DaVinci: The Lost Treasure (2011) - full transcript

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the world's

He was endlessly curious, searching

for answers in everything he did.

We think of him

as the ultimate Renaissance man.

He created a new idea of beauty.

He reinvented the art of painting,

from The Last Supper,

tragically deteriorating,

but still full of power and drama...

...to the Mona Lisa,

whose mysterious hint of a smile

has intrigued generations.

They're scattered

in different countries...

...believed until now to be all that

remains of Leonardo's work.

But in New York,

locked away at a secret address,

is a newly-discovered

painting by Leonardo,

something that hasn't

happened for over 100 years.

It could be worth £125 million.

Is this the discovery of a painting

thought lost for centuries?

Leonardo is a man for whom the word

genius could have been invented.

And yet his reputation as an artist

rests on just a handful of paintings.

And some of them were never finished.

How did Leonardo become the most

famous painter ever to have lived?

Many people dream at some

point in their lives

of discovering a lost masterpiece.

Few allow themselves

to dream of finding a painting

by Leonardo Da Vinci.

No artist has a higher reputation.

No artist's work is more highly coveted.

But there's so little of it.

I've come to New York to visit

a gallery in a secret location.

And in it is a painting that's just

been seen by a handful of experts.

If it's genuine, it will be

the discovery of a lifetime!

A painting by the greatest

old master of them all.

Hello!

You must be Fiona. Nice to meet you.

Pleased to meet you. Come this way.

Restorer Dianne Modestini,

and dealer and art historian Robert Simon

have been guarding their secret

for more than two years.

Wow.

My goodness.

Gosh! To be that close to it!

Amazing.

It's a painting of Christ known

as Salvator Mundi,

or the Saviour of the World.

It has got a real presence,

hasn't it? Yes.

He begins to really dominate the

space, and capture your attention.

And the gaze, as well.

Yes, the gaze. Yes.

That's not a happy or inviting gaze.

He's kind of fixing you

with his stare, don't you think?

Yes, it's a very intent, very

engaging and very powerful image.

I think we've all felt from looking

at it that as much as the subject,

obviously, is a religious subject,

it's a spiritual quality

that communicates rather

than anything strictly religious.

The sense that this is really a man,

and kind of a portrait of a man,

as Christ, is very powerful.

When you look at this, now, in its

pristine state, thanks to all

your endeavours, what are the bits

that really strike you about it?

The hand for example, certainly for

me, is just so beautifully done.

Yes. It has an incredible presence

that no other picture

I've ever worked on, and I've worked

on some very important things,

has had this effect on me.

Really? Yes.

If you watch how he emerges at the

end of the day,

when the light goes down,

which is the kind of light that

Leonardo describes

as being ideal for making pictures,

he starts to glow from within.

And sort of pulse with life.

It's very... it's eerie.

Do you think that you've been

spending too long with it?!

Yes! I certainly have spent

hundreds of hours!

I've experienced it too, actually!

There are details, if you look

even here, this crystal ball,

in which he's portrayed these inclusions.

The little flaws. Yes, exactly,

in which everyone is individually light.

Some from the top of it, some in the

shadow, it really boggles to see the

degree of study and the degree of

ability to be able to render that.

And of course, this enters

into Leonardo's own very deep study

of optical effects

of light and of science.

It would be a while before I got

into the restoration

studio to see the evidence,

If it is, for some people it would

be like finding a new planet!

It's a measure of the extraordinary

veneration

in which Leonardo is held.

He is that kind of mysterious,

profound artist

who seems to address the mysteries

and secrets of life

and to give them such beautiful expression

without ever tying them down.

Something of a cult has grown up

around Leonardo.

It's not just art lovers.

Thriller writers and conspiracy

theorists are drawn to him,

fascinated by his obsessive enquiries

into the frontiers of knowledge.

From the secret of flight,

to the motions of the moon,

to the hidden architecture

of the human body,

all minutely noted in his mysterious

mirror handwriting.

