Genius_2of3_Da Vinci
Transcript
01:00In the public consciousness, Leonardo da Vinci is most commonly associated
01:05with two of the most celebrated paintings in the Western tradition,
01:09The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa.
01:14These paintings are just two examples of the complexity and insight which shaped his work.
01:19Born in 1452, he was the consummate Renaissance man.
01:31Painter, sculptor, scientist, engineer and thinker, Leonardo's undoubted genius
01:38enabled him to evade the restrictions which a single discipline would impose.
01:43He was to achieve an almost legendary status in his own lifetime.
01:50I think he was a genius. He began to see how things could be made and could be made differently.
01:56He began to see the elements of things.
01:59He also had this intense interest in the way things work. He had a huge curiosity.
02:07Leonardo challenged all the prevailing scientific notions of his day,
02:14whether in anatomy, engineering or architecture.
02:19He symbolized brilliantly the revival of true scientific inquiry.
02:30There is a very clear sense that in terms of using the visual medium
02:36that no one could begin to emulate the range of what he was doing.
02:41Freed from the constrictions of medieval culture,
02:44he was able to give free reign to his soaring imagination and insatiable curiosity.
02:52Leonardo's unprecedented intellectual gifts were to prove a formative influence
02:57on the future direction of both science and art.
03:41Leonardo was born in Vinci, a small town in Tuscany.
03:47He was the illegitimate son of Sir Piero da Vinci, a public notary, and a local peasant girl.
03:56Evidence of his exceptional talent was to be found in the works of his great-grandfather,
04:02Leonardo da Vinci.
04:04Leonardo was born in Vinci, a small town in Tuscany.
04:09Evidence of his exceptional intellect and diversity emerged at a very early age.
04:15He demonstrated a high degree of ability in the fields of mathematics, music and art.
04:22One intriguing element in Leonardo's surviving notebooks is his chosen method of writing.
04:29Leonardo was left-handed and he wrote backwards in mirror script.
04:34Left-handed, homosexual, vegetarian.
04:37These factors could have influenced his creativity.
04:41It may have been that he was solitary and that sparked off a creative urge in him
04:46because being by himself, he would doodle and sketch and do all sorts of things like that.
04:51Of these various factors, the only one which is likely to have had much effect upon his career
04:56is his illegitimacy.
04:57Had he not been illegitimate, he would probably have followed his father's career of lawyer
05:02and you'd never have heard of him in art or in science or engineering.
05:06Leonardo is a fascination as a person.
05:11If you do the Mona Lisa, then people can say, who did this?
05:13Or you did the Last Supper.
05:15So people latch on to these little biographical snippets.
05:19But if you read his notebooks, they are extraordinarily impersonal.
05:23He didn't put himself into the notebooks.
05:25Michelangelo, his contemporary, the great sculptor, wrote poetry which was deeply revealing
05:30and he wrote wonderfully personal letters.
05:32With Leonardo, he's aiming not to give that sort of insight.
05:36I think he's rather a private man.
05:40In 1466, Sir Piero da Vinci, aware that his son had a rare talent for drawing,
05:48took some of Leonardo's work to the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of the day,
05:53Andrea del Verrocchio.
05:56Verrocchio recognised the potential of the work
05:59and accepted the 14-year-old Leonardo as a pupil.
06:04To be apprenticed to Verrocchio was to be privileged.
06:08He was a man of vision who surrounded himself with some of the finest minds of the day.
06:16The years which Leonardo da Vinci spent in Florence were formative.
06:20He acquired a thorough knowledge of many disciplines.
06:24Anatomy, architecture, physics and engineering were among the subjects which absorbed him.
06:31However, it was in Verrocchio's workshops that Leonardo perfected his art.
06:37He experimented with colours, explored the laws of perspective
06:42and studied the subtleties of light and shade.
06:46As an apprentice, Leonardo assisted in the completion of commissioned paintings.
06:52In Verrocchio's The Baptism of Jesus, Leonardo painted a single figure, a kneeling angel.
07:01It was this figure which demonstrated the style which was to influence high Renaissance classicism.
07:09In 1481, Leonardo was invited by the Monastery of San Donato
07:14to paint an altarpiece, The Adoration of the Magi.
07:21Leonardo never completed it.
07:23His constant search for perfection, linked to a restless nature
07:28and a need for experimentation, meant that much of his work never reached fruition.
