You're Dead to Me - Leonardo da Vinci - Live (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: August 26, 2023

In this special, live episode of You’re Dead To Me, Greg Jenner is joined by Prof Catherine Fletcher and comedian Dara Ó Briain to learn about Leonardo da Vinci.Leonardo lived from 1452 to 1519 during an era of plague and warfare across Western Europe. It was also the height of the Italian Renaissance.From mathematics to military maps, and some paintings which you may have heard of, Leonardo da Vinci did it all. But was he a generational genius or an "ideas man" who had a chronic inability to finish what he started?For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Anna Nadine-Pike Written by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey The You're Dead To Me theme tune was performed by Charles Mutter and the BBC Concert OrchestraYou’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, and welcome to You're Dead to Me, with the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster,

and I'm delighted to say that today we are recording live from the BBC Radio Theatre, which means I get to say hello, audience. So, I want to also say a huge thank you to the marvellous musicians from the world-famous BBC Concert Orchestra and their director, Charles Mutter. We're going to have music throughout the show. Say hello, orchestra. So, today we are journeying

back to the 15th century, to Italy, to delve into the life of the genius artist all around polymath and my favourite person from all of history ever, which is some feat. He was a literal Renaissance man, and his name was Leonardo da Vinci. Joining me are two very special guests in History Corner.

She is Professor of Renaissance History at Manchester Metropolitan University, as well as the author of The Beauty and the Terror, an alternative history of the Italian Renaissance. She was a BBC New Generation thinker and the historical advisor to the BBC adaptation of Hilary Mansell's Wolf Hall. And you will remember her from our episode

on the cheeky, cheeky Borgias. Oh, those scamps, they get around. It's Professor Catherine Fletcher. Hi, Catherine. Welcome back. Hi, Greg. Hi, Greg. It's great to be back. I'm looking forward to the history, and I'm just about hoping my 1990s higher chemistry

gets me through the science. Don't worry. I think we've got someone who can handle the science. In Comedy Corner, he's an absolute star of stand-up. He crushed it on Taskmaster. He was iconic as the host of Mock the Week across 17 years. He went toe-to-toe with Professor Brian Cox on Stargazing Live and lived to tell the tale. He's the author of several books for adults and kids, including Secret Science, The Amazing World Beyond Your Eyes. It's none other

than Dara O'Brien. Thank you very much. Welcome, Dara. It's a pleasure to be here. I think it's, Thank you very much. Welcome, Dara. It's a pleasure to be here. I think that's overkill. I did, however, send in the sheet music for my walk-on music, which seems to be being lost, which is Lover Man by Shaggy Bombastic.

And I was expecting a concert version of it, but no, OK. I'll work with that disappointment and carry on with that. But your scientific credentials are unquestionable. You are properly, properly into your science. But where do you stand on history happy to dump it as a subject and just do lots of sciences so uh so no in many ways this is actually kind of my guilty secret i'm very bad at this thing because we also had we all had a bad teacher we had a bad tea look that's what i'm that's the excuse i giving. So I crammed furiously in the exams. It's compulsory up until when you're about 16 in Ireland. So we get some sort of grounding in it.

But because we were taught a very different history to you, obviously, in Ireland, like your history, but with us. Yeah. Alright. But what do you know about Leonardo da Vinci? Because he's a big name from history oh look look the things that man has done uh beard model uh beard model um a general a guy a man

about town left a series of clues uh discovered at a later stage i mean he was really playing the long game with that one uh and no i'll be going the other way in this. I think he was a bluffer. I think he couldn't draw hands. And most of his inventions were the kind of thing that my six-year-old does when he goes, I've made a mech with wings that also goes in water. That was most of his inventions were essentially that. And also when he did 15 paintings.

Hey. Oh, hello. So, I mean, which is not a major body of work, we have to say, given that he didn't finish a lot of them. So, no, I'm coming down as if he's a scam. Okay, so we need to try and talk you round, but we need to proceed with the formats

before Dara breaks it. Oh, I'm sorry. Did I give away the ending? He's dead, people. He's dead people he's dead that's a twist all right well let's proceed then so uh lovely stuff that brings us onto the first segment of the podcast it is called so what do you know This is where I have a go at smashing through what we think, well, you as our lovely listener and our lovely audience might know about today's subject. And Dara has already, well, he's gone for the knees.