We've got thousands of pages

of writing, we've got

these pictures, not many, to be

sure, but he remains elusive,

so there's this strange balance

between being known and unknown,

and it's a very precious,

precarious balance.

The unknown is sufficiently

apparent, that people

can go in and see mysteries where

there are no mysteries, in fact.

Is it possible to strip away the

myths, the cult of Leonardo,

and see the truth about this flawed,

often puzzling man?

The medieval town of Vinci,

in Tuscany, in northern Italy.

It was here on 15th April, 1452,

that Leonardo was born.

His surname, Da Vinci, literally

means, "From the town of Vinci."

Leonardo's start in life

wasn't auspicious.

He was illegitimate.

His father came from a respected

local family.

His mother was a poor peasant girl

- his father's mistress.

Leonardo was born and would always

remain something of an outsider.

He never inherited his father's wealth.

He never settled anywhere for too long.

All his life, he moved

from place to place.

Leonardo's schooling was basic.

He always called himself

an uneducated man.

But he made a virtue of this.

His school room was

the Tuscan countryside.

He began to draw.

Over the course of his life,

he would fill hundreds of notebooks

with minutely observed drawings

of animals, plants and natural forms.

There's a tenderness and sympathy

in these pictures

as well as a remarkable skill.

At the age of 13 or so, Leonardo

left this small country town.

He carried with him his love

of the landscape,

his fascination with animals, and

the wonders of the natural world.

He set off for a new life

in a very different sort of place.

Florence in the 1460s was wealthy,

cultured, a magnet for the finest

artists, sculptors and architects.

An exciting place to be.

The city was the pinnacle of

Renaissance splendour.

What better place for an aspiring

young artist to live and learn.

Leonardo had come to work as an apprentice

to a master artist and craftsman,

Andrea del Verrocchio.

Artists' studios

were busy, crowded, dusty places.

In the workshops of Florence's cathedral,

where sculptors still work in the

same way they have for centuries,

you can get some

sense of what it was like.

Young apprentices learnt everything

from how to clean brushes

to how to paint an angel's wing.

Verrocchio's workshop would have

been a hive of activity.

As well as producing paintings

under the guidance of the master,

he would have produced sculptures

in bronze and marble,

works in silver and gold, theatre sets,

really anything the wealthy and

cultured classes

of Florence desired.

But for Leonardo,

the city itself became his studio.

He kept a notebook always

dangling from his belt,

and he drew the faces he saw around him.

The turns and movement

of the human body fascinated him.

In the city's Uffizi Gallery,

you can catch the first glimpse

of the hand of Leonardo, the painter.

The moment when Leonardo's master

decided it was time to let his

talented pupil pick up a brush.

This is Verrocchio's painting

of Christ with John the Baptist.

Except this isn't all Verrochio's work.

There's something very special

about the kneeling angel here.

Leonardo had the task of painting

the angel when he was 23 or so.

Just look a little bit more closely.

gazing raptly, adoringly, at Christ,

that pose was ground-breaking at the time.

Then look at the curls.

Fine detail like ripples of water.

You'll see that more and more,

and then, the subtlety of the blue

and the shading of the drapes

of the material.

Apparently, when Verrochio

saw that, as the story goes,

he decided that he should

put down his brush

and stop painting altogether,

because he had been surpassed

by his apprentice.

Leonardo progressed to more

ambitious and complex subjects.

Though this painting in the Uffizi

is unfinished,

and at first glance,

looks a bit of a mess.

It's so dark and jumbled.

It's hard even to know what's going on!

It's a common religious subject -

the moment when the three wise men

come to pay homage to the infant Christ.

Instead of the usual group

of static, silent,

reverential worshippers,

there's something completely

different going on here.

The only still figure at the

centre is Mary and baby Jesus.

Around her, there is life,

vitality, chaos.

