Exhibition on Screen: Leonardo | A Renaissance Mastermind

The exhibition explores the making of Leonardo as a one-man creative force during the 17 years that he spent in the city of Milan, in seven distinct rooms, each of which we'll be visiting throughout the course of the evening. Here in the first room we see early studies and we see what the curators call the quiet revolutionary painting that is the portrait of a musician. Into the second room sensuality, love and female beauty abound in two wonderful paintings that have never been seen side by side, including this one, The Lady with Ermine, and then La Belle Ferronniere, both lovers of, perhaps this is the wife of, Leonardo's patron Ludovico Sforza. Pictures that encourage a man to fall in love, say the curators. Then in the next room we look at Leonardo's unbelievable interest and scrutiny of the human anatomy, made manifest in this work, the unfinished penitent self-flagellating image of Saint Jerome in the wilderness, and then perhaps the treat of treats in the exhibition, where you could say the divine is made most obviously manifest. Two versions of the Virgins of the Rocks, the first here from the Louvre, and then the second version that resides in the National Gallery and has just been restored. Then we go on to a look at the workshop system and Leonardo's pupils, and then by exploring this exquisite little painting, the Madonna Lita, we explore what makes an authentic Leonardo, what makes an autographed work. Then we have a look at probably his most famous work, certainly his greatest, The Last Supper, but of course that's in a convent in Milan, but there's a life-sized copy made by one of Leonardo's pupils, along with some sumptuous drawings. And then finally we look at the idea of painting itself as a kind of divine force, a kind of miracle. In two works at the end of the exhibition, one the most famous drawing in the world probably, people queued to see it in Leonardo's lifetime, and then this, a painting that people have waited for for a long time. In fact this is the first newly authenticated Leonardo work for over a century. No other artist in history seems to inspire and fascinate more than Leonardo da Vinci. The original Renaissance man, his combined achievements in art, engineering, mathematics and science remain unrivaled to this day. But who was Leonardo and where did he come from? Well his beginnings weren't particularly auspicious. Born in 1452, Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant woman from the small Tuscan hill town of Vinci. Aged around 14, his extraordinary talents gained him a place in the workshop of the great painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence. Here Leonardo learnt the craft of painting and collaborated on a number of works, such as the Baptism of Christ. The story goes that he painted the angel so well that Verrocchio gave up painting forever. Whether or not this is true, by the age of 20 Leonardo was an independent artist, creating highly accomplished works such as this image of the Annunciation. Supremely talented, a great horseman, a musician, the young Leonardo is reported to have been a charismatic and extremely handsome man, with long flowing ringlets down to his chest. But despite his early success, Leonardo was something of an outsider. His illegitimacy and lack of academic education undermined his sense of position in society. An intensely private man, he offers few clear indications of his personal life in his own writings, but it's now generally accepted that he was homosexual, illegal in Florence in 1476, where court records show he was once accused of sodomy. But what he does write about in these years betrays an increasing restless fascination with all aspects of the world around him, an unstoppable drive to inquire and explore. In 1482, seeking new opportunities, Leonardo moved north to Milan. Perhaps surprisingly, in his appeal for patronage to Ludovico Sforza, the future Duke of Milan, Leonardo pitched himself primarily as a military engineer, promising to share his secrets. Only as an afterthought did he mention his artistic ability. Leonardo, the great artist like a simple portrait of a young man staring out from the picture with a curious intensity. But for those in the Sforza court in Milan who saw it in 1486 or perhaps 1487, this quiet and understated image was a revelation. At this time, portraits, and particularly those of rulers such as Ludovico Sforza, were almost always captured in profile, and once a likeness had been created, that was it, no matter how many years went by. Against this comes Leonardo's quietly radical but typically unfinished portrait. In this three-quarter view, we get a sense of an inner life, an emotional depth. Here is an emerging naturalism, a desire to show the sitter as he was. It was a format that came to be copied by many of Leonardo's followers in the decades to come. But it's the sheaf of paper that he holds that's the key to the painting. Previously, it had been thought that it was an image of Ludovico Sforza himself, but in 1905, restoration work revealed that there was music on the page, a crucial detail which had previously been overpainted. After that, there could be no doubt that this was an image of a musician, someone most likely well known to Leonardo. Scholars now believe the most obvious candidate to be Atalante Migliarotti, who'd actually been taught music by Leonardo himself. And here is the portrait of the musician, and joining