So, audience, give me a cheer if you've heard of Leonardo da Vinci. OK, yes, he's surely in the world's top two Leonardos alongside DiCaprio. And he painted the world's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, and maybe painted the world's most expensive painting, the Salvatore Mundi. Leonardo is a Renaissance era genius. Maybe you're a fan of his work as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. He was very busy. He gets everywhere in popular culture, as well as swathes of turtle. He was very busy. He gets everywhere in popular culture, as well as swathes of documentaries. He's been in everything from Doctor Who to the BBC Medici series to Drew Barrymore's Cinderella rom-com Ever After, a fave. Then you've got your ludicrous but lucrative Da Vinci Code. Amazon Prime spent an awful lot of money hiring Aiden Turner and making

Leonardo da Vinci hot. But what else do we need to know about Leonardo da Vinci for real? You know, who was this guy? Let's find out. First things first, Dara. I get very grumpy when people call him da Vinci. Do you know why? Because it's not a name, obviously, da Vinci. I am Dara of Bray, because that's the town I'm from.

Presumably you're angry because... But that was... Medieval times was a lot... It was really open season on what you were called because it was like, oh you happen to work in a smithy. Well you're John Smith then. And so the naming of people at that time, oh you

repair arrows. Well you're Mr Fletcher to me. Wasn't the most imaginative thing at the best of times. So the Da Vinci thing I kind of get. I mean on a form on the internet if there was surname, would he not have written Da Vinci? What would he have written instead? Catherine, he's Leonardo, right?

He's Leonardo. He might have written Leonardo Pictor, meaning painter, if he'd been swatting up on his Latin, which he wasn't terribly good at. But yeah, Leonardo Pictor, Leonardo the painter, would be plausible. So what is his childhood, Catherine? He grows up in Vinci, a town in Italy, but what is his childhood? He grows up in Vinci, which is outside Florence. He's the illegitimate son of a notary called Sir Piero.

It's a legal job. His mother's a teenage peasant called Caterina. And Leonardo gets brought up by his father's family. And eventually, because his father marries four times altogether, although never to his mother, and his mother marries four times altogether although never to his mother and his mother marries once he gets these multiple step siblings so we don't know an awful lot about his childhood but he did get a basic education not a really prestigious sort of education so he didn't learn latin and he called himself unlettered but he was quite entrepreneurial about self-education

particularly when it came to the natural world so once his father asked him if he would mind decorating a shield and he decided he was going to do a medusa style monster on it and he researched this by bringing into the house and I quote crawling reptiles, green lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, locusts, bats and other strange species. Dara you're a dad would you let your kids bring in an entire zoo's worth of animals and just let them free? No, we have a tortoise, which is weird enough. He's currently in hibernation in the drinks fridge. You literally have to put it in a cardboard box,

take the champagne out. I mean, it's really impaired my lifestyle. And trust me, you get nothing back. It's not like you go, well, okay, so we have no champagne for three months. But look at the joy the tortoise brings as he slowly wanders around the room and humps a shoe. So obviously, Leo's very clearly talented.

He's painted this shield. He's taking inspiration from the natural world. And when his dad gets a job in Florence, moves to Florence, he sorts out Leonardo with an apprenticeship, right? To a renowned painter and sculptor goldsmith by the name of Andrea del Verrocchio, which means Leo is doing, I mean, it's not photocopying, he's not making the tea.

An apprenticeship is hands-on, right? Yeah, and this is where he gets his really rigorous training in art practice and eventually goes on to collaborate with Verrocchio on a painting called The Baptism of Christ. And part of what Leonardo is doing at this stage is working on both art and science, because this isn't something that Leonardo as an individual invents. It's something that we see across the board in Renaissance art. People are interested in space. they're interested in light, they're interested in perspective, they're using theories of optics,

theories of how the eye works to produce those effects of art, those effects of light, those effects of a real space. Leonardo does do some quite innovative things, though he produces the first dated drawing that we have of a specific real landscape, certainly in Western art, showing a particular part of the Tuscan hills and observation is really really central to everything he does so for example when he's trying to learn how fabric drapes to produce that accurately in painting

one of the things he may well be doing is making plaster casts of fabric draped over a mannequin so he can see exactly how the light falls on those folds. The reason we know so much about his method is from his sketchbooks, from his drawings, and some of the drawings are absolutely gorgeous. If you look at what he is sketching from the late 1470s, once he's working as an independent artist, he finishes apprenticeship, they've got this incredible playful curiosity. So sometimes they're serious and we have studies for a painting of a maiden and a unicorn, but we've also got these wriggling Renaissance babies and, of course, the Renaissance cat pictures.

Not just sort of cat pictures, but also he has to paint a lot of religious art. He does a lot of practising doing the Madonna, the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, but he crams in a cat pic when he can. Were they like the meme of the time? So we're showing you here, Dara, this is the study for the Madonna of the cat,

as it is known. It is a pencil sketch. There's the Madonna. There's a very chubby baby Christ. And there's a very grumpy cat trying to escape. You very rarely see those two characters with something else. They very rarely stuck something else into the situation.