And there's even something slightly

threatening about the way the crowd

is pressing in on her and the faces,

some of them seem rather skull-like.

There are horses

in the background rearing.

There appears to be fighting going on.

There's a real sense that the old

order has been thrown over

and the new one is about to begin.

There's one interesting detail

to the right of the picture -

the one figure who is standing

looking away from the action.

Many artists at that time would put

a self-portrait in their work,

and it's believed that that is, in fact,

a portrait of Leonardo himself.

If that's true,

it may be the only image

we have of Leonardo as a young man.

It's not known why Leonardo

didn't finish the work.

But he became notorious for

abandoning projects

halfway through.

It drove his patrons mad with frustration.

Time and time again, Leonardo

couldn't or wouldn't finish the Job.

His insatiable curiosity

meant that he was often distracted

by something new or something different.

And it's a paradox of Leonardo's

that a man that was obsessed

with detail and with reproducing

that detail in paint

often just left his works unfinished.

I think with the Adoration of the

Magi, Leonardo realised that he

had started a picture that he simply

didn't know how to finish.

He had bitten off more than

he could chew, if you like.

I think Leonardo was sometimes intimidated

by what he set out to do.

And he got to a point

sometimes where he realised he

wasn't going to be able to finish,

that he couldn't arrive

at the perfect beauty

that he had in his mind.

In some ways, it's astonishing

that he finished anything at all,

given what he wanted for painting,

what he thought painting

should be able to achieve.

As he matured as an artist,

Leonardo acquired a reputation

for being unreliable,

a bit flaky, even.

But an exceptional talent.

Leonardo appeared to be living

a charmed life in Florence.

By the age of 20, he had been

accepted into the official

Florentine body of painters.

He was described as generous,

cultivated, well-dressed,

extremely beautiful,

with his hair cascading down in

ringlets to his chest.

One poet said he had infinite grace.

But a dark shadow was about

to fall across his world.

Renaissance Florence was a small city.

No more than 60,000 inhabitants.

Florentines knew each other's business.

They loved scandal.

They would write anonymous

notes to the authorities

denouncing anyone they thought

guilty of a crime.

They dropped them into holes

in the wall like this, known as

buchi della verita - holes of truth.

In early April 1476, someone

dropped a denunciation

into one of these holes. And it

read, "To the officers of the night,

I hereby testify that

Jacopo Saltarelli, aged 17,

who dresses in black, pursues

many immoral activities and consents

to satisfy those persons

who request sinful things from him".

He means, of course, homosexuality.

And it goes on to list

four of Jacopo's lovers or clients,

including one "Leonardo da Vinci,

who works with the painter, Verrocchio".

Homosexuality was common enough

in 15th century Florence,

particularly among artists and bohemians.

But it was still a crime,

punishable by death.

Leonardo was forced to attend court.

But the charges against him were

eventually dropped.

Was Leonardo gay?

Some biographers say

his art suggests he was.

The recurring image of a young man

with curly hair is arguably based

on a young man called Salai -

an apprentice in Leonardo's studio.

He's there in a lot

of drawings, seen often in profile

with this slightly decadent profile

and this cascade of ringleted hair.

This was something that Leonardo

really loved.

Those angels always have this

cascade of flowing hair -

it was a kind of trademark

in his paintings and drawings.

There are one or two comments

he makes in his notebooks which

suggest he ran into a bit of trouble,

because his angels were considered

a bit too much like the pretty boys

from the street, or the artist

models on which

they were no doubt based.

Salai remained at Leonardo's side

for the next 30 years

until Leonardo's death -

pupil, servant,

confidant, and his lover.

So this is the key relationship,

probably, in Leonardo's life.

In Florence, Leonardo was recognised

as a supremely accomplished artist.

But it was in another Italian city

that he would achieve greatness.

Milan was the wealthiest city state

in Renaissance Italy.

If Florence was a jewel of culture,

Milan was a city

of excess, of ostentation.

