In the public consciousness...
Leonardo da Vinci is most commonly associated...
with two of the most celebrated paintings in the Western tradition:
The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa.
These paintings arejust two examples of the complexity and insight...
which shaped his work.
Born in 1452, he was the consummate Renaissance man.
Painter, sculptor, scientist...
engineer and thinker...
Leonardo's undoubted genius enabled him to evade the restrictions...
which a single discipline would impose.
He was to achieve an almost legendary status in his own lifetime.
I think he was a genius.
He began to see how things could be made and could be made differently.
He began to see the elements.
He also had this intense interest in the way things work.
He had a huge curiosity.
Leonardo challenged...
all the prevailing scientific notions of his day:
whether in anatomy, engineering or architecture.
He symbolized brilliantly...
the revival of true scientific inquiry.
There is a very clear sense that...
in terms of using the visual medium...
that no one could begin to emulate the range of what he was doing.
Freed from the constrictions of medieval culture...
he was able to give free rein to his soaring imagination...
and insatiable curiosity.
Leonardo's unprecedented intellectual gifts...
were to prove an informative influence...
on the future direction of both science and art.
Leonardo was born in Vinci, a small town in Tuscany.
He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci...
a public notary, and a local peasant girl.
Evidence of his exceptional intellect and diversity...
emerged at a very early age.
He demonstrated a high degree of ability in the fields of mathematics...
music and art.
One intriguing element in Leonardo's surviving notebooks...
is his chosen method of writing.
Leonardo was left-handed...
and he wrote backwards, in mirror script.
Left-handed, homosexual, vegetarian:
those facts could have influenced his creativity.
Maybe because he was solitary and that sparked off a creative urge in him...
because even by himself he would doodle and sketch and do all sorts of things.
Of these various factors, the one of these, which was likely...
to have had an effect upon his career is his illegitimacy.
Had he not been illegitimate he would probably have followed...
in his father's career of lawyer...
and we would never have heard of him in art or in science or engineering.
Leonardo is a fascination as a person.
If you do The Mona Lisa, you can say who did this?
So people latch onto these little biographical snippets...
but if you read his notebooks, they are extraordinarily impersonal.
He didn't put himself into them. Michelangelo, his contemporary...
was a very great sculptor. He read poetry...
which was deeply revealing and he wrote wonderfully personal letters.
With Leonardo he is aiming not to give that sort of insight.
I think he's a very private man.
In 1466 Ser Piero da Vinci...
aware that his son had a rare talent for drawing...
took some of Leonardo's work to the leading Florentine painter...
and sculptor of the day, Andrea del Verrocchio.
Verrocchio recognized the potential of the work...
and accepted the fourteen year old Leonardo as a pupil.
To be apprenticed to Verrochio was to be privileged.
He was a man of vision who surrounded himself...
with some of the finest minds of the day.
The years which Leonardo da Vinci spent in Florence were formative.
He acquired a thorough knowledge of many disciplines.
Anatomy, architecture, physics and engineering...
were among the subjects which absorbed him.
However, it was in Verrocchio's workshop that Leonardo perfected his art.
He experimented with colors...
explored the laws of perspective...
and studied the subtleties of light and shade.
As an apprentice he assisted in the completion of commissioned paintings.
In Verrocchio's The Baptism of Jesus...
Leonardo painted a single figure...
a kneeling angel.
It was this figure, which demonstrated the style...
which was to influence High Renaissance classicism.
In 1481 Leonardo was invited by the monastery of San Donato...
to paint an altarpiece, The Adoration of the Magi.
Leonardo never completed it.
His constant search for perfection...
linked to a restless nature, and a need for experimentation...
meant that much of his work never reached fruition.
There were various reasons why Leonardo didn't finish...
quite a lot of his projects. Some are practical...
his patrons fell from power and there was all these things...
which happened to Renaissance artists...
but there is this serious problem that if in looking at one thing...
you can always see its implications on something else.
If you're writing on water and you see the implications of that...
for border the geological question, of the body of the earth...
or you can see its implications for hair...
or you can see its implications for music or sound...
then you're in trouble, because you can't settle in a sense...
that no question itself contained. It's a wonderful vision...
but it's one which doesn't make for ready completion of a single project.