Which is a trick they've missed, clearly. The Madonna Child and Bear. Madonna Child and Avalanche. But if we pop back to the previous one, Amarion said that he did one of the cherubs in this. That's right. That he does the angel bottom left right okay the uh and the and the others would have been done by other apprentices or was this the idea that like you'd have a support actor you'd say look you can do 15 minutes at the start

of the show the uh come on for a little while would the the rock you the rock you uh go i'll give you a corner i'll give you a face, you can do that, you've earned the right to do a small part of this. Yeah, I mean, basically people are paying Verrocchio for a painting and the more paintings Verrocchio can sell, the more money he's going to make. So would it be advantageous to Leonardo not necessarily to find his own style,

but to ape the house style, as it were? That's interesting, isn't it? Because actually the story that's told by Vasari is that Verrocchio takes one look at the angel and goes, I've been eclipsed. The apprentice has become the master. And do they fight with lightsabers? Yes.

The jewel of the fates plays and they fall into a ravine. And then Verrocchio is just caught on the ground. Wow. I mean, there's no new stories, are there? No. By this point, Leonardo is now an accomplished independent artist. But actually, I mean, quite quickly, Leonardo gets in trouble. He gets in legal trouble, actually, doesn't he, Catherine?

Yeah, he gets anonymously accused of sodomy. He and three other men are alleged to have sex with one young man called Jacopo Saltarelli. And this is, well, it's an interesting case eventually the charges are dropped but there's a weird paradox about these sort of cases in Florence because lots and lots of men get accused anonymously or otherwise having sex with other men so many in fact that it's pretty much a majority of men in the city at some point find their names on these police lists because they're all at it it It's both illegal and super common.

And your average young man in Florence probably at some point does experiment. Leonardo seems to be pretty keen on this idea. In fact, in 1478, he describes a man called Fioravente di Domenico as his most cherished companion. And these words are on a drawing of an older and younger man facing each other in profile. It's also got another interesting source of what Leonardo thinks about this whole business. At the time of the accusation, he writes a petition to one of the heads of guilds in Florence. And then on the back of the paper, he writes, if there is no love, what then? So on balance, we think that Leonardo, who we know didn't marry,

as far as we know, didn't have children, was probably what we now call gay or bisexual. Yeah, and the charges are dropped. But people were executed for this. So it's a serious threat to him, but he escapes that. But he does flee Florence. He goes to Milan, where there are new dangers, notably plague and war. So just two horsemen of the apocalypse. Just a couple there. So he's off to Milan now. This is fun because we think of Italy as Italy, right? A country.

You go to Italy, it's very nice. They have pasta. But in the 15th century, there is no Italy. There are city-states. So Italy has five big states, Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, and the Papal States in the centre, and many other small ones. And the people who run these states go to war and fight, Venice, Milan, Naples and the Papal States in the centre and many other small ones and the people who run these states go to war and fight literally on the battlefield sometimes but they also go to war more metaphorically they compete over palace decorations and architecture

and of course that means they all want to hire the top artists people like Leonardo so an example of one of these families would be the Medici in Florence and politically as well this is a turbulent period in Italy but it's also a turbulent period internationally in 1453 the Ottomans conquer Constantinople and about 40 years after that the rival powers of Spain and France both try their hand at expanding into Italy there's this terrible plague as you mentioned in Milan in 1484. And in 1492, an Italian chap called Columbus runs into what turns out to be the Americas, as named after another Italian chap, which supercharges the financial resources

of the Spanish empire in an extremely dubious way. So when we think about Renaissance art, there is a lot of chaos happening in the background, but that produces a little opportunity for Leonardo because it means people need fortifications and they need weapons. So he becomes a freelance defence consultant and goes off to Milan to work for the regent, Ludovico Sforza. Yeah, I mean, Dara, this gig doesn't just fall in his lap. We think of Leonardo as a genius who everyone surely wanted to work with but he's not known so he has to send a CV and a cover letter we have it and I'll read

it to you quickly I'll summarize it because it's quite long but he basically says dear illustrious Duke of Milan here are the things that I can do for you number one build portable bridges and destroy enemy bridges number two drain trenches and cross those trenches. Number three, destroy castles, even the ones built on rock, the best castles. Number four, build new kinds of catapults which hurl stones like a tempest. Number five, I can do some tunnelling. Yeah. Number six, I can invent new war chariots. Not your old ones, new ones. Number seven, I can make rare guns, which I have discovered. Number eight, I can build rare guns, which I have discovered. Number eight, I can build rare catapults,

which common people don't know about. Number nine, I can recommend naval weapons. I love that he recommends naval weapons. I've got them, mate. I can suggest. Number ten, if necessary, and only if there is peace, I guess, if there's peace, I can build architecture or canals. And at the very bottom of this CV, he says, oh, and I can also carry out sculpture in marble, bronze or clay and do, like, painting and stuff.