It's Fashion Week here in Milan.

There's something about the buzz

and the glamour and the excitement

that brings to mind why Leonardo

came here all those years ago.

It was a place to see and be seen,

it was all about spectacle.

He came here not as a painter,

but as a musician

and not just any musician,

but with a lira di braccio,

which was a kind of violin

made of solid silver

in the shape of a horse's head.

It was quite an entrance!

Leonardo's patron in Milan

was the Duke Ludovico Sforza,

an immensely powerful

and dangerous man.

Leonardo saw him as a means to an end,

a way of pursuing

his own developing ideas.

He brought with him an extraordinary

letter of introduction.

This is Leonardo presenting

himself for employment

to the Duke of Milan.

It's a CV - but not what you'd expect.

It's calculated to appeal

to a 15th century despot.

It starts with a bit of flattery -

he writes, "Senor mi ilustrisimo",

"my most illustrious Lord",

and then Leonardo effectively

goes on to sell himself

as an inventor and maker

of fantastical weapons!

There's a whole list of them here.

He talks about,

"Ponti leggerissimi forti",

bridges which are very light and strong.

"I can make an infinite variety

of methods of attack and defence."

It's only at the end,

almost as an afterthought,

that he refers to himself as

an artist. He says, "I can further

execute sculpture in clay,

marble and bronze."

"Also in painting,

I can do as much as anyone else,

whoever that may be".

Now, was he really that modest

about his own talents or was it that

he thought of all his talents,

his painting was the thing that

would least appeal to

the Duke of Milan at the time?

Whatever he meant,

the letter reveals the dazzling

diversity of Leonardo's

interests and talents.

Designing machines of war.

Studying the motion of water.

Mapping the geometry of the human body,

relating it to the perfect forms

of the circle and the square

in the famous drawing

known as the Vitruvian Man.

That person in the circle,

as well as expressing certain ideas

of proportion and harmony

and therefore being a rather

abstract composition,

that person is undoubtedly a real person.

You can see his feet

sort of pressing against the edge

of the circle, you can see

the muscles straining as he puts

his arms out in the sort of flying

position, as it seems to be.

And then, very much, you have

very specific features,

a rather saturnine figure with

long hair, parted in the middle,

and these eyes boring out.

And if you look hard at the face

of the Vitruvian Man,

which people strangely enough don't

often do, because they're so

aware of it as a sort of emblematic

figure, kind of a logo almost

of the Renaissance as it's used,

that people don't tend to suddenly think,

"Well, who is this guy?"

Well, I think the answer is it's

a self-portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Who better to express the sort of

secrets of human proportion than

the philosophical artist, scientist,

Leonardo Da Vinci himself?

In the court of Ludovico Sforza,

Leonardo was employed on

a surprising range of projects.

He didn't make his main living

by being paid to paint pictures.

He made his living at the court.

He was paid at the court to do

great festival designs.

He was paid at the court to do

military designs,

and when he was asked

to do these great designs

for weddings or whatever, I think

he got very involved with it and

he could always see possibilities.

I suspect he would have groaned initially,

and then suddenly become captivated

by the project.

But Leonardo was also experimenting

with painting portraits.

I must say, I don't warm

to this young lady.

She looks decidedly frosty.

So why is she so admired?

The portrait of Ginevra de' Benci

is curiously unlovable.

She really stares at us with

a quite sort of chilly, menacing

gaze. I think what Leonardo

was trying to do was to make her

very remotely beautiful,

was to raise her beauty above a kind

of ordinary human level

to something that

was poetic and almost otherworldly.

I think she comes over as rather

as if she's carved from marble rather than

like a living, breathing

human being and I think he moved on

a great deal in his subsequent portraits.

One picture in particular

would take the art of portrait

painting to new heights.

It's thought by some to be

Leonardo's unsung masterpiece.

But it's left Italy forever,

now hanging 700 miles away...

