Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 5 - The Hero as Artist - full transcript

The scene has changed
from Florence to Rome.

From the city of hard heads, sharp wits,
light feet, graceful movement,

to a city of weight,

a city that is like a huge compost heap
of human hopes and ambitions.

A wilderness of imperial splendour,

despoiled of its ornament,
almost indecipherable.

Only one bronze emperor,
Marcus Aurelius,

who was above ground in the sunshine
throughout the centuries.

And as you see, the scale has changed.

This is part of the courtyard
of the Vatican.

At its end, the architect, Bramante, has
built a sun trap, known as the Belvedere,



from which the Pope could enjoy
a view of the ancient city.

It's in the form of a niche,

but instead of being designed

to hold a life-size statue,
as it would have been 50 years earlier,

it is enormous.

In fact, it has always been known
as "il nicchione " - "the monster niche".

It's the outward and visible sign
of a great change

that overcame the civilisation of
the Renaissance in about the year 1500.

This is no longer a world
of free and active men

but a world of giants and heroes.

A world of giants.

This bronze pine cone -
and it really is a big pine cone -

came from that earlier
world of giants, antiquity.

It was supposed
to have been the point



at which the chariots turned
in their races round the hippodrome.

And since, in that hippodrome, many
Christian martyrs were put to death,

it was here that the Christian Church
elected to make its headquarters.

Huge, cloudy concepts compared
to the sharp focus of Florence.

But in Rome,
they weren't so cloudy after all,

because the huge buildings
of antiquity were there -

very much more of them
than we have today.

Even after three centuries,
in which they were used as quarries

and in which
our sense of scale has expanded,

they still are surprisingly big.

In the Middle Ages, men had been
crushed by this gigantic scale.

They said that these buildings
must have been the work of demons,

or at best they treated them simply
as natural phenomena, like mountains,

and built their huts in them,

as who should take advantage
of a ravine or sheltering escarpment.

Rome was a city of cowherds
and stray goats,

in which nothing was built
except a few fortified towers,

from which the ancient families
carried out

their pointless and interminable feuds -

literally interminable,
because they're still quarrelling today.

But by 1500,
the Romans had come to realise

that these mountainous ruins
had been built by men.

The lively, intelligent individuals
who created the Renaissance,

bursting with vitality
and confidence,

they weren't in a mood
to be crushed by antiquity.

They meant to absorb it,
to equal it, to master it.

They were going to produce
their own race of giants and heroes.

The scene has changed to Rome
also for political reasons.

After years of exile and adversity,

the sovereign pontiff has returned
to his seat of temporal power.

Temporal power that meant so much
to the popes of the 16th century,

but, of course,
are completely abandoned today.

Now the Pope is solely
a religious leader.

(CROWD APPLAUD)

(SPEAKS IN LATIN)

In what is commonly described
as the decadence of the papacy,

the popes were unusually able men

who used their international contacts,

their great civil service,
their increasing wealth,

in the interests of civilisation.

And even Sixtus IV, who was
as brutal and cunning as he looks,

founded the Vatican Library

and made the great Humanist,
Platina, its first prefect.

And here we see, for the first time,

the splendid head of the young cardinal,
who, more than any man,

was destined to give the
High Renaissance its heroic direction,

Giuliano delta Rovere.

What a lion he looks compared to
the donkeys of the papal secretariat!

And when he became Julius II, he was able,
by magnanimity and strength of will,

to inspire and bully
three men of genius -

Bramante, Michelangelo and Raphael.

This programme is about
a few individuals of genius.

And two of them -
Michelangelo and Raphael -

were, to some extent,
the creation of Julius.

Without him, Michelangelo would not
have painted the Sistine ceiling,

nor would Raphael have decorated
the papal apartments.

And so we should have been without
two of the greatest visible expressions

of spiritual power
and Humanist philosophy.

Well, this splendidly
over-life-size character

conceived a project
so audacious, so extravagant,

that, to this day, the very thought of it
makes me feel slightly jumpy.

He decided to pull down
Old St Peter's.

It was one of the largest and
most ancient churches in the world -

certainly the most venerable,
because it stood on the place

where St Peter was supposed
to have been martyred.