Maybe you've seen one of my angels. So, basically, his checker trade profile will be incredible, like his list of things he can do for you. It does feel like a pivot from i am drawing cherubs to i am constructing i'm draining uh swamps and constructing and destroying bridges the uh these are all claims presumably was he able to back any of this up well we'll come on to his military campaigns in a minute i think but i mean at this point quite a lot of what he's saying he can do is fairly standard stuff that's being discussed in the military manuals with a little bit of a spin.

Because Leonardo does do some sketches of mechanical devices. He has been thinking about this stuff. He has been working on these designs. He draws a big siege weapon. So if he is called in for an interview, he's got some designs that he can turn up and say, look, here is my siege weapon. I mean, it's not completely just a blagging covering letter.

But you are correct to say it is a pivot. We know that he probably pioneers matchlock muskets, the way in which they fire. That seems to be something he does contribute to. So a technical firing mechanism in how a musket fires. But the other stuff, he's sort of like, I've bashed one out on paper. it'd take a bit long to build, give me a year or 19.

So, yeah, we don't have much of what he's built, but he's promising. Yes. And sometimes that's what you need. The thing about guns, what he seems to do, he's got this German technician working in his household and this new model of gun, which is really useful because you can conceal it under

your cloak and then whip it out and shoot it you don't need a lighted match he seems to do some development work on it so it's more a matter that he's taking existing inventions and doing some modifications and improvements and so that's where his skill is coming in in bringing lots and lots of different ideas together more so than completely coming up with stuff from scratch we have these incredibly densely packed notebooks yes with what seven and a half thousand pages in them i mean they're incredible and do you know what's unique about how he writes in them dara have you ever seen them um i i know that because he was left-handed yeah did he write always write backwards so are they all though written in that they're all yeah yeah now people often said that this is a secrecy thing.

I don't think that's entirely true, Catherine. I think it's mostly because he's left-handed. I mean, it stops somebody casually looking over your shoulder, but with a bit of practice, you can learn to read that. So we have these incredible notebooks which are full of ideas. Arguably, too many ideas. But... Yeah, it's a pain for the historian.

I mean, we have these big codexes. The Codex Lester, the Codex Atlantica, the Codex Arundel, thousands and thousands of pages. What we have got is thousands of pages of notes to self and scribbles to self. And one of the problems in terms of working out, you know, what exactly Leonardo means, you think about the notes that you write to yourself in a notebook.

I mean, in 500 years time if somebody went back to your notes to self would they really be able to work out exactly which ones were the ones that you genuinely meant and had thoroughly thought through and which ones were just the kind of completely random idea that you scribbled after a night in the pub which brings us onto his inventions. Thank you, orchestra. So, Leonardo designs more weapons than Tony Stark. So, Dara, we've got a mini quiz for you here. I'm going to fire a lot of possible options at you,

and you have to guess which one of these is not a Leonardo invention. And I'm going to have some help from the BBC Concert concert orchestra so after each one we'll hear a little a little jingle so uh which of these did he not invent air screw helicopter mobile battle tank with cannons chariot with wheel scythes, an absolutely colossally huge crossbow, night vision goggles, a parachute,

a multi-barrel machine gun. Underwater diving suit. So those are your options, Dara. Do you want to hear them again, or do you get them? Bryce, no, I don't. Price, no, I don't. My God, I was so moved by the whole thing. I can't live through that time again.

So which of those do you not? Oh, do we feel that only one of them is? Only one of those was not a Leonardo. Because the ones I know, the scuba slash submarine stuff, I know that he did some of those. The helicopter, I think as well. I've heard it before. And the massive crossbow is hilarious because it is just a crossbow

in which he's drawn a small picture of a human. I'm calling bluff on the massive crossbow. It is just a crossbow. And he's gone, but if we were tiny, then it would be huge. Some of them are a bit, are you, what have you bespoken,

Leonardo? I'm just saying, like, if we were really small, the things that are normal sized would be enormous and it'd be crazy.

So I'm going in for the battle tank with cannons or the night vision goggles. Okay, you're going to choose? I'm going to choose night vision goggles.

Oh, you're correct. You can all agree. Well done. Well done. Well done. Yeah, I mean, spectacles were invented in the 1200s, so there are glasses, but they don't work at night. So we can show you four of these images.

Do you have a particular fave, Dara? We've got the screw helicopter, we've got the battle tank, we have the scythe-wheel wheels chariot and the massive crossbow. Massive crossbow. It's just a normal crossbow. And he's put a minifigure next to it and claimed that this could all scale up. And you're going, really?

Would it? Would the cables scale up? Yeah. I mean, there was a few. The one that's more famous is the Ornithopter. He built an Ornithopter one. I'm very fond of the word Ornithopter. I did have to check that up, which is, you know,

any aircraft that flies mimicking wings. And so we did that. The screw is quite interesting, but it's, yeah, you can see why it didn't work. But I just love the scaling things up. I just love the, for when the little putions come, there, this, this, this. That's by far the finest one.