...in Poland.

I've come to see a painting

that some experts believe is more

beautiful than the Mona Lisa.

And to think it was almost

completely unknown to the Western

art world until the beginning

of the 20th century!

In 1798, it was bought by a Polish prince.

In its long life, it's been

walled up in a palace,

hidden in a hotel cellar,

and survived two world wars.

It formed part of Hitler's

private collection of looted art.

Its present home is

the Royal Castle in Warsaw.

The portrait is of Ludovico's

elegant young mistress,

Cecilia Gallerani.

It's become known

as The Lady with the Ermine.

An Italian poet writing

when this was painted

said that Cecila appeared so lifelike,

it was almost as if she was listening.

And when you look at her pose,

see if I can get this right...

...it's as if someone's just

caught her attention,

just outside the frame.

And this was revolutionary. No-one

else was painting like this,

getting the body in that kind of movement.

Look at her hand -

you can see under the skin

the bones and the muscles and the tendons.

Just look at her face.

Young, modest, but intelligent

and alert. You can see that!

And that's why I love this painting.

And then what about the ermine

or the stoat that she's holding?

I mean, what's that all about?

It's certainly not a pet.

But to anyone at the time,

the symbolism of the ermine would

have been immediately apparent.

The ermine was the symbol

of purity, of chastity.

The story was that the ermine

would rather die

than let its pure white coat be soiled.

But also, this was about sex,

because the ermine

was the symbol of Cecilia's lover,

of Ludovico Sforza.

And when you look at him...

Look, he's muscular, he's got his

claws digging into her arm,

he looks as if he might take a nip

out of her at any moment.

This is about sex and about power.

Back in Milan, in 1495,

Leonardo began work on a painting

that would confirm him as

the greatest artist of his age.

The monastery of Santa Maria

della Grazia was funded

by Leonardo's patron, Ludovico Sforza.

He commissioned Leonardo

to paint a huge picture

for the monks' dining room.

The result would bring triumph,

but also tragedy.

It's visited by thousands

of people every year.

Their time limited

to just 15 minutes in the presence

of the masterpiece.

It's approached through

a series of airlocks.

It's more like a hospital,

protecting the patient

from contamination.

But the stage management of the

entrance and the exit to this work

is very important.

Because this is a deliberately

dramatic work of art.

It's such a famous image,

but nothing prepares you

for seeing it in the flesh.

Leonardo's epic painting

shows the Last Supper,

the meal Christ shares with his disciples

just before his death.

And in it, Leonardo has taken

everything he has learned

from the portraits

about revealing the life within

and choreographed it on a huge scale.

He's painted the precise moment

when Christ says,

"One of you will betray me."

And the reaction of the disciples

is frozen in time.

But you can see that bombshell

ripple out through the painting,

in their faces, in their body

language and, very Italian,

in their hands.

This is not some traditional, flat,

rather sterile religious image,

this is human drama on a scale

larger than life.

It's realistic, it has perspective,

passion.

It's like a story in widescreen.

But the painting we see today...

..is the ghost of what it was.

Because only 20% of the original remains.

So what happened?

The clue is in the way Leonardo

chose to work -

unorthodox and eventually disastrous.

Paintings on walls, frescoes,

have to be painted quickly

onto wet plaster.

But Leonardo knew he was anything

but a fast worker.

He chose to work in oil paint

on plaster that had already dried.

The result? Within a few decades,

the picture began to deteriorate.

Several desperate attempts

have been made over the centuries

to salvage it.

Leonardo's slow, painstaking

approach to painting

brought the monks

to a frenzy of impatience.

Eye witnesses sent to spy on him

reported he would sometimes work

from dawn to dusk

and then do nothing for days,

except stand and look.

The detail of Leonardo's painting

can never be recovered.

But a key to what it looked like

can be found surprisingly close to home.

In the chapel of Magdalen College

in Oxford,

and quite unknown to most people,

hangs Britain's last supper.

