Raiders of the Lost Art Season 2 Episode 5 The Lessons of Leonardo Free Documentary History

He is believed by many to have been the most talented individual who ever lived. He was an absolute experimenter and you can see that across not only his painting but all areas of his life. Drawings of helicopters and submarines, cannon and anatomy, you name it, he did it. He was a universal man, he was greatly interested in science, though he only devoted part of his time to art. But while his greatest legacy remains in his art, we're still unearthing the secrets of how he worked. Leonardo really tried to make painting do everything. He wanted movement, he wanted light, he wanted colour, he wanted psychology. He tried to put so much into a painting. We're still uncovering the fascinating discoveries he made and the mysteries of what happened to his masterpieces long after he died. Modern scientific methods offer great opportunities to know a lot more about Leonardo's technique. One always imagined that he was a feverish, constantly changing, rather fretful painter. Leonardo crashes forms together and that influenced almost everyone. Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom. Leonardo was born at a time when the House of Medici was ruling over Florence. This eminent banking family would eventually produce four popes. But their rise to prominence had occurred when Cosimo de' Medici came to dominate the region that a young Leonardo was born into. And it was Cosimo's son Lorenzo who would be crucial in establishing Leonardo's legacy. We don't know much about how Leonardo began. We know he was born in 1452 in a little Tuscan town not far from Florence. He was actually an illegitimate child and was brought up by his paternal grandfather. But his father was quite a successful lawyer in Florence and that drew the young Leonardo to Florence. He was apprenticed to Andrea Verrocchio. Now he is the leading artist in Florence, did painting, sculpture, everything, bits of engineering. Presumably Leonardo's father, who was well connected, said, I've got a son who's pretty good at this painting, drawing thing, would you take him on? In the case of Leonardo, because he was a genius when he was old, it stands to reason he must have been a genius when he was young. So he was obviously recognised as a prodigy. Poor is the pupil who does not surpass his master. Leonardo's earliest dated work, made during his time with Verrocchio, is this drawing of the Arno Valley region where he was born. Verrocchio was a terrific source of inspiration. He set this image of versatility for Leonardo. He also looked at a lesser-known artist, Antonio Pagliolo, who did wonderful anatomical nude figures, which inspired Leonardo. He looked at the great Florentine tradition of the painter Masaccio, who he mentions, the sculptor Donatello, who he mentions. So he saw himself in that Florentine tradition of anatomy perspective. He was quite a talented student, and he worked with the master on a painting of the baptism of Christ. There's a story in Vasari that he helps paint one particular scene, and Verrocchio said, it's so great, I'm never going to pick up a paintbrush ever again. It's possible that a statue made by Verrocchio of the biblical David may have been modelled on the young Leonardo, as well as the angel in the painting Tobias and the Angel, attributed to Verrocchio. Leonardo may have even worked on this painting himself, specifically the fish held by Tobias. Verrocchio obviously was the prime influence. There were some very talented students working in Verrocchio's studio, and they actually included Botticelli and Perugino. By the time he reached 20 and he went into the Guild, he was setting up with his own studio and his father helped him out with that, but he still kept this very close relationship with Verrocchio. So that was really how his artistic life was formed, was in the studio setting with him. Following such an extensive education, Leonardo needed to make a name on his own. But these were difficult times. An attempt had been made on Lorenzo de' Medici's life in the infamous Pazzi conspiracy. Lorenzo's brother was killed, but he survived. The conspirators were soon caught and executed. Leonardo would sketch the hanging body of one of the collaborators, Bernardo di Bandino Baroncelli. At around the same time, Leonardo received one of his earliest known commissions in Florence, the Adoration of the Magi. But he would leave this painting unfinished. Leonardo was a perfectionist when it came to art, and he sometimes left works unfinished, and in some cases he abandoned pictures. I think he aimed at finishing pictures, and some of them did get finished, but the problem is along the way, he can always see another way of doing it. He can see a different bit of the composition, a different emotional context, a different landscape. So it's very difficult in that circumstance to say, yeah, I've really finished with this picture. He was always on the move, you know, to Venice and then to Rome and then back to Florence and then back to Rome. And then he himself put about this idea that he didn't finish things because he could then say, boy, imagine what it'd been like if it'd been finished. And that was, I think, common and probably still is a bit. He did have a clear sense of finished pictures. The Last Supper was finished, the Mona Lisa is pretty much finished, I think, and quite a number of paintings are finished, but it was a difficult job getting to that point. Leonardo was now a part of Lorenzo de' Medici's court, and after surviving the Pazzi conspiracy, Lorenzo's power in Florence only grew. But he needed to secure a peace with the powerful Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo would travel to Milan to help achieve this goal. Leonardo was working at the court in Milan and his employment gave him the time and money to pursue his very wide interests, both in the arts and sciences. So it was a very important time for