me, scrutinising it already, is a musician, the conductor Paul Daniel. Paul, what are your first impressions of this picture? Well, it's completely enigmatic to me. Without the music there, you wouldn't know he was a musician at all. And it's true that this music was only uncovered about 100 years ago, wasn't it? It was. It was painted over. You can hardly tell what the music is. So you don't see this as a performer, someone who's just finished or is about to sing? Of course he could be. But there's nothing else about the picture that tells you that. For me, what's fantastic about it is the way Leonardo's looking into his character, into his soul, into his personality, in a way that none of those more formal portraits ever do. Yeah, well, she does have the profile ones, and then suddenly it feels like there's a whole new world opening up in this court in Milan. And it's a bit like that with the music as well, because in Italy, all of these different courts were bringing, sucking in musicians from the low countries, from France, from all over the world, coming to make new music and invent new ways of making music. So it must have been an incredible fertile environment. A culture in transition. And this, of course, is Leonardo's art, and therefore, by extension, the history of painting in transition. You're quite right that there's an ambivalence that discovering this as music changes it. But I do have to draw you. I don't want to fight, but let's have one. Leonardo says, of course, this is about the primacy of sight, and it's about painting's ability to memorialise, whereas music is transient. How do you plead to that? For me, that's a wonderful thing to know about this picture, actually, because there's this picture which is actually, of course, in movement. And, you know, just looking at the eyes, you know, the irises of his two eyes are different. One is more open than the other, which suggests that he's only just moved. So the painting is already in movement, you know, and there's the idea of music there, which, of course, is always being renewed. You know, as a musician, you know, my job is to actually take these pieces of music and make them again, which was a completely foreign concept, I guess, to composers at the time, because they were, you know, you wrote a piece of music that was thrown away. And Leonardo always said, didn't he, that, you know, painting would always rule music, even though he was a great musician, because the painting was there forever, and the musician, the music had gone. This is wonderful. That was kind of very tactful. In other words, you're backing the painting, but you're also standing up for music at the same time. Well, okay, painting freezes a moment in time, doesn't it? It does. But music actually disperses into any time. It does indeed, and there we must end it, dispersing into time. Paul Davies, thank you. Thank you very much. Leonardo da Vinci arrived in Milan in 1482 as an unknown Tuscan artist with a good deal to prove. He'd emerged 17 years later as the greatest artist of his generation, and indeed any other. Soon after his arrival, Leonardo began working for one of the most powerful men in Europe, a future Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Ludovico was also born in 1452, making him the same age as Leonardo, but the two men were very different. Ludovico was a ruthlessly ambitious, strong man, a Milanese, in some respects culturally closer to northern Europe than Florence, and yet he was an intelligent man who came to recognise that his patronage of a genius like Leonardo could further elevate his status as a great prince. Nevertheless, the relationship between artist and patron was at times rather rocky. The Duke often failed to pay his salary, while at the same time Leonardo was gaining a reputation for not finishing projects, not least the giant equestrian statue of Ludovico's father, which he never delivered. But for Leonardo, his time at court in Milan proved critical to the evolution of his art. Rather than the constant insecurity of jumping from one commission to the next, with a salary he was able to think, experiment and research. It was also in Milan that Leonardo set up his own workshop. Here he developed the talents of a number of young artists, including Marco D'Ogiono and Giovanni Antonio Botrafio, as well as the notorious Giacomo Caproti, nicknamed Salai, the little devil. Salai stayed with Leonardo for 25 years and may have been his lover, despite the master making exhaustive lists of his many misdemeanours. On one occasion he described him as thief, liar, stubborn and greedy. During this period, Leonardo's ambitions for his art changed from a desire to mirror the world he saw around him, to one that set out to create images more perfect than nature itself. The creation of the ideal in art, with its foundations in both observation and imagination, set the benchmark not just for Leonardo's pupils, but for much of the history of art to follow. Leonardo's time in Milan came to an abrupt end with the invasion of French troops in 1499. Ludovico was forced to flee and Leonardo left soon after, his fame by now such that he was wooed by all the great courts of Europe. Let's see a little more about how curator Luke Sison put the exhibition together. Well what we're doing today is putting up brown pieces of paper cut to the exact size of each of the exhibits and laying them out in the in the room so that we can work out precisely where everything is going to go once it