In 1501 he was commissioned to paint a fresco...
celebrating a Florentine victory in the war with Pisa.
This wall painting of The Battle of Anghiari, was never completed.
However, Leonardo made many preparatory drawings.
Among them was a full-size cartoon...
which shows the horror of battle.
Although the original cartoon was destroyed...
there is a copy in existence, made by the artist Rubens.
Perhaps the most memorable aspect of his work...
is his ability to capture the subtle emotions...
which reveal the innermost processes of the mind.
Leonardo used light and shade...
to create three-dimensional bodies...
and added atmosphere and depth to his work...
with subtle color changes.
The Last Supper reveals the psychological isolation of Judas.
However, it is the mystery of the inner life...
captured by the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa...
which has generated more discussion than any other portrait.
The smile gives, above all, a sense of the emotions of the mind.
Portraits with no expressions at all, which was rather the norm...
clearly didn't give a sense of the mind turning over in the brain...
and actually working, but it may also be a pun.
She was married to Francesco de Giocondo...
and her nickname was La Gioconda and that means the happy or smiling one.
So I think it's possible that the smile could be an emblem.
He did something very strange with the horizon.
Perhaps I can demonstrate this with my hands.
On one side of the picture the horizon is here...
and the other side of her head, the horizon is up there.
So the viewer is continually oscillating...
particularly around the eyes, and that creates the ambiguity.
The Mona Lisa out of its frame, particularly...
if the light changes slightly, it kind of breaths against the background.
It has this quality of being alive...
and I think Mona Lisa probably comes...
as close as you could ever come to satisfying...
this total ambition that Leonardo has to get everything right in the painting.
For Leonardo, painting wasjust one form of artistic expression.
In pursuit of an unprecedented realism within art...
he constantly sought to increase his knowledge of the physical world.
When Leonardo made any painting...
he was aiming for it to do everything...
to have the emotions of the minds of the figures in the picture...
to have perfect veracity, for every light effects...
perfect veracity of space and he set himself an impossible agenda.
He never quite realized the limitations of painting.
In common with his artistic methods...
Leonardo's scientific theories were based on precise observations.
He wanted to discover the underlying laws which governed nature.
It is impossible to isolate Leonardo's art from his scientific studies.
He believed that his art was science.
Drawing became an extension of his creative thought processes.
Detailed studies of plants, animals, and humans...
were part of a quest to capture the absolute likeness of his subject.
His Sketch of a Lily demonstrates not only artistic brilliance...
but also the minute detail of scientific observation.
One of the formative influences in Leonardo's life...
was his childhood in the Tuscany countryside.
He was allowed to wander at will in a landscape...
whose changing moods heightened his awareness of the power of nature.
It was here that Leonardo's enduring fascination with organic life began...
as he mastered the art of observation.
With such persistence in solitude...
he developed a remarkable artistic skill...
and a remarkable keenness of observation which were, in fact...
to underlie his anatomical illustrations in the future.
Until Leonardo, no one had studied the human body in such detail.
It was considered sacrilegious to cut up human bodies.
His use of dissection to uncover the body's innermost workings...
was to bring Leonardo into conflict with the Church.
Leonardo's unique approach to anatomy...
produced a new method of scientific study...
based on thorough observation.
His notebooks are full of precise illustrations and supporting notes.
He produced the first anatomical drawings which were of such quality...
that they have formed the basis for modern scientific illustration.
As a medical historian...
one could say that his important contribution...
to anatomy was the concept of sectional anatomy of the limbs...
whereby anatomy was perceived in horizontal sections of the limbs.
Leonardo also made astounding discovery...
of the anatomy of the heart...
and it is entirely conceivable that if his writings...
had not been lost, his discovery of the circulation of blood...
would not have had to wait for Harvey, it would have occurred much earlier.
Leonardo was able to unify areas of study...
which had previously been seen as distinct.
Through his studies of the human form...
which encompassed both the external and the internal...
Leonardo produced figures of remarkable realism.
His drawing The Proportions of the Human Figure...
not only expresses the precision of his anatomical studies...
it visually blends together mathematics and nature.
Leonardo recognized that written explanations of complex issues...
could prove obscure.