07:35There are various reasons why Leonardo didn't finish quite a lot of projects.
07:40Some are practical, you know, his patrons fell from power
07:43and they're all these vagaries which happen to any Renaissance artists.
07:46But there is this serious problem that if in looking at one thing
07:51you can always see its implications for something else.
07:53If you're writing on water and you can then see the implications of that
07:57for broader geological questions of the body of the earth
08:00or you can see its implications for hair
08:02or you can see its implications for music or sound, then you're in trouble.
08:07Because you can't settle in a sense that no question is self-contained.
08:11It's a wonderful vision but it's one which
08:14doesn't make for ready completion of a single project.
08:18In 1501, he was commissioned to paint a fresco
08:21celebrating a Florentine victory in the war with Pisa.
08:26This wall painting of the Battle of Anghiari was never completed.
08:31However, Leonardo made many preparatory drawings.
08:35Among them was a full-size cartoon which shows the horror of battle.
08:41Although the original cartoon was destroyed, there is a copy in existence
08:46made by the artist Rubens.
08:53Perhaps the most memorable aspect of his work
08:56is his ability to capture the subtle emotions
08:59which reveal the innermost processes of the mind.
09:07Leonardo used light and shade to create three-dimensional bodies
09:12and added atmosphere and depth to his work.
09:16The last supper reveals the psychological isolation of Judas.
09:27However, it is the mystery of the inner life
09:30captured by the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa
09:34which has generated more discussion than any other portrait in the history of art.
09:40The smile gives, above all, a sense of the motions of the mind.
09:44Portraits with no expression at all, which was rather the norm,
09:48clearly didn't give a sense of a mind turning over in the brain and actually working.
09:53But it may also be a pun.
09:55She was married to Francesco del Giocondo
09:58and her nickname was La Gioconda
10:01and that means the happy or smiling one.
10:03So I think it's possible that the smile could be an emblem.
10:07He did something very strange with the horizon.
10:10Perhaps I can demonstrate this with my hands.
10:13On one side of the picture, the horizon is here
10:17and on the other side of her head, the horizon is up there.
10:22So the viewer is continually oscillating, particularly around the eyes
10:29and that creates the ambiguity.
10:32And the Mona Lisa out of its frame, particularly if the light changes slightly,
10:36kind of breathes against the background,
10:38it has this extraordinary quality of being alive.
10:43And I think the Mona Lisa probably comes as close as you could ever come
10:47to satisfying this total ambition that Leonardo has
10:50to get everything right in painting.
10:53For Leonardo, painting was just one form of artistic expression.
11:00In pursuit of an unprecedented realism within art,
11:03he constantly sought to increase his knowledge of the physical world.
11:08When Leonardo made a painting, any painting,
11:11he was aiming for it to do everything.
11:14To have the motions of the minds of the figures in the picture, as he called it,
11:18to have perfect veracity for every light effect,
11:23perfect veracity of space.
11:25And he set himself an impossible agenda
11:27and he never quite realised the limitation of painting.
11:34In common with his artistic methods,
11:36Leonardo's scientific theories were based on precise observations.
11:42He wanted to discover the underlying laws which governed nature.
11:47It is impossible to isolate Leonardo's art from his scientific studies.
11:52He believed that his art was science.
11:56Drawing became an extension of his creative thought processes.
12:01Detailed studies of plants, animals and humans
12:04were part of an untiring quest to capture the absolute likeness of his subject.
12:11His sketch of a lily demonstrates not only artistic brilliance,
12:16but also the minute detail of scientific observation.
12:22One of the formative influences in Leonardo's life
12:25was his childhood in the Tuscan countryside.
12:29He was allowed to wander at will in a landscape
12:32whose changing moods heightened his awareness of the power of nature.
12:37It was here that Leonardo's enduring fascination with organic life began.
12:42As he mastered the art of observation.
12:46With such persistence in solitude,
12:50he developed a remarkable artistic skill
12:54and a remarkable keenness of observation,
12:58which were, in fact, to underlie his anatomical illustrations in the future.
13:06Until Leonardo, no-one had studied the human body in such detail.
13:11It was considered sacrilegious to cut up human bodies.
13:16His use of dissection to uncover the body's innermost workings
13:20was to bring Leonardo into conflict with the church.
13:25Leonardo's unique approach to anatomy
13:28produced a new method of scientific study based on thorough observation.