arrives. And the reason we do that of course is because things arrive at different moments, which means that you can't actually lay it all out on a wall at one time, so you have to work this out in advance. It's what we call the paper hang and it's the beginning stage of any installation. There's probably never been an exhibition quite like this one before. Leonardo painted extraordinarily little, something around 15 pictures and we've got half of them coming here. There's probably more Leonardo's in London now than there ever have been anywhere before. Now that's not just an end in itself because of course by doing that we're going to be able to follow that journey, that sense of where Leonardo began as a painter and where he took the art of painting. This is a show like none that has ever been before. That's not even English but it's true. We've been incredibly lucky in what we've been able to gather here in London, but I have to say that's been the result of years of hard work, of long conversations with all the individual lenders and that's right in a way that each of them should be persuaded not just that their works are going to travel safely and will be looked after properly while they're here in London, but that by lending them people will actually learn by seeing those pictures normally in Poland or in France or in Italy with other works by Leonardo that we'll actually see something more by seeing those pictures together than we would even if we saw them in quite quick succession by travelling across Europe as fast as we could. Everything starts arriving properly tomorrow so I'm feeling nervous, a little tired but actually very excited. This is the beginning of the countdown, this is the beginning of the end of this incredibly long journey. This room of the exhibition is entitled Beauty and Love and at its heart are two portraits painted around five years apart. They're both are women loved by Leonardo's patron Duke Ludovico yet they tell us something very different about how Leonardo developed his approach to portraying feminine beauty. Both paintings have travelled to be here, the Lady with Ermine has come from Poland and La Belle Ferronniere has made the journey from the Louvre. The great joy of an exhibition like this is the ability to see works side by side that are normally exhibited miles apart, but before we compare them here's the story of these two great Leonardo's artistic ambition was to create a truly naturalistic form of painting. He wanted to depict the world around him as he saw it and he viewed portraiture as the real test of his skill. Not only could the likeness be compared directly with the sitter but in a portrait he could aim to capture something of the true character of a person. Leonardo looked for a model so beautiful that her image could represent the beauty of all things and he found his perfect subject in Cecilia Galerani, mistress to Ludovico Sforza. Known as the Lady with an Ermine the resulting portrait is one of Leonardo's great achievements. Scholars have known for a long time that Leonardo painted Galerani but it was only in the last century that it was identified as this painting, when it was realised that her surname matched the Greek for ermine and that Ludovico was known to many as the white ermine. Leonardo's other great image of female beauty has a similar identity crisis. For the past 300 years she's been misidentified as La Belle Ferronniere, mistress of King Francois I of France. But scholars are still unable totally to confirm the true identity of the sitter, believing it to be either Lucrezia Crivelli, another mistress of Ludovico or indeed the Duke's wife Beatrice d'Este. If the subject is indeed Beatrice, not known for her natural beauty then Leonardo would certainly have to abandon his rigorous naturalism and by this point he felt that art should in fact idealise the image of those he painted if not reflect a universal notion of female beauty. Outward beauty was seen as reflecting inner virtue and so an idealised portrait could be seen to reflect the sitter's true character. Idealised she may be but there's no doubt that Leonardo convincingly brings her to life. This extraordinary image of the ageing but muscular Saint Jerome shows Leonardo caught between his twin ambitions and obsessions, namely the difference between nature and the ideal, between acute observation of the anatomical body and the passion of the human imagination. Saint Jerome was one of the great scholars of the church. He translated the bible from Greek to Latin and was often depicted in the Syrian desert where he spent time as a penitent hermit. The lion is a common feature in imagery of Saint Jerome as he was believed to have befriended one after removing a thorn from its paw. Here Leonardo shows the saint in a moment of spiritual turmoil and physical agony, gazing on a vision of the crucified Christ whilst attempting to banish his earthly desires by beating his chest with a rock. But beyond the powerful religious message of the painting this is a profound study of the human body and movement, an image in which every muscle and tendon comes alive. Never again would Leonardo depict a nude or semi-nude figure with such drama. The painting is exhibited alongside an array of Leonardo's anatomical studies, from precise descriptions of muscles in the neck to a remarkable rendering of the human skull. All these remind us of Leonardo's contribution to science. Few if any figure before him had come close to this