I totally think that my angle at the start where this guy's a bluffer, which I really kind of made up off the cuff, is absolutely correct. This is all just a scam. Again, how many of these were ever, how many of these were ever? No, it's true that what's interesting about them is that when people have tried to make them in the present day, using the materials that we have now available, they work surprisingly well. These notebooks are not published until the 20th century.

They are just his personal notes for how theoretically you could do stuff. So he's got these ideas that are way, way ahead of most of what is going on in this particular society, which is why he's got this reputation as a genius. But you're right, people are not going out there immediately producing these and using them in warfare. My favourite thing, though, is when he's designing his batwing flying machine, he notes to himself, test it over water. Yeah. And wear an inflatable girdle. So I kind of, you have to imagine him, we don't know if he did test it, we don't know if he ever built it. But you have to imagine him basically a bearded genius hurling himself off a cliff, strapped to a hang glider,

cranking his wooden bat wings with inflated pig bladder strapped around his chest. It's basically Dick Van Dyke in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It's a slightly loony guy just going like, I'll give it a go, wee! You can actually visit the hills. In the hills outside Florence, there's a little plaque where he's supposed to have done this,

jumped off these hills to test his stuff. I was slightly distracted there because when you said, oh, it'd be like if you checked your own notes and I went to the phone and I opened my notes, these are ideas for a show, 2019. I used to say I hate kids, but then I had kids and now I've grown up

and now I hate other people's kids. Everything breaks, that's all it says. That's all that one is. They're not great. I would not like to think that in 400 years there'll be a podcast slowly pouring over. Stuff I jotted down on my phone. So much in it. I mean, we need to talk about Leonardo the anatomist.

I mean, Catherine, Leonardo, again, is renowned for his anatomical drawings. And not all of them are entirely forensically accurate. There's an element of imagination going in it. But he really draws beautifully. So how does a man with no access to Google Images discover the literal ins and outs of the human body? Well, it's a lot of hard work.

It's years of slow study. It's years of experimentation. I mean, Leonardo really is obsessed by nature. So he's obsessed by mechanics of flight in birds and bats. He studies the flow of water. He thinks about gravity. And he just has this absolutely endless curiosity, and one feature of that is the interest that he takes in the human body.

And he has an early encounter with a corpse in 1479, specifically the corpse of one Bernardo di Bandino Barancelli, who had been involved in a plot to murder members of the Medici family and got strung up for his pains. And the dead Bernardo was immortalised in Leonardo's sketchbook. And Leonardo went on from there. And in 1508, he did his first dissection of a human body, then went on to collaborate with a professor of anatomy at the University of Pavia. And throughout his studies of anatomy, though, as Greg says, they're not always exactly correct. He's interested in how the other things he's studying might have applications.

So he's thinking about hydraulics in relation to the anatomy of the heart. Can that illustrate how blood flows around the heart, for example? Put in context to me where we are medically at that stage. Are we still in humours? Yes. It's Padua, it's where you sort of go to study medicine, isn't it? It's sort of an era of big advances being made,

but still very much classical humour. Oh, it's classical, yeah. I mean, it's bleaches and bleeding and all that. We're still there. So it's not quite... And he's fascinated by rivers. He's obsessed with water, the hydraulics. And so when he draws arteries and alveoli,

he draws them almost like rivers. He's thinking about the body almost like a landscape. It's really fascinating. But what I like about him is he's funny. He's got jokes and puns in his notebooks. He's a bit naughty sometimes. He's a bit cheeky. He writes gags down.

He asks brilliant scientific questions. He writes down, What is sneezing? What is yawning describe the tongue of a woodpecker great questions yeah i mean you know these are the questions that scientists ask and comedians ask right yeah i mean we've covered that ground now feel many of these things but yes i mean that's that's great that he's asking questions the uh again is there an element and again i'm not i'm not trying to undermine that he flitted from thing to thing too much from we've already named three separate

careers from now this day did he jump around too much did it stop him perhaps i mean we like the idea of a genius having these flurry of ideas coming from all directions but like if he'd knuckled down into what could he genuinely have made something of himself? I'm going to step up and say that the reason he's so brilliant is that everything goes into everything. So when he's getting distracted by one thing, it's going to make him better at the other thing. He really gets into maths later on. First, I want to talk about Leonardo the urban planner.

I mean, pick a lane. First, I want to talk about Leonardo the urban planner. You know... LAUGHTER I mean, pick a lane. He lives through a plague, and plagues happen because living in cities, the sewers aren't good, etc. So he's like, right, how do we solve this then? He is an urban planner. In 1482, there is a devastating plague in Milan.

Tens of thousands of people die. And he's like, right, OK, I'm going to design myself an ideal hygienic plague-proof city based on the circulatory principles of the body so again he's using the anatomy to do urban planning and mathematics etc and so he comes up with a city built on multiple level levels with the poshest houses up top a lower tier for shops ordinary homes and transits there's sewers as well there's going to be canals in the center of it so people can move around again he's fascinated with rivers as the arteries of the city as a community, as a bod, as a body, as a bod. Sorry, that was weird, isn't it?