13:34His notebooks are full of precise illustrations and supporting notes.
13:37He produced the first anatomical drawings,
13:40which were of such quality
13:42that they have formed the basis for modern scientific illustration.
14:01As a medical historian,
14:03one would say that his important contribution
14:07to anatomy were the concept of sectional anatomy of the limbs,
14:14whereby anatomy was perceived in horizontal sections of the limbs.
14:21Leonardo also made astounding discoveries of the anatomy of the heart,
14:27and it is entirely conceivable that if his writings had not been lost,
14:33the discovery of the circulation of blood
14:35would not have had to wait for Harvey and would have occurred much earlier.
14:41Leonardo was able to unify areas of study
14:44which had previously been seen as distinct.
14:48Through his studies of the human form,
14:51which encompassed both the external and the internal,
14:55Leonardo produced figures of remarkable realism.
14:58His drawing, the proportions of the human figure,
15:01not only expresses the precision of his anatomical studies,
15:05it visually blends together mathematics and nature.
15:12Leonardo recognised that written explanations of complex issues
15:16could prove obscure.
15:19He knew that it was his drawings
15:21which would most effectively convey knowledge.
15:23If the scientific and theoretical writings
15:26contained in Leonardo's notebooks had been made public,
15:29they would have revolutionised the science of the age.
15:33However, he did not choose to publish them.
15:39I think there are two problems here.
15:41There's the practical one.
15:43Illustration is a very complex subject.
15:45It's a very complex subject.
15:46It's a very complex subject.
15:48It's a very complex subject.
15:49It's a very complex subject.
15:51Here, there's a practical one.
15:53Illustrated books were still very rare.
15:55Most of the illustrated books had woodcuts
15:57which didn't deliver enormous amounts of quality.
16:00Now, if you think about Leonardo's drawings,
16:02how detailed they are,
16:03how perfect they are in their spatial definition,
16:06then he would have needed copper plates.
16:09He would have needed very expensive engraving techniques
16:13which are very difficult to print in book form.
16:15But the overriding problem is that
16:18none of the projects were wholly complete.
16:20He could always see the next step.
16:22He could always see something more to do.
16:24So there's this frustration of seeing this wonderful open-ended agenda,
16:28but how do you actually get a completed work out of that?
16:30And he never really solved that problem.
16:33Yes, quite a lot of what he did would have revolutionised
16:37science and technology of that time,
16:39but he put it to good effect
16:41inasmuch as he published his work
16:44via those people who mattered most,
16:46namely those who employed him as the senior people
16:49of that society, the Dukes and so on.
16:52In 1482, Leonardo left Florence
16:56to work for Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.
17:01This association was to last for almost 20 years.
17:06In a letter to the Duke,
17:08Leonardo offered his services as a military engineer,
17:12demonstrating the extent of his technical achievements.
17:15In an age of war, this might have seemed an indispensable skill.
17:21However, Ludovico was more interested in Leonardo's expertise
17:25as an artist and sculptor.
17:29Handsome and gracious, Leonardo was popular at court
17:33and organised pageants and masquerades to entertain his patron.
17:38Despite his personable nature, Leonardo was, at heart, solitary.
17:45He did not allow court duties to deflect him
17:48from a single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
17:53While in Milan, Leonardo pursued his interest in mathematics.
17:58He collaborated with the mathematician Luca Pacioli
18:02and illustrated Pacioli's celebrated work
18:05on divine proportion.
18:09If we're thinking about Leonardo mathematics,
18:11we have to differentiate between the sorts of mathematics.
18:15Arithmetic was of some interest to him,
18:17but he was pretty poor at it.
18:19He couldn't add up a column of many figures
18:21without making mistakes.
18:23He wasn't at all interested, as far as we know,
18:25in algebra, which was available in rudimentary form.
18:28And it's geometry.
18:29It is geometry, which is visual mathematics.
18:32And he clearly saw geometry almost as a form of visual sculpture.
18:36He could take three-dimensional bodies
18:38and manipulate them geometrically.
18:40He could clearly see forms in space.
18:43So geometry became a kind of mental sculpture for him.
18:46And that is where his genius as a mathematician lies.
18:51The notebooks and sketches from those years in Milan
18:55reveal Leonardo's mastery of an ever-widening variety of subjects,
19:00ranging from botany and geology to anatomy and architecture.
19:06His study of a star of Bethlehem is a masterpiece.