Julius decided to pull it down

and put in its place something
even larger and more splendid.

In his thoughts for the new building,

he was influenced
by two Renaissance ideals -

it must be based on perfect forms,
the square and the circle,

and it must be on a scale that surpassed
even the grandiose ruins of antiquity.

And he called on Bramante
to provide a plan.

He didn't get very far with it.

You know, great movements
in the arts, like revolutions,

don't last for more than about 15 years.

After that, the flame dies down,
and people prefer a cosy glow.

Julius II was Pope for only ten years.

St Peter's wasn't completed
till almost a century after his death.

But the first step
in this visible alliance

between Christianity and antiquity

was taken when Julius decided
to pull down the Old Basilica

and rebuild it in rivalry

with the enormous remains
of Roman architecture.

In the 15th century,
Greco-Roman sculpture had become

a shining, almost inaccessible, model
to the more adventurous artists,

and collectors had begun to compete
for fine examples.

The greatest prize
in the papal collection

was the Apollo Of The Belvedere -
an ideal of godlike beauty.

But for some time, these discoveries

didn't influence
their mental picture of antiquity.

They read the ancient authors
with passionate attention,

they wrote to each other in Latin,

but although their minds
were full of antique literature,

their imaginations remained
entirely gothic.

When the average painter set out to depict
a scene of ancient history or legend,

as in this picture of
The Rape Of Helen,

he did so in the costume
of his own time,

with dainty, fantastical movements

which show not the slightest
consciousness of the physical weight

and the flowing rhythms of antiquity.

Well, these are not ancient Greeks
but 15th-century Florentines.

And the funny thing is that the Humanists,
who took such trouble

about the text of an author like Livy,

accepted a picture like this,
of the death of Julius Caesar,

as a correct representation
of the event.

As long as there was
this rather comical discrepancy

between the written word and the image,

antiquity couldn't exert
its humanising power on the imagination.

I suppose that the first occasion
in which the dream of antiquity

is given a more or less
accurate visible form

is the series of decorations
representing The Triumphs Of Caesar,

done for the court of Mantua
by Mantegna in about 1480.

It's a piece of romantic archaeology.

Mantegna has rummaged passionately
in the ruins of ancient Roman towns

to find evidence for the shape
of every vase or of a Roman trumpet.

But he has subordinated
all his antiquarian knowledge

to a superb feeling for the drive
and discipline of Rome.

I said that the gigantic
and the heroic spirit

of the High Renaissance belongs to Rome,

and it's true,

but there was a sort of prelude
in Florence.

(CHURCH BELLS RING)

The Medici, who had been the rulers
of Florence for the last 60 years,

had been kicked out in 1494,

and the Florentines
had established a republic.

They made speeches full of the noble,
puritanical sentiments

which pre-Marxist revolutionaries
used to dig up out of Plutarch and Livy.

And to symbolise their convictions,
they re-erected two statues by Donatello,

the lion of the republic,
called the Marzocco,

and Judith, the tyrant slayer,

two figures belonging to
an earlier period of Florentine liberty.

And the city fathers also commissioned
various works of art

on heroico-patriotic themes.

And one of them was a gigantic figure
of David,

the free, pure-hearted youth
who had killed the giant of corruption.

The commission was given
to an alarming young man

who had just returned from Rome
to his native city - Michelangelo.

Only 25 years separate
this marble hero

from the dapper little figure

which had been
the last word in Medician elegance,

the David of Verrocchio.

And you see there really has been
a turning point in the human spirit.

The Verrocchio is light, nimble,
smiling and clothed.

The Michelangelo - this is the original,
the one you saw in the piazza was a copy -

the Michelangelo is vast,
defiant, nude.

It's rather the same progression
that we'll see again in music

between Mozart's Figaro

and Beethoven's Fidelio.

What a man!

Everyone who met Michelangelo

recognised that he had an unequalled
power of mind and skill of hand.

Even as a boy,
his spiritual energy terrified people.

Personally, I believe
that this small figure,

which he carved in Bologna
when he was under 20,

is a self-portrait.

And it shows that he never changed,

except that he grew sadder,
like the rest of us.

It has the indignant
singleness of purpose

that alarms ordinary,
accommodating citizens.