He knew that it was his drawings, which would most effectively convey knowledge.
Art became a method of communicating science.
If the scientific and theoretical writings...
contained in Leonardo's notebooks had been made public...
they would have revolutionized the science of the age.
However, he did not choose to publish them.
I think that here there are two problems. There is a practical one.
Illustrated books was still very rare.
Most of the illustrated books had woodcuts...
which didn't deliver an enormous amount of quality.
Now if you think about Leonardo's drawings, how detailed they are...
how perfect they are in their spacial definition...
then he would have needed copper plates.
He would have needed very expensive engraving techniques...
which are very difficult to print in book-form...
but the overriding problem is that none of the projects were wholly complete...
he could always see the next step, see something more to do...
so there is this frustration of seeing this wonderful open-ended agenda...
but how do you actually get a completed work out of that?
He never really solved that problem.
Yes, quite a lot of what he did would have revolutionized...
science and technology of that time, but he put it to good effect...
in as much as he published his work via those people who mattered the most...
namely those who employed him: the senior people of that society...
dukes and so on.
In 1482, Leonardo left Florence...
to work for Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan.
This association was to last for almost twenty years.
In a letter to the Duke...
Leonardo offered his services, as a military engineer...
demonstrating the extent of his technical achievements.
In an age of war this might have seemed an indispensable skill.
However, Lodovico was more interested...
in Leonardo's expertise as an artist and sculptor.
Handsome and gracious, Leonardo was popular at court...
and organized pageants and masquerades to entertain his patron.
Despite his personable nature, Leonardo was at heart, solitary.
He did not allow court duties to deflect him...
from a single-minded pursuit of knowledge.
While in Milan, Leonardo pursued his interest in mathematics.
He collaborated with the mathematician Luca Pacioli...
and illustrated Pacioli's celebrated work On Divine Proportion.
If we're thinking about Leonardo in mathematics...
we have to differentiate between the sorts of mathematics.
Arithmetic was of some interest to him, but he was pretty poor at it.
He couldn't add up a column of many figures without making mistakes.
He wasn't at all interested as far as we know in algebra...
which was available in rudimentary form. It is geometry...
which was visual mathematics...
and he clearly saw geometry almost as a form of visual sculpture.
He could take three-dimensional bodies and manipulate them geometrically.
He could clearly see forms in space...
so geometry became a kind of mental sculpture for him...
and that is where his genius as a mathematician lies.
The notebooks and sketches, from those years in Milan...
reveal Leonardo's mastery of an ever-widening variety of subjects...
ranging from botany and geology to anatomy and architecture.
His Study of a Star of Bethlehem is a masterpiece.
It conveys not only the sense of movement and vitality...
which Leonardo always tried to capture...
but also a degree of detail which is almost microscopic.
He understood the effects of sunlight and gravity on plant growth.
He discovered that it was possible to determine the age of plants and trees...
by studying their structure.
One of the driving forces in Leonardo's life was his intellectual curiosity.
He wanted to understand every aspect of the universe.
Far in advance of 19th Century Darwinism...
Leonardo's investigations into fossil shells...
enabled him to formulate evolutionary theories.
Leonardo was enormously interested in the earth as a living body.
He called it the body of the earth...
and he thought it had undergone enormous changes over time.
Now he saw that there were fossils on mountains...
but for a variety of reasons he didn't think a single deluge...
a deluge of seven days and seven nights...
could get slow-moving creatures at that height...
and they were clearly alive on the mountains as sea saw them.
So there's a whole series of arguments like that...
and he came to the conclusion that there must have been multiple inundations...
and the earth must have been submerged, subject of some kind of living body...
to a huge changes over a period of time.
These ideas were not revolutionary, but had they been published...
I think they would have caused something of a scandal.
Leonardo's power of observation, when linked to his soaring imagination...
was an invaluable tool in the many and various roles he adopted.
In his own time, Leonardo was well known as an architect and sculptor.
His architectural drawings include designs for the dome of Milan Cathedral.
If we think about Leonardo as an architect...
it's difficult in the period to define what an architect was.
There wasn't a body of professionals whom you could call architects...
and different people intervened at different points.