19:11It conveys not only the sense of movement and vitality,
19:15which Leonardo always tried to capture,
19:18but also a degree of detail which is almost microscopic.
19:24He understood the effects of sunlight and gravity on plant growth.
19:29He discovered that it was possible to determine the age of plants and trees
19:34by studying their structure.
19:41One of the driving forces in Leonardo's life was his intellectual curiosity.
19:47He wanted to understand every aspect of the universe.
19:52Far in advance of 19th century Darwinism,
19:55Leonardo's investigations into fossil shells
19:58enabled him to formulate evolutionary theories.
20:02Leonardo was enormously interested in the earth as a living body.
20:07He called it the body of the earth.
20:10And he thought it had undergone enormous changes over time.
20:13Now he saw that there were fossils on mountains,
20:16but for a variety of reasons didn't think a single deluge,
20:20the biblical deluge of seven days and seven nights,
20:22could get slow-moving creatures at that high.
20:25And they were clearly alive on the mountains as he saw them.
20:28So there are a whole series of arguments like that.
20:31And he came to the conclusion
20:32that there must have been multiple inundations
20:35and the earth must have been submerged
20:37and it's been subject as a kind of living body
20:39to huge changes over a period of time.
20:42Now these ideas were not absolutely revolutionary,
20:45but had they been published,
20:46I think they would have caused something of a scandal.
20:50Leonardo's power of observation,
20:53when linked to his sawing imagination,
20:55was an invaluable tool in the many and various roles he adopted.
21:02In his own time, Leonardo was well known as an architect and sculptor.
21:07His architectural drawings include designs for the dome of Milan Cathedral.
21:13If we think about Leonardo as an architect,
21:15it's difficult in the period to define what an architect was.
21:18There wasn't a body of professionals who you could call architects.
21:22And different people intervened at different points.
21:24I think I would describe Leonardo as a brilliant architectural consultant,
21:28but probably not an architect who built buildings.
21:31And his great quality as an architect was he could see space in a particular way.
21:36It's the same way he treated geometry.
21:38It was a form of spatial sculpture.
21:40And I think nobody had at that period a clearer vision
21:46of a building as a way of sculpting space or shaping space.
21:50And his drawings reflected that.
21:51And he had enormous impact upon Bramante,
21:54the man who built St Peter's or started St Peter's.
21:56And that great massive building, full of space and full of volume,
22:00is very much a product of the kind of vision he pioneered.
22:04Although none of Leonardo's architectural plans were ever realised,
22:08the skill and imagination they reveal is remarkable.
22:13Leonardo's scheme for palaces and roads at various levels had a practical purpose.
22:20In an age of recurring plague,
22:23this drawing was his design for a new and healthier Milan.
22:27Leonardo envisaged a city of space and light
22:31intended to prevent the spread of disease.
22:35This model city was on two levels.
22:39The upper level was to be pedestrianised,
22:41while carts and carriages, which formed the traffic of the day,
22:45were restricted to the lower level.
22:49Leonardo's notebooks indicate that he fulfilled
22:52a series of minor commissions for Lodovico.
22:56However, one major commission was a memorial to Francesco Sforza,
23:01the father of Lodovico.
23:04The memorial, which was destined never to be completed,
23:08was to be a colossal equestrian statue cast in bronze.
23:14In preparation, Leonardo created a full-scale clay model.
23:19Its power and beauty were widely acclaimed.
23:22Leonardo's interest in animals was quite patchy in a way.
23:26He never followed what we would call zoology.
23:29That science didn't exist at the time.
23:32He was enormously interested in the horse.
23:34The horse was seen as a noble animal,
23:36and in fact he had two projects at least to do equestrian statues.
23:40So he investigated a lot of horse anatomy and horse proportions.
23:43He spent ages measuring the most beautiful horses
23:46to find out how the proportions worked.
23:48There's a kind of music of anatomical proportion,
23:52which he did with human beings as well.
23:54He seems to have dissected a bear, certainly a bear's foot.
23:57He was very interested in animal movement.
24:00There wasn't a systematic campaign of zoology,
24:03and he wasn't interested in classification, essentially.
24:06So he had patches where he got suddenly involved with it.
24:10But it is the horse, and he is described as having done a book on horse anatomy.
24:14Not a finished book, but a manuscript on that subject.
24:16Now lost, but we've got some drawings to show what he did in that area.