his work. Somebody like the Duke of Milan rang you up and said, you know, hey, why don't you come and work for me? Then, you know, you said, OK. You didn't say no to people like that. He probably lived a very various life. We don't have eyewitness descriptions, but he was doing this and that within the court. He complained often that the court duties were getting in the way of his quest for fame, to do immortal works, as it were. So he'd be diverted from project to project, ranging from military engineering, civil engineering, architecture, stage design. Very varied. I think it suited him quite well because we know he's got this restless intellect and restless creativity. Ludovico Sforza was obviously impressed and Leonardo would work in the city for almost two decades. It would be Sforza who would commission The Last Supper. Ludovico employed Leonardo for 19 years and not without signs of frustration in The Last Supper. He writes to a secretary saying, get Leonardo going and get him onto the next wall. So it was that element of frustration. But I think all patrons, including Ludovico, knew they'd got someone amazing. That was a great virtuoso. Whilst in Milan, Leonardo would create one of his most enigmatic portraits, the Lady with an Ermine. The subject of the painting is Cecilia Galerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. She came from a bourgeois family in Siena, but obviously had a very nice dad, I think, because she was taught all the things that her brothers were taught. She was taught maths and Latin and all that sort of stuff. da Vinci started painting her portrait in 1489 and she was quite an unusual character for the time. She hosted almost what we could now describe as a salon, so all the intellects of the day from Milan would meet with her and she would invite da Vinci to join. The animal in the painting is an ermine, and I say that firmly because it doesn't make sense as anything else. The ermine was a symbol of purity. It wouldn't go across a bog. It would rather be captured by a hunter. It was also a symbol of moderation. You may think for Duke's mistress, the symbol of purity is slightly anomalous, but that's how it worked in the Renaissance. So it must be an ermine. Ludovico was awarded the Order of the Ermine. Ermine became also his nickname. So that's how art historians connected the subject of the painting to his mistress. Leonardo is only believed to have completed four oil paintings of women throughout his career. After his death, two of them, La Belferronie and the Mona Lisa, would end up in the Louvre. But we're not completely certain who were the sitters for these portraits. A third, the Ginevra di Benci, took a long time to finally be accepted as a Leonardo. But it was the portrait of Cecilia Gallarani, the lady with an ermine, that would have the most eventful history and, thanks to modern science, would continue to give us insight into the workings of a genius. There are three classes of people. Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see. Leonardo da Vinci died in Amboise in the Kingdom of France on the 2nd of May, 1519. The paintings that he had taken with him there now reside in the Louvre in Paris. But he left behind a whole plethora of works, both finished and unfinished, that would eventually be scattered all across the world. You're just beginning, at the late of 15th century, to get artists recognised as kind of intellectual ornaments of the court. You're beginning to get what I call the super-artists, the Raphael, considerably younger, Michelangelo, a bit younger, who were becoming huge figures in their own right. And some of the Italian courts were beginning to accommodate this new brand of rising artists. The three titans of the Renaissance era, Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo, had such a profound impact that their works became treasured in a way unlike artists before them. And Cecilia Galerani, the woman captured as the Lady with an Ermine, owned a rare portrait completed by Leonardo, which would endure the most perilous journey of all before finding its new home in Poland. What happened to the portrait was, it obviously was in the hands of Cecilia Galerani. We know she had it in 1498. It was Isabella d'Este from Mantua who was avid to get the best artists working for her. Would you send the portrait? I'd like to compare it with Giovanni Bellini, the great Venetian artist. Cecilia wrote back and said, I can lend it to you, but it's not a good likeness. This is not the painter's fault. I have changed a great deal in the intervening years. So we can be pretty sure that it was with the family, with Cecilia herself until her death. What happens to it then, we simply don't know. For the first 300 years, we don't know anything about it. But it was bought in about 1800 by a Polish prince, Adam Czartoryski, who purchased it in Italy. The young princess, Adam Jerzy, goes on a tour with his brother to Sicily. The brothers spend their time acquiring artworks. Among them, the famous Raphael and the Leonardo da Vinci painting. They knew that it was a Leonardo, but they didn't know who the painting was of. When the picture was in the collection of Isabella Czartoryski, they put an inscription on it, almost certainly at that time, saying La Belle Freniere Leonardo da Vinci. So she'd got the right artist, but the wrong girl. It's incredibly innovatory how that painting works. We think of Mona Lisa as very novel, but this is very novel as well. She's there and she's looking sideways and smiling. Now, who is she smiling at? What has drawn her attention? I think it's almost certainly the Duke. So there's a kind of triangular relationship. There's us looking at her. She's looking at the Duke. So we can imagine almost certainly that the person who she's glancing at and smiling slightly is the Duke. And that is incredibly novel, to build in this other presence in the painting which is implied. The painting had arrived in Poland, where it