level of understanding of the workings of the human body. But we must also remember that Leonardo didn't differentiate between art and science. All of Leonardo's studies of the human body had a single aim, better to depict the human body in his art. He wanted to go beyond outward appearances, to get under the skin and wrestle with the flesh and bones of his subjects, and in doing so he created a visceral depth to his art like no other artist had done before. One of the most exciting aspects of this exhibition is the bringing together of the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks for the very first time in history. Even Leonardo himself would never have seen them side by side, but here at the National Gallery, before our eyes, we have the unprecedented privilege to explore one of the great sagas of art history. In 1483 the newly formed confraternity of the Immaculate Conception in Milan commissioned a sculpted altarpiece in which a painting of the Virgin and Child with Angels was to be included. It was a full 25 years later, after numerous legal wrangles, that an altarpiece was finally delivered, and during that time Leonardo, the man who rarely finished any piece of work, completed two versions of his famous painting. The first was begun immediately following the commission, nothing quite like it had ever been painted before, and it isn't immediately apparent how it fulfilled the confraternity's desire for a depiction of the Immaculate Conception. Perhaps, pictured among the primeval rocks of creation, the Virgin represents both the origin of Christ and the origin of the world itself, conflated into one. At some point during the early 1490s, a series of delays caused by lack of funding, and perhaps disagreement over Leonardo's radical vision, meant that this first version of the Virgin of the Rocks was sold to another buyer. Little is known of its history from this point on, but it surfaces again in 17th century France, and from there found its home in the Louvre. For some time a debate has raged as to whether the second version of the painting is merely a copy made by Leonardo in his workshop to fulfill his contract with the confraternity, or indeed a second original. But the recent extensive restoration of the painting shows that Leonardo wrestled with the design as he worked, something only he would do. Leonardo's own spirituality is hard to determine, for he wrote very little on the subject. His dedication to the pursuit of scientific knowledge has sometimes seen him cast as a proto-atheist, and in the decades after his death he gained a mildly heretical reputation. But for Leonardo there was no contradiction in his investigation of the natural world and a belief in a supreme being. He understood very well the role of art in religious devotion, and the Virgin of the Rocks is a supreme example. The Virgin of the Rocks recently underwent a major restoration under the management of the National Gallery's Larry Keith. When the Virgin of the Rocks was acquired by the Gallery in 1880 it had some panel work done. In 1948 and 49 there was a more comprehensive restoration, but unfortunately the varnish that was selected and used at the time degraded quite markedly. It yellowed a great deal, and a surface coating on top of the varnish, which contained a lot of wax, imbibed quite a lot of dirt, which meant the whole thing got quite foggy, and that means it's very hard to read the darker tones. For someone like Leonardo, whose painting is based on really quite careful manipulation of tones, in other words the values from light to dark, at least as much as color, when you're missing a lot of the darker range then that really wreaks havoc with the kind of fundamental intention of the painting. Well I think one of the really remarkable things about the restoration, or the result of the restoration, is to allow you to understand, you know, the evidence you can see of the long campaign of work on the painting, and how he changed his style, and his level of finish, and the way he went about painting. And there's some very interesting evidence, circumstantial and technical evidence, that suggests that parts of the picture may have even been finished while it was in the frame. For example the way that this ultramarine paint layer, which is the more expensive blue used to finish the sky, was applied in such a way that seems to follow the line that would have been covered by the original framing. And the fact that it's filled in in some areas here and stops in a rather fairly abrupt way compared to here, where it's very carefully pulled down and merged with the lighter colors closer to the horizon. The actual treatment itself had to do with reducing and thinning these varnishes, mostly from the 1948-49 treatment. We removed enough of the varnish, not all of it, but enough to get the aesthetic goals that we wished from the picture. In this case that was, as I said, largely to do with re-establishing the tonal range and seeing the paint that's there, and letting it function properly. I think the most exciting single episode to do with the study and restoration of the picture was the initial investigation with infrared, where we found a completely different composition underneath the one you see now. What you see now is essentially a reprise of the Paris picture with some important changes, but beneath that there's a whole different image. I think the discovery of that image confirmed the dating of our picture and helped a lot of pieces