24:20So he really was, I think, effectively in zoology,
24:23a specialist in animal motion and a specialist above all in the horse.
24:29Leonardo's interest went beyond the scientific.
24:33He had a love for all animals and birds.
24:36He bought caged birds in order to set them free.
24:41His own restless nature made him sympathetic to any creature
24:44deprived of liberty.
24:48Leonardo's first allegiance had always been to man and nature,
24:52as he sought for his goal of perfect truth.
24:57Despite his affection for his native Tuscany,
25:00no city or country could command that same allegiance.
25:05The resulting detachment from any sense of involvement in the politics,
25:09war and intrigue of his age,
25:11saw Leonardo enter a period in which he lived an almost nomadic existence.
25:18Venice, Florence, Rome and Milan were all stages on this ultimately wearying journey,
25:26as Leonardo put his mental and imaginative powers at the disposal of various patrons.
25:32In 1502, he made the controversial decision to enter the city of Rome.
25:38He made the controversial decision to enter the service of the treacherous Cesare Borgia.
25:47I think that possibly why he went to work for him was because Cesare Borgia appeared to be working
25:54in order to help the Pope against the oppressors who were trying to come in and take over Italy
26:02at that time in that century.
26:05And Leonardo would naturally want to go and help in that.
26:10However, when he was working for Cesare Borgia,
26:15he discovered he wasn't a very nice person at all to work with.
26:19Indeed, it's rumoured that he actually raped one of the ladies who belonged to his former employer.
26:25Cesare's enterprises began to fall apart.
26:28He was betrayed by some of his own captains.
26:30He became ill.
26:31So I think it was a short-lived episode.
26:33But Leonardo was always looking for a patron who would basically give him a kind of research contract,
26:39looking for a patron who would support his interests across the board.
26:44And Cesare, for a time, was a very magnetic figure, seemed to promise that.
26:49But it fell apart.
26:51In the service of Cesare, Leonardo was able to demonstrate his ingenuity.
26:57He made plans to drain marshes, designed canal systems,
27:01drew maps and designed fortifications.
27:06However, Leonardo was unable to maintain his intellectual detachment
27:11in the face of Cesare's murderous nature, and he left his service in 1503.
27:23Whichever patron he worked for, Leonardo was continually exploring and experimenting
27:29to further his own research on flight.
27:35He made countless sketches of birds and studied the anatomy of their wings.
27:41Leonardo trusted the logical conclusions of mathematics
27:45because they were based on concepts of universal truth.
27:49However, he knew that science must be based on experiment.
27:54Only in this way would knowledge increase.
27:57His experimental drawings show designs for flying machines.
28:02Leonardo produced a large number of drawings of various devices like flying machines.
28:07I don't think there's any strong evidence that he ever tested them.
28:11Other people were testing things at the same time.
28:13There was a celebrated abbot in Scotland who decided that he was going to demonstrate
28:18the power of alchemy by doing a solo flight non-stop from Stirling to London.
28:25He got as far as the first hundred yards, he fell down and broke a leg.
28:30And I suspect that had Leonardo tried any of his flying machines,
28:32he might well have landed up in the same situation.
28:36When we think about Leonardo's flying machines, I think there are two phases that we have to look at.
28:41One is when he was thinking of flapping machines,
28:45and essentially imitating a bat or a bird's wing.
28:48I'm pretty certain that he then concluded,
28:52either as a result of tests or thinking about it,
28:55that there simply wasn't the power in man's frame to drive that huge machine.
28:59And the later ones come very close to what we would call hand gliders.
29:04He was thinking then of gliding systems with the wings and tail used for steering purposes.
29:10The one that was most likely to fly, I think, wasn't actually one that he most liked.
29:15He rather liked the bird's idea of flapping wings and so on,
29:18but he got that wrong.
29:19The one that really would have worked, I think, was the helicopter,
29:23because he had a mechanism,
29:25and that mechanism, once he could find a way of moving it,
29:29other than human power, could possibly have worked.
29:33His design evolved from flying machines to other devices
29:37intended to be used after flight had been achieved.
29:41One of his drawings is of the world's first parachute.
29:45It was to be many centuries before other inventors introduced similar life-saving devices.
29:52Leonardo was fascinated by the elements.
29:55He was obsessed with the power and movement of both air and water.
30:00His series of drawings, the deluge, which are almost abstract in form,
30:06show a raging sky and torrents of swirling water.