It was painted in Leonardo's day,

thought to be by a pupil

of Leonardo, copied from the original,

possibly approved by the master himself.

Details which have disappeared

forever from Leonardo's picture

can be seen clearly in this one.

The food on the table...

...the sandaled feet

of the disciples...

...and, most dramatically,

the face of Simon,

stubborn and disbelieving.

In 1499, Leonardo left Milan.

His restless, inquiring nature

took him off in pursuit of new,

often wildly ambitious projects.

In Venice, he tried to persuade

the authorities

to let him build underwater

defences for the city.

In Rome, he worked on designs

for grand villas and statues.

He dreamed up a scheme to divert

the waters of the river

around Florence to make it navigable.

Eventually, he settled back in Florence,

the city that had made him a painter.

But things had changed here.

In a city already crowded

with talent, a new star had emerged,

whose talents as a painter and sculptor

threatened to eclipse Leonardo's.

He was arrogant

and aggressively ambitious.

His name was Michelangelo

and the two men would become

fierce rivals.

In 1501, Michelangelo won the commission

to build a colossal statue

for the city, of David,

the slayer of Goliath.

Leonardo was piqued and unimpressed.

The two artists couldn't

have been more different.

Whereas Michelangelo's figures

are virile supermen,

all muscle and swagger,

Leonardo was always after

delicacy and subtlety.

He even had a go at figures like

that, saying their bulging muscles

made them look ridiculous -

like "un sacco di noci",

a bag of nuts.

Leonardo was much in demand,

as military engineer, map maker,

architect, designer.

And though he was celebrated

as a painter, he was notorious

for late delivery.

One man wrote of him,

"Leonardo is better than anyone."

"But he won't leave

a picture alone."

It was a quality that got him

into trouble more than once.

At the age of 54, he received

a summons from some rich patrons

in Milan -

"Come back and finish our painting."

The painting in question

is a mysterious reimagining

of the Madonna and child.

Once again, Leonardo brought

to a conventional subject

an unusual approach.

He places them in a strange cavern

of rocks,

a remote deserted place

suggesting a world before time began.

Instead of the bright,

sharp colours of the day,

he creates an atmosphere

of shadows and subtle shifts

of light and shade.

Before Leonardo, people were very,

very interested

in line, in contour.

Leonardo, on the other hand, believed

in dissolving those contours

to make something

which was... which was really

modelled from light and shade.

And he used a technique called

sfumato, which literally means

smoked or smoky. So that's about

those misty transitions of light and shade

which he applied to a face like the

Virgin in the Virgin Of The Rocks.

It was really an entirely

revolutionary process

and was born from the fact

that he understood

the way in which light fell on objects

like no other artist before him.

The painting now hangs

in the National Gallery in London.

It's being restored for a major

Leonardo exhibition there.

The restoration is a terrifyingly

delicate business.

Just how much do you tinker

with a Leonardo?

On the one hand, it's a restoration

of a Renaissance painting.

On the other hand, it is a Leonardo,

which is no small thing.

The retouching I am doing

is quite reversible

and separated from

the actual paint of Leonardo

by a modern varnish layer.

Leonardo was really exploring the

possibilities of using oil paint

to do this kind of modelling

from light to dark

in a consistent way. I think

he's exploring the difference

between quite dark, very dark

and extremely dark,

in a way that other artists up

to then hadn't really done.

One of the things that I think

is essential about Leonardo -

you can see when you look

closely at this picture -

is the way that he didn't seem

to like to produce

a definitive answer to anything.

Contours are always being adjusted,

nothing is quite final.

There's often the possibility

of just a slight change,

a little modification here, a twist there,

a line a little different than it was.

And the fact that so many

of his works are unfinished

speaks to that kind

of psychological tendency.

I think he always saw another possibility,

another way of doing something.

Leonardo would never lose his habit

of seeing other possibilities.