And in a way, his art never changed.

This relief of a battle
is certainly one of his earliest works,

and already one sees
the same expressive poses

that reappear on the Sistine ceiling,
even in The Last Judgment.

It's inspired
by a Greco-Roman relief.

Antique art was always,
to Michelangelo, a kind of quarry

from which he dug out
his ideas of form.

But of course it's still
rather a rough version of antiquity.

And when he went to Rome,

he was able to make much more
finished versions of antique sculpture,

some that were actually
passed off as originals.

This one even achieves

some of the unpleasant smoothness
of a Roman copy.

But when he returned to Florence,

he was able to charge this worn-out
style with his own vigour and potency.

Seen by itself,
the David's body might be

some unusually taut and vivid
work of antiquity.

It's only when we come to the head

that we are aware of a spiritual force
that the ancient world had never known.

I suppose that this quality -
which I call heroic -

isn't a part of most people's idea
of civilisation.

It involves a contempt for convenience
and a sacrifice of all those pleasures

that contribute
to what we usually call civilised life.

It's the enemy of happiness.

And yet we recognise that
to despise material obstacles,

and even to defy
the blind forces of fate,

is man's supreme achievement.

And after all, we see
that he's expressed this

by the body no less than by the head.

By this living cage of ribs.

By those tense architectural
muscles of the pelvis.

Above all,
by this huge Florentine hand,

so far from the antique tradition
of ideal beauty.

And since, in the end,
civilisation depends

on man extending his powers
of mind and spirit to the utmost,

we must reckon the appearance
of Michelangelo's David

as one of the great events
in the history of Western man.

And this brings us back to Rome
and to the terrible Pope.

In fact, I'm sitting
in the Papal Garden, in the Vatican.

Julius II wasn't only ambitious
for the Catholic Church,

he was ambitious for Julius II.

And in his new temple, he planned to erect

the most grandiose tomb of any ruler
since the time of Hadrian.

It was a staggering example of "superbia”,
what we call megalomania.

Michelangelo, at that time, wasn't
without the same characteristic.

I needn't go into the question
of why the tomb was never built -

there was a quarrel.

Heroes don't easily tolerate
the company of other heroes.

Nor does it matter to us
what the tomb was going to look like.

All that matters is that some
of the figures made for it survive

and they are something new
to the European spirit,

something that neither antiquity

nor the great civilisations
of India and China

had ever dreamt of.

As a matter of fact,

the two most finished of them
were derived from antiques.

But Michelangelo has given them
a complex inner life

that was almost unknown in antiquity.

And he has made them convey
their emotional conflicts

by the action of their bodies.

They're conceived as captives,
bound captives.

One of them struggling to be free.
From what? From mortality?

From the weight
of his muscle-bound body?

Derived, as we know,
from a Roman figure of a boxer.

And the other sensuously resigned,

"half in love with easeful Death".

Michelangelo had in mind a Greek figure
of the dying son of Niobe.

These two are carved in the round.

But the others, assuming they were part
of the same set, are unfinished.

Their bodies emerge
from the marble

with the kind of premonitory rumbling
that one gets in the 9th Symphony

and then sink back into it.

To some extent, the rough marble
is like shadow in a Rembrandt,

a means of concentrating on the parts
that are felt most intensely.

But it also seems
to imprison the figures.

In fact,
they're always known as The Prisoners,

although there's no sign
of bonds or shackles.

As with the finished Captives,

one feels that they express
Michelangelo's deepest preoccupation -

the struggle of the soul
to free itself from matter.

(# TOMÁS LUIS DE VICTORIA:
Tenebrae Responsories)

I'm standing in the Sistine Chapel,

and above my head is
one of the greatest works of man,

Michelangelo's ceiling.

People sometimes wonder
why the Italian Renaissance

didn't make more of a contribution
to philosophy.

The answer is that
the most profound thought at the time

wasn't expressed in language
but in painting,

just as, in the early 18th century,
it was expressed through music.

Of this truism, the chief example
is Michelangelo's ceiling.

We owe it to Julius II.

Ever since Michelangelo's
earliest biography,

the Pope has been blamed

for diverting his energies from
the tomb, on which he'd set his heart,

and putting him to work on the painting
of the Sistine ceiling.