I think I would describe Leonardo as a brilliant architectural consultant...
but probably not an architect who built buildings...
and his great quality as an architect...
was that he could see space in a particular way.
It's the same way he treated geometry, it was a form of spatial sculpture...
and I think nobody at that period had a clearer vision...
of a building as a way of sculpting space...
and his drawings reflected that.
And he had enormous impact upon Bramante...
the man who built St Peter's or started St Peter's...
that great massive building full of space and full of volume.
It is very much a product of vision he pioneered.
Although none of Leonardo's architectural plans...
were ever realized, the skill and imagination they reveal is remarkable.
Leonardo's Scheme for Palaces and Roads at Various Levels...
had a practical purpose.
In an age of recurring plague...
this drawing was his design for a new and healthier Milan.
Leonardo envisaged a city of space and light...
intended to prevent the spread of disease.
This model city was on two levels.
The upper level was to be pedestrianized...
while carts and carriages, which formed the traffic of the day...
were restricted to the lower level.
Leonardo's notebooks indicate that he fulfilled...
a series of minor commissions for Lodovico.
However, one major commission was a memorial to Francesco Sforza...
the father of Lodovico.
The memorial, which was destined never to be completed...
was to be a colossal equestrian statue, cast in bronze.
In preparation, Leonardo created a full-scale clay model.
Its power and beauty were widely acclaimed.
Leonardo's interest in animals was quite patchy, in a way...
he never followed zoology, that science didn't exist at the time.
He was enormously interested in the horse.
The horse was seen as a noble animal and in fact, he had two projects...
to do with equestrian statues.
So he investigated a lot of horse anatomy and horse proportion.
He spent ages measuring the most beautiful horses...
to find out how the proportions worked...
a kind of music of anatomical proportion...
which he did to human beings as well.
He seems to have dissected a bear.
He was very interested in animal movements.
There wasn't a systematic campaign of zoology.
He wasn't interested in classification essentially.
So he had patches where he got suddenly involved with it...
and he is described as having done a book on horse anatomy...
not a finished book, but a manuscript on that subject.
They are now lost, but there are some drawings to show...
what he did in that area, so he really was, I think...
a specialist in animal motion, and above all, the horse.
Leonardo's interest went beyond the scientific.
He had a love for all animals and birds.
He bought caged birds in order to set them free.
His own restless nature made him sympathetic...
to any creature deprived of liberty.
Leonardo's first allegiance had always been to man and nature...
as he sought for his goal of perfect truth.
Despite his affection for his native Tuscany...
no city or country could command that same allegiance.
The resulting detachment from any sense of involvement in the politics...
war and intrigue of his age...
saw Leonardo enter a period in which he lived an almost nomadic existence.
Venice, Florence, Rome and Milan...
were all stages on this ultimately wearying journey...
as Leonardo put his mental and imaginative powers...
at the disposal of various patrons.
In 1502, he made the controversial decision...
to enter the service of the treacherous Cesare Borgia.
I think possibly why he went to work for him was because...
Cesare Borgia appeared to be working...
in order to help the Pope against the oppressors...
who were trying to come in and take over Italy...
and Leonardo would naturally want to go and help in that.
However, when he was working for Cesare Borgia...
he discovered that he wasn't a very nice person to work for.
Indeed, it is rumored that he raped one of the ladies...
who belonged to his former employer.
Cesare's enterprises began to fall apart.
He was betrayed by some of his own captains.
But Leonardo was always looking for a patron...
who basically was giving him a research contract...
Iooking for a patron who would support his interests...
across the board and Cesare was for a time a very magnetic figure...
and it seemed to promise that, but it fell apart.
In the service of Cesare, Leonardo was able to demonstrate his ingenuity.
He made plans to drain marshes...
designed canal systems...
drew maps, and designed fortifications.
However, Leonardo was unable to maintain his intellectual detachment...
in the face of Cesare's murderous nature...
and he left his service in 1503.
Whichever patron he worked for...
Leonardo was continually exploring and experimenting...
to further his own research on flight.
He made countless sketches of birds and studied the anatomy of their wings.
Leonardo trusted the logical conclusions of mathematics...
because they were based on concepts of universal truth.
However, he knew that science must be based on experiment.
Only in this way would knowledge increase.