30:09For Leonardo, the properties of air and water were similar.
30:14Just as clouds were supported by air,
30:17so water supported anything that floated on its surface.
30:22He saw flight as comparable to swimming.
30:26Leonardo brought his acute power of observation to bear on his studies of hydrodynamics.
30:32In the process of his research, he was able to understand
30:35Leonardo did interesting drawings of the flow of fluids.
30:40This was, I think, largely because he was very interested in anatomy and in biology
30:46and perhaps in the flow of blood through the body.
30:50He wasn't able to take this work very far.
30:52He was 200 years before anybody was really interested in the flow of water.
30:58He was very much interested in the flow of energy.
31:01He was 200 years before anybody was really in a position
31:06to do very much in the way of hydrodynamics.
31:08Just as Leonardo believed that man would fly,
31:11his drawings demonstrate a desire for man to master the sea.
31:16He experimented with buoyancy and invented ski-like shoes for walking on water.
31:23Leonardo's sketch of the first life belt
31:26anticipates exactly the design evident on ships today.
31:31There is evidence that Leonardo invented a system for supplying air to a man underwater.
31:38He is believed to have destroyed the details of this device
31:42because he recognized the potential for its abuse by the evil nature of men.
31:49Leonardo's study of hydrodynamics drew him further into the field of pure technology.
31:56Much of Leonardo's reputation for technical innovation
31:59rests on his work as an engineer and inventor.
32:06Leonardo lived in an uncertain, violent age.
32:11Renaissance Italy was constantly at war.
32:14Wracked by internal disputes, she was also under threat from other states.
32:20During the Renaissance, it was usual for craftsmen and artists to be familiar with weaponry.
32:27Both Giotto and Michelangelo drew plans for the fortification of Florence.
32:33Practical science became important in relation to war
32:36as more effective ways of dealing death were sought.
32:40It's often said there was a revolution of warfare in the late 15th century,
32:44especially with the introduction of new fast-firing light cannon
32:48that could accompany armies on the march.
32:50But the real role of artillery was to break into fortifications
32:54and most of the warfare fought in northern Italy, the late 15th, early 16th century,
32:58what are usually known as the Italian Wars, centered around fortifications.
33:03And so what you needed as a dynast, as a ruler,
33:07was a master engineer who could both build you successful fortifications
33:12and also help you construct the siege weapons
33:15which to batter them down and defeat your opponents.
33:18Leonardo's untiring search for knowledge
33:21was at the heart of both his artistic and scientific endeavors.
33:26In the years he spent working for Lodovico Sforza in Milan,
33:30Leonardo was constantly designing equipment
33:33intended to improve the performance of the military.
33:37He offered Lodovico a wide-ranging quantity of ideas.
33:41There were plans of bridges, pontoons and ferries.
33:45There were plans of bridges, pontoons and fortifications.
33:50Although he saw war as bestial madness,
33:54Leonardo produced numerous designs for weaponry.
33:58Some, like his detailed sketches of scaling ladders,
34:02were improvements on existing equipment.
34:06Leonardo's design was for a mechanized ladder
34:10which could be raised or lowered using a system of cranks and gears.
34:15This is similar to the equipment used by today's firefighters.
34:20Other designs were of his own inventions
34:22and included a triple-tier machine gun which produced a hail of shrapnel.
34:33There were also hand grenades and exploding mortars.
34:39He made a lot of designs for all kinds of weaponry,
34:42helpful in sieges, cannon and also fortification itself,
34:47which was a very important thing in the warfare of the late 15th, early 16th century.
34:52I think we have to say that most of his designs never really came to fruition
34:56and so probably weren't used in Lodovico's wars
34:59in the ways that he hoped they had been.
35:01On a larger scale, Leonardo designed a covered armoured car
35:06which had breech-loading guns.
35:08It was intended to be powered by hand cranks.
35:12This was the forerunner of the modern tank.
35:16It was not until the 20th century and the First World War
35:21that tanks were introduced into battle.
35:24I think you have to say that his tank was impractical.
35:27I mean, it's sad to say because it's a fantastic design,
35:30it's got cannon firing on all sides
35:32and there's also a cutaway diagram showing how it was to be powered.
35:36But it wasn't really until the late 18th century
35:39when they had the steam-powered cars,
35:41or really properly until the late 19th century
35:44with the development of the internal combustion engine
35:46that you could ever create anything like the modern 20th century tank.