That's Leonardo the turtle coming in there. Sorry. Great bar, dude. So canals are going to be the arteries of the city. He pioneers the idea of external staircases so people can get fresh air, but they'll be covered by porches. These ideas don't catch on until the 1920s, the architectural futurism movement. So he's doing this in the 1480s. So he's already thinking of how do you design the perfect city that keeps people safe? He's conceptually interested in how do you problem solve? So I wanted to ask, how would you improve the city of the future? I wouldn't go, let's put the rich people at the top. I wasn't quite sure what that meant exactly.

And then you start listing and then there'd be a mercantile area and then there'd be canals and sewers. And you never finished where the actual working class people were going to go. They're below the canals and the sewers. You know, like they're down in some sort of subterranean level doing all this. I mean, Catherine, yeah, they're down in some sort of subterranean level doing all this, like, yeah. I mean, Catherine, sticking with urban planning,

on a previous episode, you told us about the scandalous Cesare Borgia, and Leonardo ends up working for him, mapmaking. So, Leonardo is doing very nicely in Milan, until the French invade, and an invasion clearly does not make for an ideal city, and certainly not an ideal city backdrop if you are trying to just get on with your research. But in 1502, he finds another job, and this is being architect and general engineer

to Cesare Borgia, who is the son of the Pope. Yes, you did hear that correctly. And leading a military campaign to conquer Romagna, an area of northern Italy where he hopes to make himself Duke. And Leonardo, in the course of this job, makes a really quite revolutionary bird's eye plan view of the city of Imola with added details of distances between the places. I mean, he also makes other regional maps, but this aerial plan is an innovation in cartography. There was a previous scale drawing

of Rome, which was outlined in a book by Leon Battista Alberti called Ludi Mathematici. It loosely translated as mathematical games or fun with maths. Don't look so skeptical. The way this works, this fun with maths, is that you start at a central point in the city. You take your measurements using a surveying disc

and calculate all the angles of the surrounding buildings. And then you measure out the key distances of the roads and squares by pacing them out on foot. And this is what Leonardo does to get to this map. So this map is, you know, incredibly forensically drawn. Is it accurate, by the way? Yeah, it's precise. And this is where the military innovation comes in. I mean, this is going to help Cesare Borgia break in and take over Imola.

So it's not about the giant catapult or anything else. It's actually about the quite relatively dull, but, you know, rather charming maps that mean you can run an effective military campaign when you're besieging a city. Apologies. He worked for Borgia, and this is a city that Borgia wanted to take over.

Yep. And he went to the city and mapped it out. Hello, visiting artist. Don't mind me. Why yes, that is a Borgia shirt I'm wearing.

Are you not a Borgia man yourself? Anyway, gotta go. Click, click, click, click, click. But he was just planning the ideal city. You know, that's what he was there for. So he was performing espionage for Borgia

on top of the other seven careers he already had. He was actually, he was also a spy at that stage. I mean, it's just really tough to make money as an artist. So it's a very precarious kind of career. By the way, through all this now, is he doing any painting at any stage? Well, actually... We'll get to that, yeah.

He's just always sort of going, hey, I'll knock it out next week. Oh, sorry, I did this. But this he does. This he does, the maps. But, I mean, we need to move on to mathematics because you raised it, Dara, and it's a good point, right? He is interested in maths.

He's increasingly interested in maths because he wasn't classically educated. He didn't get the standard education you get as a gentleman, you know, the Latin and the Greek and the oratoryatory so he's sort of teaching himself asking mates when he peeps he bumps into people and goes can you teach me this can you teach me that he talks to you know a guy about how bells work so the thing that's really fun and the thing that i want to see is the flat share sitcom he lives with a mathematician is accountant, a mathematical expert in accounting who wrote the book

on double-entry bookkeeping. This guy, Luca Pacioli. This is comedy gold. Who knows what crazy adventures those, the original odd couple, got up to. Why was he in a flat chair, by the way?

That's slightly more weird. Certainly art is not a reliable career. Well, certainly. That's slightly more weird. Certainly art is not a reliable career. Well, certainly if you don't do any. I mean, it's getting increasingly tenuous that he's an artist at all at this day.