It was even said to be a plot
devised by his enemies.

Well, I think it was
a stroke of inspiration.

The original project of the tomb

included almost 40 marble figures,
over-life-size.

How could Michelangelo
ever have done it?

It's true that he carved marble
faster than any mason,

but even with his heroic energy,
the tomb would have taken him 20 years,

during which time
his mind was changing and developing.

And the very fact that, in the ceiling,
he decided to depict scenes,

not simply to concentrate
on single figures,

allowed him a range of experience
which would hardly have been possible

in the more concentrated medium
of sculpture.

Look at this woman
holding her child in front of her,

and these piled-up men
looking across the flooded landscape.

And this wretched woman
lying there in misery, abandoned.

All these show
a human side of Michelangelo

which will scarcely appear again.

The ceiling also allowed him to express
his thoughts about the divine plan.

But were they //s thoughts?

In most philosophical paintings
of the Renaissance,

the ideas were suggested
by poets and theologians.

But in one of Michelangelo's letters,

he says that the Pope had told him
to paint what he liked.

So I suppose that the subject of the
ceiling was largely his own idea.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons
why it's so difficult to interpret.

It's an extremely complex work.

Viewed from the ground,
there's an acute physical difficulty

in concentrating long enough

to relate the scenes and the individual
figures to each another.

Some scenes are clear.

The contrast between the confident,
sensual twist of Eve's body

before the Fall

and the huddled, desperate animal after.

As for the general scheme,
I think at least one thing is certain -

the Sistine ceiling
passionately asserts

the unity of man's body,
mind and spirit.

You can admire the ceiling
from the point of view of the body

as 19th-century critics used to do so,

who looked first
at the so-called athletes,

or from the point of view
of the mind,

as one does when one looks at those
great embodiments of intellectual energy,

the prophets and sibyls.

But when one looks at the sequence
of stories from Genesis,

I think one feels that Michelangelo
was chiefly concerned with the spirit.

As narrative,
they begin with the Creation

and end with the drunkenness of Noah.

But Michelangelo compels us
to read them in reverse order.

And, indeed, they were painted
in the reverse order.

Over our head, as we enter the chapel,
is the figure of Noah,

where the body
has taken complete possession.

At the other end, over the altar,

is the Almighty
dividing light from darkness,

in which the body has been completely
transformed into a symbol of the spirit.

And even the head,
with its too evident human associations,

has become indistinct.

In between these scenes comes the
central episode, the Creation of Man.

It's one of those rare works

which are both supremely great
and wholly accessible,

even to those who don't normally
respond to works of art.

Its meaning is clear and impressive
at first sight,

and yet the longer one knows it,
the deeper it strikes.

Man, with a body of unprecedented
splendour, is reclining on the ground

in the pose of all those river gods
and wine gods of the ancient world

who belonged to the earth
and did not aspire to leave it.

He stretches out his hand so that
it almost touches the hand of God,

and an electric charge
seems to pass between their fingers.

Out of this glorious physical specimen,
God has created a human soul.

Behind the Almighty, in the crook
of his arm, is the figure of Eve,

already in the Creator's thoughts

and already, one feels,
a potential source of trouble.

It's possible, I think, to interpret
the whole of the Sistine ceiling

as a poem on the subject of creation,

that godlike gift which so much occupied
the thoughts of Renaissance man.

After God has brought Adam to life

come those scenes of the Almighty
in the act of creation,

which form a sort of crescendo.

The movement accelerates
from one scene to the next.

First of all, God dividing
the waters from the earth.

"And the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the waters."”

I don't know why these words give one
such a feeling of peace, but they do.

And Michelangelo has conveyed it
by a tranquil movement,

a gesture of benediction.

In the next scene -
the creation of the sun and moon -

He doesn't bless or evoke
but commands,

as if dealing with these fiery elements
required all his authority and speed.

And to the left, he swishes off
the scene to create the planets.

Finally, we're back at the separation
of light and darkness.

Of the rare attempts of finite man
to set down an image of infinite energy,

this seems to me the most convincing -
one might even say the most realistic -

because photographs
of the formation of stellar nuclei

show very much the same
swirling movement.