35:50So it had to remain a fantasy for his own day.
35:56Leonardo's exceptional intellect and soaring imagination
36:00produced a constant stream of inventions.
36:03Their unique nature placed many of them
36:05beyond the technical abilities of the age.
36:08There's the paradox that a lot of the things he actually did
36:11are not recorded in drawings
36:13because they're on-the-site activity.
36:15And we shouldn't underrate the extent to which he did that
36:18but the drawings, in a sense, are a kind of fantasy warfare
36:22which is deliberately aiming for style,
36:27for vision, to convince the patron.
36:30And when the patron's got the manuscript,
36:32for the patron to have something which looks incredibly advanced,
36:37very stylish and incredibly wonderful.
36:40I think Leonardo put a lot of his mechanical inventions to very good use,
36:45particularly in the area of the military applications
36:49because he was employed for that particular purpose.
36:52And he certainly wouldn't have been kept in that employment
36:55if the things he invented didn't work.
37:00Not all of Leonardo's designs for a time of war
37:03were offensive weapons restricted only to a military purpose.
37:08Some, like Leonardo's design for a rotating bridge,
37:12may have originated as methods of fortification
37:15but had a wider potential.
37:19This bridge, which could be swung across a river and back again,
37:24was a feat of engineering
37:26which demonstrated Leonardo's technical skill.
37:30One of his other bridge designs was for a two-level bridge.
37:35This adopted the same principle as Leonardo's plan for a model city.
37:39It used different levels to separate pedestrians and traffic.
37:45The type of framework which Leonardo designed for this bridge
37:49is identifiable in bridges built since the 19th century.
37:54He clearly understood the way in which stressor materials could be used
37:58and assembled because the structures that he created
38:01could easily be swung into position
38:03so he could build the bridge very quickly on land.
38:08This was extremely important,
38:10something which was very uncommon at that time.
38:15In 1514, Leonardo was in Rome.
38:20This was almost the last stage of his journeying.
38:24He spent three difficult years under the patronage of Pope Leo X.
38:29There was no natural affinity between the two men.
38:33Leonardo devoted his time principally to scientific experimentation.
38:39As regards Leonardo learning or plagiarising
38:42other people's techniques and ideas,
38:44there was a tradition of artist-engineers,
38:46in Italy especially, going back for two centuries,
38:49and he was particularly influenced by men such as
38:53Francesco di Giorgio Martini and Giuliano de Sangallo.
38:58I think it's fair to see him as part of a tradition which he exploited
39:02using his knowledge of both classical and modern,
39:04that is to say, in his own time, modern technologies and understandings.
39:13Throughout his life, Leonardo had been interested in mechanical science.
39:18His familiarity with machinery had begun in Verrocchio's workshops.
39:23A fascination with machines of all types
39:26is evident in his analytical drawings of their component parts.
39:31Leonardo not only classified the different parts,
39:34but also specified their potential functions.
39:39His sketches show numerous reproductions of gear systems.
39:44Leonardo recognised that, if used appropriately,
39:48gears were a potential source of functional power.
39:52Gears, cogs and weights are central to many of Leonardo's inventions.
39:57What characterises his engineering drawings
40:00is a sense of how a complex system can work in three dimensions.
40:04And I think, in his mind, he could, in a sense, see the parts moving.
40:09And that's the quality of his engineering.
40:11So he brought his abilities to understand things in space,
40:14movement in space, which you see in all his drawings,
40:17he brought it to engineering.
40:22The detailed plans Leonardo drew for all his inventions
40:25have allowed 20th century engineers to assess their potential.
40:31His ingenious design for a spring-driven car
40:34shows clearly that it would have been capable of limited forward movement.
40:40I think many of his other inventions were probably more speculative.
40:44I think he enjoyed playing with ideas
40:46and there were loads and loads of pictures, of sketches, of designs,
40:50which were possibly never used.
40:53It didn't stop him.
40:54Because that's the way designers work.
40:55They will produce loads and loads of sketches of things,
40:58not expecting them to be used,
40:59because they're developing ideas and developing principles.
41:02But we don't quite know exactly how many of things might have been used
41:05because we haven't got all that he produced.
41:08The evidence was that he was far more prolific
41:10than even the small amount that we've got indicates.
41:15In pursuit of the precision he valued,
41:18Leonardo designed measuring devices.