fall into place about the chronology and the history of our picture and Leonardo and other works as well. Larry, you've spent a lot of time restoring this. Very briefly, what did you do and why did it need doing? Well, we decided to do work on this picture after studying a lot of the pictures in the collection by his pupils and associates, starting in the mid-1990s. In restoring those paintings we learned a great deal about techniques and materials and intent, and after doing that it became very obvious that the discoloration of the varnish on the Virgin of the Rocks was really standing between the viewer and Leonardo's intent, and so the decision was made to do the work. When you're working on a work like this, I know there's a lot of over-romantic projection about Leonardo's kind of genius and the divine nature of what he does, a lot of which, you know, I found very, very powerful, but do you feel that you're getting closer to Leonardo, or is yours a much more detached and scientific viewpoint that he might respect? Well, that's true. I think there's an aspect of both of those things in doing a restoration. I think, you know, by using the work that the Gallery undertakes in the scientific department and the research of the curators and our experience of other paintings, we learn about the material changes to the varnish, say, that we do something about, but the process of doing the restoration then reveals Leonardo's own intent, and that's where the mystical component comes in, I think. Is there a Leonardo brushstroke that you can now recognize under microscope? Oh, I don't think it's quite like that. I think, you know, the quality of this picture in particular has to do with the way the effects are orchestrated across the whole thing, you know. It's about an intent and understanding of technique and materials used to express a certain idea about how light works and how people see. Now, you're going to be very diplomatic, but you have revealed this beautifully, and the problem is that now, in contrast with the Louvre's picture, it makes that look slightly grimy. Tell me you want to get your mitts on the Louvre painting and start restoring that. Oh, I'm very sure that the people in the Louvre are very, very capable of deciding what to do with that picture. Diplomatic answer. Thanks very much, Larry. Thank you. The most recent renovation work on this painting has been also on the impressive frame, and we've talked to Peter Schade, the Gallery's head of framing, to find out more about the work he's been doing to present this great painting in a new way. The opportunity to reframe this, the Madonna of the Rocks, just was purely by chance when I discovered parts of an old frame at an auction in Italy, and amongst three or four frames, there was this one, these three pieces of this one frame, which I immediately thought would be useful for something in the Gallery. The idea to use it for the Madonna of the Rocks came slightly later, when I discovered that amongst the paintings that were roughly the right size, this would be a very suitable one. The Virgin of the Rocks has now come out of the frame prior to the exhibition, allowing us one last chance to check that the newly created bits still work as well with the old parts that we bought at an auction. The frame has been made using original early 16th century parts, which are the columns and the entablature on top, and combining them with elements that we had to create, partly because they were missing, like the predella, the entire bottom part, we just didn't have, so we had to recreate that, but also partly to adapt the shape of the frame to the arched top image of the Madonna of the Rocks. We did not want to copy exactly bits of the frames that we bought, because that would have been unusual to repeat this or something else closer to the inner edge, but we copied things that are very much current in Italy at about 1500, and this is a so-called guilloche pattern that's carved in wood and then gessoed and gilded, and in the end distressed to look like part of the original frame. Often, paintings being restored is a moment that you rethink the framing. The crucial point was that the curator, Luc Zeissen, shared my vision or could see what I tried to propose that we could do, we could achieve, but also had the kind of trust and confidence in that we should attempt this, because a reframing of a Leonardo is something potentially controversial. The complex creative relationship between Leonardo and his pupils is explored through this work, the Madonna Lita. The idea of the artist working alone to create a masterpiece is a relatively recent product essentially of 19th century romanticism. Leonardo, like every other artist of his time, worked alongside a number of assistants. Until midway through the 19th century, the Madonna Lita had always been believed to have been painted by Leonardo himself. Ever since though, a debate has raged over how much of it may have been painted by Leonardo and how much by the workshop. Recent research, such as the existence of these preparatory drawings, makes a very strong argument that it was done solely by the great man himself. But perhaps the most persuasive argument of all is to ask who else but Leonardo could have created a work of such quality. Many artists have depicted the biblical scene of the Last Supper, the final meal that Christ shared with his apostles and before his crucifixion, but Leonardo's is the best remembered, the most famous. Why is