Blowing the dust off that business card. Well, you know, I kind of think of myself more like an artist, but I mainly measure streets. I mean, Pacioli is one of the greats of the era, isn't he? As you say, inventor of double bookkeeping

and his double entry bookkeeping, which is a big stuff, a big thing. I mean, that's the big deal. That's the thing that he gets remembered for now. But he's one of the major mathematicians of his time. He gives Leonardo lessons in geometry in return for getting illustrations for his book. So this is a kind of bit of barter going on leonardo does some drawings and leonardo gets to learn maths and i mean this

is quite irritating for all the people who want to commission leonardo to do some art at the time because leonardo is kind of busy um studying geometry yeah that's that's another story and pacioli is one of the great espouses of golden ratio theory. So Pacioli is the guy who publishes the book explaining what it is. The golden ratio theory is that there is a composition in painting

which is most pleasing to the human eye. Not that you would stick somebody right in the middle of the frame, but you put them slightly off centre on both axes. But the ratio of the large to the small tends towards a particular number, which is also the root of an equation. And also using Fibonacci sequences as a kind of...

It's the limit of Fibonacci sequences. It tends, as you go to infinity, to this same number. We don't know if that's a fluke. We don't know if that's kind of pleasing, or maybe we're just used to seeing stuff in nature that tends to work to this ratio and therefore we find it pleasing to see it recreated in art, like whatever,

or if it's just a very happy little, happy coincidence. Well, it's the thing, it's almost, it's a meme, isn't it? You keep getting, this painting is like a piece of Renaissance art and somebody will have drawn this spiral over it and that'll go around on the internet. And that's the kind of thing i mean that's where we get that meme from is this idea of that all that kind of working with the

golden ratio so far but it is very weird with that within art that nobody thought do you know what if we just moved it slightly to the left it's nicer to look at than if you have every picture like an icon just with a face staring straight down the left there's hundreds of years of art being really unimaginative about where they put things. And everything has to be flat into the frame, like whatever. So was that all, were people just thinking, oh, we can shift this, we're allowed, be looser with this now?

The artists really structure geometry into their work. You are meant to understand maths, you're meant to understand optics. That's really part of an artist's training. So they take it quite seriously. I mean, I mean Leonardo I think takes it to an extreme but this is a pretty common thing in Renaissance art the idea that it ought to be based on mathematical principles it ought to be engaged with science and Pacioli is a Franciscan friar he's a monk so Leonardo is living with a monk and we don't know his religious views. Yeah, we get quite mixed messages about it.

I mean, later on, the art historian Giorgio Vasari, later in the 16th century, initially sort of places him as not religious at all, then backtracks on that and deletes out the second edition of his book. In Leonardo's own work, he refers to God's grace and God's creations. But at the same time time some of his observations are in tension with what's in the bible for example he's concerned that Noah's flood could not possibly have happened the way the bible says it did because the water just wouldn't flow that way so you know he's not getting it you know you know he's he's by no means an atheist I don't think we

can say that but he he's acknowledging some of the tensions between what's written down as the word of God and what he's observing yeah I would generally say at that time you'd advise somebody to soft pedal their objections to the church don't bang on about it Galileo just keep you know we get the point but like you're not going to leave the house for the next 40 years I mean the other thing, we think he's probably a vegetarian, Leonardo. Yeah, there's some allusions in his work to the human throat being a tomb for all animals. And he writes that humans are beasts for rearing animals to be eaten. So there's a few other comments that lead us to think possibly he didn't eat meat, but we don't absolutely know.

So we think he's a gay, vegetarian atheist living in Italy in the 15th century. Working for the church, primarily. Navigating things incredibly carefully. Yes, his Twitter is very quiet. Nice day! Have you seen me, Big Crossbow? I mean, how are you picturing him in your head? So, you know, if we were to bring him to the room right now,

how are you visualising Leonardo da Vinci? Fashion, looks? For now, I'm visualising him like a tech bro who promises a tonne of things, but has never actually... I picture him really getting into cyber currency at the moment. It's going to be a new thing. I mean, maybe not now, but in 400 years.

I feel there's an element of, I know he's your favourite, but there's an element of, man, could you do a day's work in your life about this guy? What do we know of his looks, Catherine? Well, the Anonymous Fiorentino, which is a contemporary anonymous social commentary on Florence, provides a very romantic description of Leonardo's appearance, writing, He was a beautiful person. Well-proportioned, agreeable and lovely to look at. He wore a short, rose-coloured tunic, reaching down to his knees. And this at a time when long clothes were being worn.

This at a time when long clothes were being worn. A fine beard, well arranged in ringlets, descended to the middle of his chest. He's hot! And he wears pink. He's a fellow who wears pink. And he's a hottie. No, no, he's clearly cosmopolitan. And metropole, metrosexual. By the way, did all of you hear that music?

Yes, very sophisticated. He's a sophisticated ideas man. With a beard down to his chest, the ringlets. He wears pink. You know, he's beautiful. People fancy Leonardo. He's gorgeous. The beautiful get away with a lot. Yeah. Yes. Not

doing a day's work in there. The next thing in my script is, how would you describe him? Would you use the word procrastinator? I think you would. Very much would. Sashaying around with his lovely beard going, would you like to see my big weapon? I mean, Catherine, even his first two commissions, when he's like in his 20s, he doesn't even finish those.