He spent many months here at the

monastery of Santissima Annunziata

in the centre of Florence.

The monks would certainly have

appreciated a painting from him.

But one who visited him

at work in his studio reported,

"He scarcely seems interested

in picking up a brush."

Leonardo's attention had been seized

by new kinds of exploration,

including the study of the human body.

From dissections he made

in the city's hospitals,

he analysed the architecture

of the body...

...and noted the minute workings

of its internal organs.

The anatomical drawings

are incredibly beautiful

and he would regard the inside of

the body as at least as beautiful

as the outside.

So if he draws, say, the branching

of the air passages in the lung,

it becomes like a coral.

It's a beautiful structure,

and that's not a loose analogy

because he saw branching in nature

as all the same thing.

How a tree branches, how our vessels

branch, how rivers come together,

these are all systems

which are essentially the same.

During these intense philosophical

investigations,

painting seems to have been

forgotten. Until...

One day Leonardo received

a request to paint a portrait.

It probably came from

Francesco del Giocondo,

a merchant in silk and cloth,

and he wanted Leonardo to paint

a portrait of his wife.

Nothing unusual in that -

a perfectly ordinary, everyday subject.

What Leonardo could not have

imagined is that this would be

the painting that defined him.

It would become the most famous

painting in the world.

As so often with Leonardo, you can

see glimpses of future masterpieces

in his sketchbooks.

The merchant, Del Giocondo, never

actually received the portrait

of his wife which he'd commissioned.

When Leonardo left Italy

for the last time in 1516,

he took it with him.

He had an invitation from the young

French king, Francis I.

Francis saw in Leonardo

a mentor and a genius

who would adorn his court.

But Leonardo never stopped working

on his portrait of the wife

of a Florentine merchant.

She now hangs in the Louvre Museum

in Paris.

She's known, of course, as the Mona Lisa.

I've come here for a private

audience with her

to try and see why she has become

the most iconic image

in the world.

It's not obvious.

On first impressions,

she's very small, very dark

and very yellow.

I know this is the most famous

painting in the world

and is considered a work of genius,

but I just don't quite get it.

What is so good about the Mona Lisa?

How did Leonardo manage

to create this mysterious

and captivating woman?

It is uncanny.

It lives in a very extraordinary way.

This is... You know,

it sounds kind of pretentious

but there is no other way

of describing it.

The figure seems not just to be

inert pigments on a surface,

but seems to be living and breathing.

Now, the way that Leonardo did that

is not by some kind of mystery,

he did it by technique and he did it

by mixing in the flesh,

in these key areas, these very subtle,

thin layers of paint, called glazes.

Just a little, thin stain of colour,

a lot of oil

and just little dispersed bits of pigment.

So he lays that down on top

of a white priming.

Then he'll lay another stain down,

then another one and another one,

sometimes adding a bit of shadow,

sometimes a little bit of highlight,

but basically he's relying upon

the light coming through

from the white panel.

So he's using this transparency

and it means the light comes through

and is very subtle, very elusive

and you don't have fixed edges.

He doesn't draw the edge

of a nose as a line.

It's very ambiguous, very elusive.

That is uncanny, it's spine tingling.

Leonardo spent the last years

of his life at the court

of the French King.

Relieved of all pressure

to deliver paintings, free to follow

wherever his curiosity led him.

I think at the end of his life,

Leonardo was, if anything, more

of a celebrity than a painter.

And when he moved to France,

it was not necessarily

because King Francis wanted

somebody who was going to paint

enormous fresco cycles in the

various chateaux that he owned.

I think it was more that he wanted

to be seen to offer protection

to perhaps the greatest man

in Christendom, of the day.

His last self portrait seems

to show the face of a man

who has spent a lifetime

enquiring into everything.

He died on 2nd May, 1519,

at the age of 67,

in the arms, so the story goes,

of the French king.

Francis declared he, "Did not

believe that a man had been born

who knew as much as Leonardo."