this? Well, partly because of the level of ambition that Leonardo had, and partly because even on this scale, gigantic, he was still trying to experiment technically. But mainly because unlike other artists, Leonardo was able to bring such a convincing sense of narrative to a fixed image. The original can't be here as it was painted directly onto a wall, that of the monastery of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It was commissioned by Leonardo's patron, Duke Ludovico, and Leonardo worked on it between 1495 and 1498, although typically we hear accounts that Leonardo often wouldn't paint anything for days. Vasari then tells us that when the Duke questioned him on this, Leonardo replied that the greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less. Nice motto. The Last Supper's not a true fresco, as it was painted onto a dry wall rather than wet plaster. Because a fresco can't be modified as the artist works, in his typically experimental way, Leonardo chose to and then paint onto the ceiling layer with tempera and oils. And it's because of this experimental method that the painting began to deteriorate, even within Leonardo's lifetime. This, however, didn't stop the King of France from wanting to try and move the painting, presumably wall and all, back to France. Who knows what condition it might now be in, had he actually attempted it. Two early copies of the Last Supper are known to exist, and this one is painted onto a canvas by Leonardo's pupil called Giampietrino around 1520, and it allows us a fascinating glimpse of what the original might have looked like in all its pre-faded glory. As I mentioned, perhaps the key to this painting's rightful reputation as one of the greatest works in art history is down to its ability to tell a convincing and dramatic story. Standing here in front of Giampietrino's copy, I'm grateful for the documented memory, but I miss the punch and presence of the original and all its faded, damaged glory in Milan. But it's the drawings that really bring this image to life here in London, and just as the monks in the refectory in Milan would have had their leap of faith required to believe that the Last Supper was taking place above them, prompted by Leonardo's grand illusion on the wall, so the drawings here help us to try and grasp what remains of the work, and they also help the viewer to make a leap of faith and imagination. The last two decades of Leonardo's life were spent travelling the courts of Italy and beyond, at the height of his fame. By 1503 he was back in Florence, along with his great contemporary Michelangelo. Their intense rivalry came to a head when the now-celebrated artists were commissioned to decorate either end of the city's council hall, with two extraordinary battle scenes, Leonardo, the Battle of Anghiari, and Michelangelo, the Battle of Cassina. The Renaissance heavyweights were not on good terms though. Michelangelo reportedly mocked Leonardo for not completing the Sforza horse, while Leonardo had once described Michelangelo's muscular male nudes as looking like a bag of walnuts. When he left Florence in 1506, Leonardo typically abandoned the mural unfinished. It was destroyed in the mid-16th century, and all that remains is this chalk-drawn copy, showing his hugely ambitious design. Around the same time, Leonardo was working on what would become his most famous painting, a portrait of the wife of a Florentine silk merchant, a lady called Lisa del Giaconda. Even through the layers of discoloured varnish applied down the centuries, we see in her delicately rendered face Leonardo's unrivalled ability to create tonal modulation. Why the Mona Lisa has attained quite such global fame is complex and not altogether justified, but what is clear is that in this, in many ways straightforward painting, Leonardo achieves much of his ambitions for his art. The final room of the exhibition contains two pictures that we're going to focus on. The first is one of the great achievements in representational art. The amount of respects it commands is incredible, and yet it's an unfinished drawing. The second is a painting that's been causing all manner of excitement in the art world, in the press, and with the visitors here tonight, mainly a newly rediscovered painting attributed to the hand of Leonardo. In the period when Leonardo first left Milan at the end of the 15th century, he was at the height of his fame and immersed in his philosophy that art could truly capture the divine, and insinuating the touch of divinity upon the artist capable of doing so. He's now linking his talent directly to God, and both the works we're going to look at in this room have a religious subject matter. His drawing of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist, also known as the Burlington House cartoon, caused a furore when it was first exhibited during Leonardo's lifetime, and the newly discovered Salvatore Mundi is sure to cause similar excitement exhibited here for the first time. More though on the Salvatore Mundi in due course, first though let's take a closer look at a it spent hanging in the Royal Academy in London, this is one of the most famous drawings in the history of art. The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and John the Baptist is one of Leonardo's great works. As a subject this was unprecedented, and possibly commissioned by the French king, Louis XII, in tribute to his wife Anne of Brittany. Even in its day it was admired, with the Renaissance