His experimental drawings show designs for flying machines.
He produced experimental drawings of devices like flying machines.
I don't think anybody ever tested them.
Other people were testing things at the same time.
There was a celebrated abbot in Scotland...
who decided he was going to demonstrate...
the power of Archimedes by doing a solo flight non-stop from Stirling to Paris.
He got as far as the first 100 yards. He fell down and broke a leg...
and I suspect that had Leonardo tried any of his flying machines...
he may well have landed up in the same situation!
When we think about Leonardo's flying machines...
I think there are two phases that we have to look at.
One when he was thinking of flapping machines...
essentially imitating a bat or a bird's wing.
I'm pretty certain that he concluded out the results of tests...
that there simply wasn't the power in man's frame...
to drive that huge machine and the later ones...
come very close to what we would call hang-gliders.
He was thinking of gliding system with the wings and tail...
used for steering purposes.
The one that was most likely to fly, wasn't actually one that he most liked.
He rather liked the bird's idea of flapping wings and so on.
He got that wrong I think. The one that really would've worked...
was the helicopter, because he had a mechanism...
and that mechanism, once he could find a way of moving it...
other than given power, could possibly have worked.
His design evolved from flying machines to other devices...
intended to be used after flight had been achieved.
One of his drawings is of the world's first parachute.
It was to be many centuries before other inventors...
introduced similar life-saving devices.
Leonardo was fascinated by the elements.
He was obsessed with the power and movement of both air and water.
His series of drawings The Deluge...
which are almost abstract in form...
show a raging sky and torrents of swirling water.
For Leonardo the properties of air and water were similar.
Just as clouds were supported by air...
so water supported anything that floated on its surface.
He saw flight as comparable to swimming.
Leonardo brought his acute power of observation...
to bear on his studies of hydrodynamics.
In his research he discovered the effect of the moon on tides.
Leonardo did interesting drawings of the flow of fluid.
This was I think largely because he was very interested...
in anatomy and biology and, perhaps, the flow of blood through the body.
He wasn't able to take this work very far.
He was 200 years before anybody was really in a position...
to do very much in the way of hydrodynamics.
Just as Leonardo believed that man would fly...
his drawings demonstrated a desire for man to master the sea.
He experimented with buoyancy and invented ski-like shoes...
for walking on water. Leonardo's sketch of the first lifebelt...
anticipates exactly the design evident on ships today.
There is evidence that Leonardo invented a system...
for supplying air to a man underwater.
He is believed to have destroyed the details of this device...
because he recognized the potential for its abuse...
by the evil nature of men.
Leonardo's study of hydrodynamics...
drew him further into the field of pure technology.
Much of Leonardo's reputation, for technical innovation...
rests on his own work as an engineer and inventor.
Leonardo lived in an uncertain, violent age.
Renaissance Italy was constantly at war.
Racked by internal disputes, she was also under threat from other states.
During the Renaissance, it was usual for craftsmen and artists...
to be familiar with weaponry.
Both Giotto and Michelangelo drew plans for the fortification of Florence.
Practical science became important in relation to war...
as more effective ways of dealing death were sought.
It is often said that there was a revolution of warfare...
in the late 15th Century especially with the introduction...
of new, fast-firing light cannons, which could accompany armies.
But the real role of artillery was to break into fortifications...
and most of the warfare fought in Northern Italy...
in the late 15th and early 16th Century, was known as the Italian Wars...
centered around fortifications and so what you needed...
as a dynast, as a ruler, was a master engineer...
who could both build you successful fortifications...
and also help you construct siege weapons...
which could batter them down, to defeat your opponent.
Leonardo's untiring search for knowledge...
was at the heart of both his artistic and scientific endeavors.
In the years he spent working for Lodovico Sforza in Milan...
Leonardo was constantly designing equipment...
intended to improve the performance of the military.
He offered Lodovico a wide quantity of ideas.
There were plans of bridges, pontoons and fortifications.
Although he saw war as bestial madness...
Leonardo produced numerous designs for weaponry.
Some, like his detailed sketches of scading ladders...
were improvements on existing equipment.
Leonardo's design was for a mechanized ladder...
which could be raised or lowered using a system of cranks and gears.
This is similar to the equipment used by today's fire fighters.
