to the genitals of all of his assistants so he gets all the proportions exactly right, the way Vitruvius had suggested.

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

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

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

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

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: Since leaving Vinci decades earlier, Leonardo had rarely made any note of his mother, who, by 1493, was in her mid-60s and widowed.

Bramly, speaking French: Narrator: One year later, on a page of his notebook, he recorded the costs of burying her.

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

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

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

On display for the occasion was a colossal 20-foot-high clay horse sculpted by Leonardo, the model for part of a bronze monument honoring Il Moro's father.

"I am certain that neither Greece nor Rome," one astonished witness said, "ever saw anything more massive."

[Horse neighs] The artist had studied live horses obsessively, measuring their proportions and drawing their features in his notebooks.

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

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

♪ You see all the different possibilities.

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

Narrator: Rather than cast the massive statue in the tried and tested way, divided into pieces, Leonardo planned to create one giant mold.

♪ Man as Leonardo: When you shall have made the mold upon the horse, you must make the thickness of the metal in clay.

Dry it in layers.

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

And with this plaster, enclose the irons both outside and inside to a thickness of two fingers.

Make terra cotta.

♪ Narrator: He planned to build a lattice metal frame to secure the mold before lowering it upside-down into a pit using a pulley machine of his own design.

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

Ludovico Sforza gave him the 75 tons of bronze he needed, but in the fall of 1494, before Leonardo could put it to use, Sforza confiscated it all.

[Swords clanging] The French King Charles VIII had ordered his troops south to conquer the Kingdom of Naples, setting the entire Italian peninsula on edge.

To preserve his control over Milan, Il Moro quickly aligned himself with Charles.

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

King: He couldn't have been human if he wasn't disappointed at losing this commission which, had he been able to bring it to fruition, it really would've made his reputation.

It would've been his work of fame.

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

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

Home to an order of Dominican friars, the site featured a cloistered garden, quarters for the monks, a sacristy, and the recently completed Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie.

To adorn the south wall of the refectory, Sforza commissioned a fresco of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

For the north end, Leonardo was to paint a scene suitable for the monks who dined there in silent contemplation-- the final meal Christ shared with his apostles before he was crucified-- the Last Supper.

It would be his most ambitious painting to date, featuring multiple figures engaged in a complex, dynamic narrative on a physical scale much larger than any of his previous works, including the abandoned "Adoration of the Magi."

It's a difficult subject for painters because it's a long, thin, wide picture, which is slightly difficult to organize, and you want some drama, or Leonardo wanted drama in it.

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

If you look at these paintings, Christ and the apostles ranged across the table mostly in silence, eating, maybe one or two talking together, and they're very placid scenes.

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

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

King: It's an incredibly emotional moment, where we have this charismatic religious leader with his band of brothers, and they're meeting in an occupied city whose authorities are plotting against them, and, of course, sitting in their midst is a traitor, the one who's going to betray the leader, and I think Leonardo was probably electrified by this story, and he was going to tell it in a very dramatic, theatrical way, a way in which no artist previously had thought about, let alone attempted.

Narrator: Leonardo began exploring how the disciples, roiled by Christ's words, would twist their limbs, wring their hands, and distort their faces.

Man as Leonardo: One who was drinking and has left the glass where it was and turned his head towards the speaker; another, weaving the fingers of his hands together, turns, frowning to his companion.

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

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

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

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

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

♪ He pounded nails into the plaster for reference and used a ruler to draw construction lines and a stylus to etch grids.

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

♪ One nail hole at the very center would serve as the point at which all perspective lines would converge.

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

♪ Man as Leonardo: Filippo, Simone, Matteo, Tome, Jacopo maggiore... Narrator: He made sketches in chalk and used a brush to paint outlines directly atop the plaster.

♪ Man as Leonardo: Pietro, Andrea, Bartolomeo.

♪ Marshall: The moment you lay down the first mark or first line, you're engaged in a process of evaluating every next step and understanding whether or not you have to make some major changes or some minor changes.

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

Narrator: Rather than follow the traditional technique for fresco in which pigments ground in water are painted on wet plaster and bind to the wall in a matter of hours, Leonardo used a mixture of oil and tempera that he'd concocted himself.

Bambach: This allowed him the luxury of painting during a long process of time so he was not limited to 8 hours a day and just one part of the design, and it also, very importantly, allowed him to create the transitions of tone and the transitions of light because you could not get the effect of light with fresco.

♪ Narrator: In layer upon layer, he applied the pigments that would, over time, bring the scene to life, often disregarding his initial outlines as the contours of his design evolved.

♪ For Christ's garments, he used vermillion, a pigment made from a brick-red mineral called cinnabar, and ultramarine, created by crushing lapis lazuli, a costly but brilliant blue metamorphic rock that could only be found in Afghanistan.

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

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

♪ [Birds chirping] Meanwhile, Sforza had grown impatient with Leonardo's unhurried pace and directed his secretary to draft a revised agreement that would impose a deadline on the artist.

♪ Within months, Leonardo was finished.

♪ The mural rose 15 feet from bottom to top and spanned 29 feet across the refectory's north wall.

♪ It showcased his gift for blending tones and colors, his mastery of light and shadow, and his command of geometry, which he wielded with great precision to bring harmony to a moment of chaos.

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

It is in a way, but it's more complicated than that because if you look in the picture, the main thing is that Christ's saying is, "One of you will betray me."

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

"Is it I?"

"Is it I?"

And this central figure, totally focused on what's going to happen the next day and on the sign that he's giving of the offering of His body and blood, He gazes down in deep sadness.

He doesn't look at the apostles.

Kemp: And all the disciples react in a particular way apart from Judas, who's rigid and his tendons on his neck stick out because he's aware of what's going to happen.

♪ The announcement of betrayal then ripples out.

♪ Delieuvin, speaking French: ♪ ♪ King: This was the heart of the painting for him because it allowed him to show gesture and action and facial expression, the motions of the mind.

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

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

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

It is so much a process of thinking, of engaging, of feeling that was essential in his creative process, and, really, this is part of the reason that this painting has that transformative, transcendental aspect to it.

♪ When we go as viewers and look at it, we all fall into the same reverie.

♪ Narrator: The artist now turned his attention to other projects.

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

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

This time, the French planned to depose Sforza.

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

The French took Milan without a fight.

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

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

After 18 years in Milan, Leonardo decided it was time for him to move on.

He was 47 years old.

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

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

He had no concern for being a successful professional painter and to be admired, adored for that.

He wants to be admired for his intellect.

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

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

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

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

Thank you.

Announcer: Can looking back push us forward?

Man: Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Billie Holiday.

♪ Will our voice be heard through time?

Can our past inspire our future?

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

What would you like the power to do?

Bank of America.

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

And yet Leonardo does.

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

Charles Nicholl: He was always interested.

He was always wanting to know.

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

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

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

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

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

This series is also available with PBS Passport and on Amazon Prime Video.

♪ ♪