biographer Vasari reporting how the people of Florence queued for over two days to see the image, unimaginable for a drawing then and now. But this was a drawing by an artist who was the superstar of his day, and who was believed to have God-given powers. In its artistic achievement it's unrivaled, a monumental drawing that conveys an almost sculptural presence using white chalk and charcoal. Its intermingling of figures is an almost impossible composition. Despite its name it was never used as a cartoon, that is pricked with pins and scaled up to be used as the basis for a larger painting, and because of that it's remained in an exceptional condition down the centuries. Drawing and more importantly planning encapsulated in the Italian word disegno linked the hand of the artist to the mind, and in doing so raised the status of the artist beyond that of a mere craftsman. But this image, with Leonardo's creative fervour evident in various changes of mind and unfinished passages, seems to link the hand to the soul. As I mentioned earlier, also in this room is the recently restored Salvatore Mondi, or Christ as Saviour of the World. It's remarkable that this is the first painting to be authenticated as a work by Leonardo in over a century, but equally remarkable is the story of where it disappeared to and how it ended up here. It's always been known that Leonardo painted an image of the Salvatore Mondi, or Christ the Saviour of the World. Over the years numerous versions of the subject have surfaced, all showing the influence of the master, but the original on which all of these were based was believed to have been lost forever. But after recent extensive restoration scholars have now agreed that this image is indeed the lost Salvatore Mondi, a remarkable and rare moment in the story of Leonardo da Vinci. Much of the painting's history remains unknown. It passed from the French royal family into the possession of Charles I, was sold off with the rest of his art collection after his execution in 1649, and then disappeared only to resurface in a private collection over 250 years later in London around 1900. Severe overpainting, aggressive cleaning and other damage meant that it remained disregarded by art historians throughout the 20th century, even selling for a mere 45 pounds, the equivalent of about 800 pounds today. But once cleaned the quality of the image became immediately apparent. Layers of thin paint are built up to create the incredibly soft modelling on the face, a technique known as sfumato. Other clues that it's a bona fide Leonardo are the delicacy of the curls of hair and the brilliantly irregular pleats in the cloak, plus the pentimenti, small adjustments made during the painting process. Something that would only be in an original, not a copy. But unlike many of his other depictions of the human face, Leonardo abandoned his desire to create the ideal for something far more powerful. Here he based his proportions of the face on the Mandylion of Edessa, a piece of cloth bearing the miraculous image of Christ. Leonardo's image of the Son of God therefore in a way could be seen to approach the miraculous, the actual likeness of Christ created by a divinely gifted artist. His final years were spent under the patronage of the French king Francis I at his castle at Amboise. He was paid an enormous court salary, paid it seems simply for being Leonardo. The 1400 kilometre journey from Rome to Amboise was undoubtedly gruelling for the elderly luminary, but an invitation from the king of France was not one to refuse. He was free here to dream, to think, to work. And the king gave him the provision of the Château du Clou, with a pension of a thousand ecus d'or, which is a real fortune, and this freedom to work at the royal commission. Leonardo had his room, he had his salle du conseil, where he received his other remarks, the ambassadors, the artists, but also the royal family, the king Francis I himself, who came to see him to work on his various works. And then there is his kitchen, where Leonardo thus took his meals. While at Clou, Leonardo continued to stay fully occupied, finishing his three masterpieces, as well as continued investigations into architecture and engineering. His continued appetite for knowledge impressed all who met him. The king sought him out for conversation and inspiration, but no amount of invention could prevent the inevitable. The story goes that Leonardo wept on his deathbed, particularly regretting that he'd not worked on his art as well as he should have. He declared his frustration that he was about to die with still so much to learn and so much to give. He died in his bedchamber on the 2nd of May 1519. Leonardo's final resting place is in the king's private chapel, in the grounds of the Château d'Amboise. This was a rare privilege and reflects the king's affection and respect for him. Leonardo, the universal man, illuminated with his vision and intellect the world in which he lived. He ventured into uncharted scholarly territory, investigated everything from the possibilities of flight to the workings of the human body. He brought the rigours of scientific study and creative imagination to his art, and he had a great impact on the world in the many spheres that he explored. Leonardo also recognised how little humans actually knew and understood of the world around them, and it's this self-awareness and enthusiasm for knowledge that can be placed above all at the heart of Leonardo da Vinci the man.