Michelangelo's power
of prophetic insight

gives one the feeling
that he belongs to every epoch,

most of all, perhaps, to the epoch
of the great romantics,

of which we are still
the almost bankrupt heirs.

It's the quality that distinguishes him
most sharply from his brilliant rival,

the second hero
of this programme, Raphael.

Raphael was, above all,
a man of his age.

Even in his early work,
still painted

in the clear, self-contained style
of the 15th century,

he has begun to absorb
and harmonise

all that was being felt or thought
by the finest spirits of his time.

He is the supreme harmoniser.

That's why he's out of favour today.

One couldn't write a bestseller
about Raphael.

I suppose one must allow
that, as works of art,

Raphael's frescoes aren't
all that easy to enjoy.

Even in the 18th century,

when Raphael stood at the summit
of an established Olympus,

Sir Joshua Reynolds
warned young artists

not to be disappointed
by their first visit to the Stanze,

but to go on looking and looking
until finally they understood

the restrained but perfectly balanced
language in which he expresses his ideas.

I've tried to follow his advice
over the last 40 years,

and, I promise you,
it's been worth the effort.

Raphael came from Urbino,
where his father was court painter.

And it's reasonable to suppose that
he was introduced to the papal service

by his compatriot Bramante, who was not
only the architect of the new St Peter's

but seems to have been on relatively
intimate terms with Julius II.

At the time, Raphael was 27.

He'd only once tried his hand
at mural painting.

He'd shown no evidence at all that he
could cope pictorially with great ideas.

And yet Julius had the insight
to commission this young man

to decorate the library and study, which
was to be the centre of the Pope's life,

where he was to meditate on theology,
decide on action.

The decorations must, in some sense,
project and harmonise his thoughts.

No doubt Raphael had passed much of his
boyhood in Urbino in the palace library,

where paintings of poets
and philosophers and theologians

were placed above the shelves
containing their books.

And when he came to decorate

what in effect
was a branch of the papal library,

he determined to carry
the same idea further.

He would not only portray the figures
whose books were in the shelves below,

he would relate them to each other

and to the whole discipline
of which they formed a part.

He must have had advice
from the learned, cultivated men

who made up about a third
of the papal Curia.

But that sublime company
wasn't assembled by a committee.

It represents Human Reason.

It's always known as
The School Of Athens.

And on the opposite wall
is Divine Reason,

known, for some reason,
as the Disputa.

On the subsidiary wall,
the window wall,

is poetic inspiration,
Apollo and the muses,

known as The Parnassus.

Everything in the groups is thought out.

For example, of the two central figures
in The School Of Athens,

Plato, the idealist, is on the left

and he points upwards
to divine inspiration.

And beyond him, to the left,
are the philosophers

who appeal to intuition
and to the emotions.

We recognise Socrates,

but many of the others
can't be identified.

We can be certain only
that these noble human beings

are passionately engaged
in a search for truth.

To the right is Aristotle,
the man of good sense,

holding out a moderating hand.

And beside him are the representatives
of rational activities -

logic, grammar and geometry.

Curiously enough, Raphael has put
his own portrait in this group,

next to a bearded philosopher

who seems to be an ideal portrait
of Leonardo da Vinci,

perhaps intended
to represent Pythagoras.

And below them is a group
of beautiful young men

looking over the shoulder
of a bald-headed geometer -

Euclid, I suppose.

He is certainly a portrait of Bramante,
and it's fitting that he should be there,

because the noble piece of architecture,

in which these representatives
of human reason are assembled,

must, I think, represent Bramante's
dream of the new St Peter's.

Raphael himself was later to become
an architect, and a very fine architect.

But in 1510, he couldn't possibly
have conceived a building like this,

one of the most life-enhancing
effects of space in art.

It may have been designed by Bramante,
but Raphael has made it his own.

Like all great artists,
he was a borrower.

But he absorbed his borrowings
more than most.

One has a vague feeling that these figures
are inspired by Hellenistic sculpture.

I suppose that's one of the things
that makes him distasteful to us.

But every figure in this picture
is pure Raphael...

or every figure but one.

This morose philosopher

does not occur
in the full-size drawing for the fresco,

which, by a miracle, has survived.