41:21These included an odometer, an instrument to calculate distances.
41:29In order to measure time more effectively,
41:31he designed a clock with separate movements for minutes and hours.
41:36The clock was powered by gears and weight-driven mechanisms.
41:41Many people were beginning to experiment with the idea of using a spring.
41:45Now the difficulty with a spring is that when you wind it up,
41:48it will have its maximum force when it's fully wound.
41:52And as it unwinds, the force available goes down
41:56exactly in proportion to the amount of time it spends.
41:59So what Leonardo devised was a way which,
42:02as the force went down from the spring,
42:06so he applied the lever principle or gearbox principle
42:09to multiply it back up again.
42:11Leonardo believed that the key to accurate representation
42:15was acute observation.
42:18His conviction that vision was the most vital function
42:22led Leonardo deeply into the study of optics.
42:25He was familiar with the construction and function of lenses.
42:29His notes revealed the intensity of his study.
42:34Leonardo has been credited with the invention of the camera obscura.
42:38He understood that images were reversed on the human retina.
42:43There are indications in his notes that he experimented with simple photography.
42:50For a man of genius who was obsessed with the faithful reproduction of appearance,
42:54photography must have been a logical progression.
42:58One of the theories advanced to explain the mystery
43:01of the controversial Turin shroud involves Leonardo.
43:04It is claimed that he faked the shroud
43:07using a photographic image of a decapitated head.
43:14During his three-year stay in Rome,
43:16Leonardo had used dissection in order to pursue his studies of the human form.
43:22He dissected bodies in the Roman hospital.
43:25This work was to end when he was accused of sacrilege.
43:29Now, he had some German miramides,
43:31who were making mirrors for him and doing various technological jobs,
43:35and these gave him a lot of trouble.
43:36They wouldn't learn German.
43:38They went off shooting with the Swiss guards and didn't do their work.
43:41In retaliation, it seems, the German miramides said to the Pope,
43:45Leonardo is dissecting illegally.
43:48We don't know the result of this,
43:50but there's no evidence that Leonardo got into trouble for the dissections he did.
43:54In 1516, Leonardo entered the service of his last and best patron.
44:01The new ruler of France, King Francis I,
44:05invited Leonardo to make his home at the Château de Clou.
44:09Francis offered him the biggest salary that was then available anywhere in Europe
44:14for an artist, an engineer, a sculptor, a sculptor, a sculptor,
44:20for an artist, an engineer, an architect, for being in the court.
44:26And he also offered him accommodation in a manor house, a very gracious residence.
44:31So I think Leonardo went because of the opportunity.
44:35The king made no demands on a man he saw as the intellectual and artistic giant of the age.
44:42He simply wanted the pleasure of Leonardo's conversation.
44:46The king gave Leonardo a home, a pension, and peace.
44:52Leonardo lived contentedly at Clou and died there in 1519.
45:01This most complex genius of the Renaissance belongs to the history of the human mind.
45:08Leonardo towered above his contemporaries.
45:11His true genius lay in the proficiency he achieved in a diverse range of highly specialised areas.
45:19He understood, more clearly than anyone of his century, the importance of precise observations.
45:28Leonardo's endless search for knowledge was both his triumph and his tragedy.
45:34He failed to complete artistic projects when other avenues of study were available.
45:41His notes were never made public in his lifetime, and his discoveries lay hidden for centuries.
45:48Leonardo was a man ahead of his time.
45:52His unique, detailed approach to science and art was a mark of his true genius.
45:59The quality of his painting and drawing has endured throughout the centuries.
46:40If you regard genius as the ability to innovate, to think on far wider parameters than any of your
46:48contemporaries, to essentially have a leap of the imagination beyond anyone around you,
46:55then yes, he was a genius.
46:57It is truly remarkable that an essentially self-taught person, without any claim to a
47:06formal education, could have accomplished so much in so many disparate fields in a single lifetime.
47:19No one had a broader feeling for the complete texture of the world and human beings as dynamic
47:26living systems, and could express that in visual form. And I think the great genius lies in the
47:33drawings and the notebooks and in this vision. No one had a greater sense as to how the visual
47:40medium drawing could convey this vision of universal science, of universal knowledge.
47:48When Leonardo died, his friend Francesco Melzi wrote,
47:52The loss of such a man is mourned by all, because it is not in the power of nature to create another such.