resides today. But in the intervening years, it travelled all across Europe as its owners attempted to protect it. The November uprising of 1830 meant that Isabella Czartoryska had to flee Warsaw, taking the lady with an ermine with her. The next time it was seen was in Paris, at the home of Adam Czartoryski. However, it had to be hidden in the basement as the Franco-Prussian War commenced. It returned to Warsaw in 1876, where it remained until the outbreak of the First World War, when the Czartoryski family took the painting, along with the rest of their collection, to Dresden. When Hitler invaded Poland, the Leonardo was seized from the Czartoryski estate, and it was taken back to Berlin. In 1939, just before the war, the atmosphere was quite jolly. Things weren't looking very good, but nobody was expecting what was about to happen. From the west, Germans come, from the east, Russians come. The collection was moved to Kseniawa, which is 16 kilometres from here. The palace in Kseniawa gets plundered by the German army, but before that, the collection is moved here, to Pełkinie. We're not exactly sure where it was hidden, but I suspect it might be the secret room behind the library. The SS come in and steal the collection. The Gestapo moves in and takes over one wing of the palace, and as war continues, the village of Pełkinie is witness to horrific things. It went to Berlin, to the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, but then a very unpleasant gaoliter of Poland, Hans Frank, decided that he wanted it. He then goes on the wall of his office, and in 1945, at the end of the war, he goes almost on the run with it, takes it to Silesia, to his country house. But the Monuments Men find it and bring it back to the Czartoryski Museum. The Lady of the Ermine has an amazing status within Polish culture. We know that Isabella greatly admired the Renaissance and saw herself as a kind of new Renaissance figure around about 1800. I think it's got a huge totemic value in Poland, partly because not many countries have, you know, it's one of six places where you can find a Leonardo, but also because it's been through so much, as indeed has Poland. So I can see why they would identify very strongly with the sufferings of that picture. It's been on postage stamps and so on. So this particular picture in Leonardo has sort of been absorbed within Polish culture. It's become a Polish picture in a very profound sense. The Lady with an Ermine now takes pride of place in the Czartoryski collection. And recently, it's given up some more of its secrets, thanks to some revolutionary technology, which has shed new light on Leonardo's way of working. Modern scientific techniques offer great opportunities to look under the surface of paintings. So we know a lot more about Leonardo's technique and what the paintings originally must have looked like. The layer amplification method pioneered by Pascal Carte has shown us lots of things from the lower layers. Now, we knew that Leonardo was a manic fiddler with paintings. He kept altering them and so on. And what this has shown is that the alterations are even more extensive than we suspected. It's been shown recently that the background of the painting, which is now black, was originally a bluish grey, with a darker area of bluish grey where there would have been shadow. The ermine has almost certainly been adjusted, though I think it's more difficult to see than Pascal Carte claims. One of the most striking things that the layer method has come up with is the interlace pattern. We know that Leonardo loved these interlace patterns, these knots, he did them independently. You can see a whole lot of interlace on her costume we couldn't previously see. What that method has done is to confirm or extend something which we could already see in other paintings. Over the centuries, experts have had to piece together Leonardo's body of work. In total, he only left behind around 20 or so paintings, many of them unfinished. He's believed to have approached every single work differently, and as more paintings become accepted in his canon, we've learned more about the amazing techniques he used. And his incredible manuscripts show the artistic breakthroughs that he made throughout his career. Leonardo looked at how light behaved in nature, and he was able to think about two aspects of it. One is tone, that's to say, where does it exist on a scale of black to white, in a grey tone, as it were. And he also thought about colours and how they related to that scale. He'd had this theory called the simple colours or six-colour theory, which was effectively that you could paint anything using what we would now call the primary colours, plus black, white and, oddly enough, green, which he thought of as a primary colour for reasons that elude me. You look at Cecilia Gallarani, Lady with the Ermine, you can see both the individual colours are singing out in their proper notes, but they're also part of a unified pattern of light and shade. Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake? One of the more notable features of the painting is the way the light behaves. Leonardo talked about light hitting things, he talked about percussione, so where the light hits at different angles, it makes different effects. And the percussione then rebounds, so if you look under her chin, you've got this rebound of light back into the shadow and under her hand as well. Leonardo's a great pioneer of this technique. But despite all his remarkable insights and achievements, even the great Leonardo doubted his own ability at times. I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have. In a sense, his ambition for painting and his sheer inventiveness made it very difficult for him to finish paintings, but at the end of the day, he finished the world's most famous painting, perhaps the second most famous painting, The Last Supper, and did the world's most famous drawing, The Vitruvian Man, so that's not bad.