We can see where he comes from -
the Sistine ceiling.

Michelangelo wouldn't let anyone
in there while he was at work,

but Bramante had the key.

And one day, when Michelangelo was away,
he took Raphael in with him.

Who cares?
The great artist takes what he needs.

(LITURGICAL MUSIC)

While Human Reason
is rooted to the earth,

Divine Wisdom floats in the sky

above the heads of those philosophers,
theologians and Church fathers

who have tried to interpret it.

For all these figures,
Raphael made studies,

which are models
of the academic style of drawing.

He even made nude studies
of whole groups

to get the underlying structure
solid and real enough.

How Michelangelesque
that left-hand figure is.

Then other studies
of the flow of drapery.

But when he came to the final design,

all these ideas
are enriched and developed.

The seekers after revealed truth
are arranged with the same regard

for their relations with each other,

and with the philosophic scheme
of the whole room,

that exists in The School Of Athens.

In so far as civilisation consists
in grasping imaginatively

all that's best
of the thought of a time,

these walls represent
a summit of civilisation.

If only, we feel,
Raphael had more often allowed himself

this vein of sensuous poetry,

which, in its way, is quite as civilising
as his intellectual abstractions.

Michelangelo took no interest
in the opposite sex.

Leonardo thought of women
solely as reproductive mechanisms.

But Raphael loved the girls
as much as any Venetian.

Soon after this portrait was painted,
Julius II died.

And his successor, Leo X,
doesn't look at all like a hero.

I suppose Raphael tried to make
this portrait as flattering as possible,

but what a contrast to the old warrior!

Raphael remained on
in the papal service

and was asked to do everything,
from the rebuilding of St Peter's

to the decoration of a very pagan
bathroom for Cardinal Bibbiena.

Of course,
he couldn't do it all himself.

For such a project as the Loggia
of the Vatican,

one must imagine him
making dozens of slight sketches,

handing them out, right and left,
to his brilliant young pupils.

Really young -
Giulio Romano was only 16.

Someone said of Courbet

that he produced pictures
as an apple tree produces apples.

The same is true of Raphael, except that
his apples were fruits of the imagination

and sometimes achieved
such grace and finality

that they stamped themselves
on the European mind for 300 years.

However, one of the commissions
of this period

had a more questionable influence.

This was a series of designs

for the tapestries which were
to be hung in the Sistine Chapel.

With the thought of Michelangelo's ceiling
above them,

Raphael took a lot of trouble about them,
and, of course, they are masterpieces.

Masterpieces of composition,
in the tradition of the early Florentines.

Masterpieces of elevated imagination.

But their very nobility was dangerous.

They're concerned with the lives
of the apostles, Peter and Paul.

Well, St Peter was a poor fisherman.

Raphael has made him
and all his companions

uniformly handsome and noble.

Where can one find
more impressive human types

than in the group of apostles
who listen to Christ's charge,

"Feed my sheep"?

It may be good for us
to leave our daily chores

and move in high company
for a short time.

But this convention, by which the events
in biblical or secular history

could be enacted only
by magnificent physical specimens,

handsome and well-groomed,

went on for too long - till the middle
of the 19th century, in fact.

Only very few artists -

perhaps only Caravaggio and Rembrandt
in the first rank -

were independent enough
to stand against it.

And I think that the convention,

which was an element
in the so-called grand manner,

became a deadening influence
on the European mind.

It deadened our sense of truth,
even our sense of moral responsibility,

and led, as we see in modern art,
to a hideous reaction.

In the autumn of 1513,
soon after the death of Julius,

there arrived in the Belvedere,
almost exactly where I am now,

one more giant -

Leonardo da Vinci.

Historians used to speak of him
as a typical Renaissance man,

a kind of successor to Alberti.

Well, that's a mistake.

In fact, he belongs to no epoch.

He fits into no category.

And the more you know about him,
the more utterly mysterious he becomes.

Of course, he had certain
Renaissance characteristics.

He loved beauty and graceful movement.

He shared - or even anticipated -

the megalomania
of the early 16th century.

The horse that he modelled
as a memorial to Francesco Sforza

was to be 26 feet high.

He made schemes
for diverting the River Arno

that even modern technology
couldn't accomplish.