Other designs were of his own inventions...
and included a triple-tier machine gun, which produced a hail of shrapnel.
There were also hand-grenades and exploding mortars.
He made a lot of designs for all kinds of weaponry...
helpful in sieges, cannon and also fortification itself...
which was a very important thing in the warfare...
of the late 15th, early 16th Century.
We have to say that most of his designs never really came to fruition...
so maybe weren't used in Ludovico's wars in the way they had been.
On a larger scale, Leonardo designed a covered armored car...
which had breech-loading guns.
It was intended to be powered by hand-cranks.
This was the forerunner of the modern tank.
It was not until the 20th Century and the First World War...
that tanks were introduced into battle.
I think you have to say that his tank was impractical.
It is sad to say because it's a fantastic design.
It's got cannons firing on all sides and there's also a cut-away diagram...
showing how it was to be powered.
It wasn't until the late 18th Century when they had steam-powered cars...
or really properly until the late 19th Century...
with the development of the internal combustion engine...
that you could ever create anything like the modern 20th Century tank.
So it had to remain a fantasy for his own day.
Leonardo's exceptional intellect and soaring imagination...
produced a constant stream of inventions.
Their unique nature placed many of them beyond technical abilities of the age.
There's a paradox that a lot of the things he actually did...
are not recorded in drawings.
But the drawings, in a sense, are a kind of fantasy warfare...
which is deliberately aiming for...
style or vision to convince the patron...
and so the patrons had something which looked incredibly advanced...
very stylish and incredibly wonderful.
I think Leonardo put a lot of his inventions to very good use...
particularly in the area of military applications...
because he was employed for that particular purpose.
He certainly wouldn't have been kept in that employment...
if things he invented didn't work.
Not all of Leonardo's designs, for a time of war...
were offensive weapons restricted only to a military purpose.
Some, like Leonardo's design for a rotating bridge...
may have originated as methods of fortification...
but had a wider potential.
This bridge, which could be swung across a river, and back again...
was a feat of engineering which demonstrated Leonardo's technical skill.
One of his other bridge designs was for a two-level bridge.
This adopted the same principle as Leonardo's plan for a model city.
It used different levels to separate pedestrians and traffic.
The type of framework which Leonardo designed for this bridge...
is identifiable in bridges built since the 19th Century.
He clearly understood the ways in which stress of materials could be used...
because the structure he created could easily be swung into positions.
So they could build the bridge very quickly on land...
so it was extremely important, which was very uncommon, at that time.
In 1514, Leonardo was in Rome.
This was almost the last stage of hisjourneying.
He spent three difficult years under the patronage of Pope Leo X.
There was no natural affinity between the two men.
Leonardo devoted his time principally to scientific experimentation.
As regards Leonardo plagiarizing other people's techniques and ideas...
there was a tradition of artists and engineers in Italy especially...
going back for two centuries, and he was particularly influenced...
by men such as Francesco de Georgio Martini...
and Giuliano de Sangero. I think it's fairer to see it as part of...
a tradition which he exploited using his knowledge of classical and modern...
that is to say, in his own time, modern technology and understanding.
Throughout his life Leonardo had been interested in mechanical science.
His familiarity with machinery had begun in Verrocchio's workshops.
A fascination with machines of all types...
is evident in his analytical drawings of their component parts.
Leonardo not only classified the different parts...
but also specified their potential functions.
His sketches show numerous reproductions of gear systems.
Leonardo recognized that, if used appropriately...
gears were a potential source of functional power.
Gears, cogs, and weights, are central to many of Leonardo's inventions.
What characterizes his engineering drawing...
is a sense of how a complex system can work in 3 dimensions...
and I think, in his mind, he could see the parts moving.
That's the quality of his engineering so he brought his abilities...
to understanding space, movement in space...
which you see in all his drawings, he brought it to engineering.
The detailed plans Leonardo drew for all his inventions...
have allowed 20th Century engineers to assess their potential.
His ingenious design for a spring-driven car...
shows clearly that it would have been capable of limited forward movement.
I think many of his other inventions were far more speculative.
He enjoyed playing with ideas, loads of pictures, sketches, designs...
which possibly were never used, and it didn't stop him.