Leonardo left several of his

paintings to his favourite, Salai.

Among them was the Mona Lisa.

She won't be travelling to London

for the exhibition.

Instead, the buzz will be about a picture

that most people will never heard of...

...the newly discovered

Salvator Mundi.

It's an amazing story.

It's been known for centuries

that Leonardo painted

such a picture.

Until now, it was thought lost.

This is how the picture

looked before it was restored,

dismissed as a crude copy,

buried in a private collection,

last sold for £45 in 1958.

I went to the restoration studio

to see the evidence for myself.

What had led restorer

Dianne Modestini to believe

she had discovered a lost Leonardo?

First of all, X-rays revealed

what lay beneath

the surface of the painting.

That's the face, isn't it?

Yes, which you can just barely

make out the features.

What about these cracks?

What are they up there to the left?

That's the crack in the wood.

Just missed his face.

Imagine it had gone through the middle!

Yeah, miraculous.

Just missed the face.

You see, it all came from this knot.

Oh, a knot in the wood?

There was a knot in the wood.

It had this defect.

Leonardo was very never very

careful about his wooden supports.

Given how meticulous he was about everything else,

that's quite surprising. It's very surprising.

So the wood has basically warped

and split from that knot. Yes.

One of the things you must have been

looking for, which is

a classic clue to whether or not

a picture is an original,

is a pentimento,

it's called, isn't it? That's right.

Which is where an artist

has had a number of goes

at painting something

in a particular way before settling

on painting a hand in a particular

way or a drape of cloth.

And you can see him trying to work

it out on the canvas. Yes.

It doesn't look like there are

any here in the X-ray.

No, we don't see any in this

X-ray, but where we do see them

is in the infrared reflectogram.

So what are we looking at here?

Here we can see quite clearly, I think,

that there's a first idea for the thumb.

Oh, yes! So it was more upright.

It was more upright.

But this was the moment that gave us

a clue and gave us some hope,

which wouldn't have entered

our minds previously,

that we might be dealing

with a lost original.

As it became clearer to you

that this could well be

an original Leonardo, did you

have a moment where you thought...

...if I do the wrong thing here...

this could all rest on your shoulders.

Yeah, I couldn't let myself

think about that. I couldn't.

I would never have dared to touch it.

The discovery of a different

first design for the thumb

was an incredible breakthrough.

No-one painting a mere copy

would experiment in this way.

When the picture was finally shown

to leading Leonardo experts,

they examined everything -

its history, its hidden details,

the paint itself.

I walked in to the conservation

studios where it was being displayed

at that point and you get

that tingle and you think,

"Ah, this is..."

But then I always have

a gravitational pull.

I say, "Don't believe it!"

A Leonardo painting hasn't

come along like that

since the early 20th century,

so one every 100 years is kind of rare.

There is that long process

of research where you're putting

the counter arguments and saying,

"Let's look for what's wrong

with it."

And in this case, I couldn't find

anything wrong.

So the verdict is in.

It's the real thing.

Getting the Salvator Mundi

and all the other paintings

to London, poses a massive challenge...

especially the huge copy

of the Last Supper in Oxford.

Moving the picture is a two-day operation.

Once it's lowered from the walls,

it's removed from the wooden stretchers

that keep the canvas taut.

The canvas is carefully rolled

around a drum, painted side outwards

to stop it cracking.

Then it's off to the National

Gallery to take its place

alongside work by Leonardo himself.

Never before will so many

Leonardo paintings

and drawings have been assembled

in one place.

And almost certainly,

they never will be again.

So valuable, so delicate,

it's unlikely anyone would dare

risk moving them again.

When you strip away the cult

that has grown up around Leonardo,

his sheer skill and vision as a painter

still tower above all others.

But there is also mystery.

He's an artist who continues to

intrigue and baffle and astonish.

And that enduring mystery has earned

him a unique place in our history.