Then, of course, he had,
to a supreme degree,

the gift of his time for recording
and condensing whatever took his eye.

But all these gifts were dominated
by one ruling passion,

which was not a Renaissance
characteristic - curiosity.

He was the most relentlessly
curious man in history.

Everything he saw made him ask
why and how - particularly how.

And he's left his answers

in thousands of sheets of paper
and scores of notebooks.

I've got in my hands a facsimile
of one of these - Manuscript B.

It deals with practical problems -
mill wheels, toothed wheels, ratchets.

Architecture - a tower
for the Ducal Palace in Milan,

the Castello Sforzesco.

A church in the style
of his friend, Bramante.

Leonardo was obsessed with the idea

of putting a round dome
onto a square base.

And a stable
for the Duke of Milan's famous horses.

A very grand stable.

The hayloft above,
the feeding byres on either side

and a drainage system
down the middle.

And then the other aspect
of Leonardo's mind,

his interest in theoretical
and mathematical problems.

This you see in a manuscript called
Manuscript A,

where he's studying the action
of light falling on a sphere

and the interruption of light,
forming this continuous modelling.

It looks abstract enough,

but, in fact, it was the theoretical
study of light falling on a sphere

that enabled Leonardo
to achieve the incredibly precise,

scientifically precise,
continuous modelling

of the head of the Mona Lisa.

You can see
from these manuscripts

that Leonardo's curiosity was matched
by an indefatigable energy.

He's never satisfied
with a single answer.

He goes on asking the same question
again and again,

worrying it, restating it,
countering imaginary antagonists,

till the reader is absolutely worn out.

Fortunately, he also left answers
in the form of drawings,

which are, or appear to be,
easier to take in.

One can enjoy them for the way
in which his eye grasps each form

and his hands set it down
with a unifying rhythm.

But one mustn't forget
that they are all - or nearly all -

answers to questions.

How does one stream of water
deflect another?

What is the cause of whirlpools?

How are rocks formed?
What is the reason for stratification?

How do storm clouds build up?

How do trees mass together?

How does a twig support
its load of acorns?

How do blackberries mass
on a branch?

Why do the leaves
of a Star of Bethlehem

resemble the movement of water?

What is the structure
of a bird's wing?

How does a bird fly?

Of all these questions,

the ones he asks most insistently
concern man.

Not the man of Alberti's invocation,

with "wit, reason and memory
like an immortal God",

but man as a mechanism.

How does he digest?

How does the heart pump blood?

How does a child live in the womb?

How does he speak?

Is it by using his throat muscles
or his tongue?

And finally,
why does he die of old age?

Leonardo discovered a centenarian
in a hospital in Florence

and waited gleefully for his demise
in order to examine his veins.

Every question demanded dissection,

and every dissection was drawn
with marvellous precision.

And at the end, what does he find?

That man,
although remarkable as a mechanism,

is not at all like an immortal god.

He is not only cruel and superstitious
but feeble.

If Michelangelo's defiance of fate
was heroic,

there is something
almost more magnificent

in the way that Leonardo,
that great hero of the intellect,

confronts the inexplicable,
ungovernable forces of nature.

And it was in Rome,

in the very year that Raphael was
celebrating the godlike human intellect,

that Leonardo used his scientific
knowledge of the movement of water

to express his feelings
of human insignificance.

The painstaking way
in which he depicts these disasters

shows a strange mixture of relish
and tragic indignation.

On the one hand, he is
the patient observer of hydrodynamics.

On the other hand,
he is King Lear defying the deluge.

(SOUND OF THUNDER)

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!

"Rage! Blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

"Till you have drench'd our steeples,
drown'd the cocks!”

We are used to catastrophes.

We see them every day
on film and television.

They contribute to our pessimism.

But coming from a perfectly endowed
man of the Renaissance,

these extraordinary drawings
of the world destroyed by flood

are prophetic.

(WIND BLOWS AND WAVES CRASH)

The golden moment was almost over.

But, while it lasted,

man achieved a stature that he's
hardly ever achieved before or since,

because to the Humanist virtues
of intelligence

was added the quality of heroic will.

For a few years,
it seemed that there was nothing

which the human mind
couldn't master and harmonise.