That's the way designers work. They would produce of sketches of things...
not expecting them to be used...
because they are developing ideas and developing principles.
We don't quite know exactly how many ideas might have been used...
because we haven't got all that he produced.
The evidence is that he was far more prolific...
than even all the work we have got, indicates.
In pursuit of the precision he valued...
Leonardo designed measuring devices.
These included an odometer, an instrument to calculate distances.
In order to measure time more effectively...
he designed a clock with separate movements for minutes and hours.
The clock was powered by gears and weight-driven mechanisms.
Many people were beginning experimenting with use a spring.
Now the difficulty with the spring is that when you wind it up...
it will have its maximum force when it is fully wound...
and as it unwinds...
the force available goes down...
exactly in proportion to the amount of time it spends.
So what Leonardo devised was a way in which...
as the force went down from a spring...
so he applied the lever principle to multiply it back up again.
Leonardo believed that the key to accurate representation...
was acute observation.
His conviction that vision was the most vital function...
led Leonardo deeply into the study of optics.
He was familiar with the construction and function of lenses.
His notes reveal the intensity of his study.
Leonardo has been credited with the invention of the camera obscura.
He understood that images were reversed on the human retina.
There are indications, in his notes...
that he experimented with simple photography.
For a man of genius, who was obsessed...
with the faithful reproduction of appearance...
photography must have been a logical progression.
One of the theories advanced to explain the mystery...
of the controversial Turin Shroud involves Leonardo.
It is claimed that he faked the Shroud...
using a photographic image of a decapitated head.
During his three-year stay in Rome...
Leonardo had used dissection in order to pursue his studies of the human form.
He dissected bodies in the Roman hospital.
This work was to end when he was accused of sacrilege.
He had some German mirror-makers working in his workshop...
who were making mirrors for him and doing various technological jobs...
and he gave them a lot of trouble. He wouldn't learn German.
They went off shooting with the Swiss Guards and didn't do their work.
In retaliation, it seems, the German mirror-makers...
said to the Pope that Leonardo was dissecting illegally.
We don't know the result of this, but there is no evidence...
that Leonardo got into trouble for the dissections he did.
In 1516...
Leonardo entered the service of his last, and best, patron.
The new ruler of France, King Francis I...
invited Leonardo to make his home at the Chateau de Cloux.
Francis offered him the biggest salary...
that was then available anywhere in Europe for an artist...
an engineer and an architect, all being in the court...
and he also offered him accommodation in a manor house...
a very gracious residence, so I think Leonardo...
went because of opportunity.
The king made no demands on a man he saw as the intellectual...
and artistic giant of the age.
He simply wanted the pleasure of Leonardo's conversation.
The king gave Leonardo a home, a pension...
and peace.
Leonardo lived contentedly at Cloux and died there...
in 1519.
This most complex genius of the Renaissance...
belongs to the history of the human mind.
Leonardo towered above his contemporaries.
His true genius lay in the proficiency he achieved...
in a diverse range of highly specialized areas.
He understood, more clearly than anyone of his century...
the importance of precise observations.
Leonardo's endless search for knowledge...
was both his triumph and his tragedy.
He failed to complete artistic projects...
when other avenues of study opened up.
His notes were never made public in his lifetime...
and his discoveries lay hidden for centuries.
Leonardo was a man ahead of his time.
His unique, detailed approach to science and art...
was a mark of his true genius.
The quality of his painting and drawing has endured throughout the centuries.
If you regard genius as the ability to innovate...
to think on a far wider parameter than any of your contemporaries...
to essentially have a leap of the imagination...
beyond anyone around you, then he was a genius.
It is truly remarkable that as an essentially...
self-taught person...
without any claim to have had a formal education...
could have accomplished so much...
in so many desperate fields...
in a single lifetime.
No one had a broader feeling...
for the complete texture of the world and human beings...
as dynamic living systems and could express that in visual form...
and I think a great genius lies in the drawings...
and in the notebooks and in this vision...
no one had a greater sense of how the visual medium drawing...
could convey this vision of universal science and universal knowledge.
When Leonardo died his friend Francesco Melti wrote...
"The loss of such a man is mourned by all...
because it is not in the power of nature...
to create another such."