I mean, he really can't get stuff done, can he? No, and people are pretty well aware of this. So when Leonardo's studio was working on a painting of the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, we actually have a letter to the Marchioness of Mantua who really, really wants a Leonardo portrait. And this letter explains that Leonardo is hard at work on geometry and has no time for the brush

and that the life that Leonardo leads is haphazard and extremely unpredictable so that he only seems to live from day to day. No, sorry, Isabella, you're not getting your portrait. So was it that he was distracted away from stuff? Was it that he was dogged by a desire for perfection? Or was it just that he was ill-focused or he couldn't feel once he'd been paid for the commission

that he was poorly motivated? Do we know what caused it? Because it happened repeatedly. Were there warnings from his first master about this? Yeah, I mean, there were warnings because some of the very earliest art commissions he gets, there's an adoration of the Magi that he doesn't finish there's an alt piece for the palazzo vecchio i mean that's the city hall in florence that's a big deal commission you're asked to an alt piece

for city hall he just doesn't deliver and yet people buy into his genius and the small number of works that he does finish are so good that he gets away with it we should talk about him as the artist so uh seeing as he plonks it you know last on his list to his cv to the the leader of milan we may as well do it last as well here you've already said 15 confirmed paintings yeah even that's debatable so we've got eight uncontested 10 that are widely accepted but like don't mention it to an expert because they'll get in you know and then we've got some controversial ones yeah we have for example the Salvatore Mundi the most expensive painting of all time sold for 450 million dollars and I think we should stick to just saying that that attribution is hotly debated you mentioned spending half a

billion dollars on something that might be a Leonardo. He was hailed as a master in his lifetime so it's not just most you know 20th century where we decided he's a genius he was hailed as a genius but a frustrating one and he has his own workshop doesn't he in Milan? Yeah by 1490 he's got his own workshop he is hiring his own apprentices from that time in Milan we get The Last Supper, which is pretty much Leonardo's only painting that's remained in its original place. Leonardo then goes back to Florence,

sets up a workshop there. That's in the context, again, of war. By the turn of the century, he's 48. He gets another big commission for the city hall. They clearly hadn't learned from last time. This time, he's going to paint him a massive battle painting called the battle of anghiari doesn't finish that and it's also at this point that leonardo begins painting the mona lisa commissioned by francesco del

giocondo which he works on from 1503 on and off to 1516 yeah i mean and it's not a big painting. No, it's not. I mean, I know we shouldn't judge art on just size alone. I mean, it's one of the many metrics that you can judge art on. That's a small painting for four years. We should say... 13. Yeah, 13 years. Oh, sorry.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Francesco del Giocondo, well, he may have paid for the Mona Lisa with money that he got from the slave trade. So there's some slightly dodgy cash flow. This commission, the Mona Lisa, is a painting of Francesco's young, glamorous wife called Lisa Giocondo,

which is why in France they call her La Giaconde. So when you go to the Louvre, you say, where's the Mona Lisa? And they look at you and go, what? We have no such painting here. What kiddies are you? We have no such painting here. Leo gives her the iconic, enigmatic smile and presumably

francesco is absolutely chuffed with the portrait pops it on his bathroom wall in the toilet maybe no right francesco did not get his painting because leonardo hadn't quite finished the mona lisa when he took it off with him to france after after King Francis I gave him a job offer in 1515. Right, so 13 years painting it, didn't even get it in the end. Sham! Even though there's something in the mechanics of why this painting

which is not objectively greater than many, many other paintings is as famous or as iconic as what was it that... I mean, is there some... In the 19th century, it became popularised. Is there some mechanism by which this painting became established? Oh, yes. We'll be getting to that.

Yeah. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, he gets hired by the King of France as a prestige geek, but to woo him, he doesn't send him a cover letter or a CV, he sends him a robot lion, which is former host of Robot Wars, I'm guessing, in your wheelhouse. You said a robot... You mean that that's not a thing? It's a mechanical lion that's sort of got automatic, like, gears and can...

Like an automaton lion? Yeah. Does it actually clockwork? Does it move? Yeah. What, really? Yeah, we don't have it, but, like... So now he's a toy maker? Yeah. So, and the chateau in France is called Clos de Luce, but that's where he spends his last days. He sort of goes into sort of retirement in France.

Yes, we get a poignant account of this from Antonio de Beatis, who was secretary to the Cardinal Luigi d'Aragona. The two go and visit Leonardo, who shows the Cardinal several paintings from his earlier career, but Beatis now observes that nothing more that is fine can be expected of Leonardo owing to the paralysis which has attacked his right hand and Leonardo is continuing to teach others he becomes even more interested in a sense of the looming apocalypse predicting a great flood that might destroy the earth which he

sketches in these last years, even drawing a whole town underwater. But he died aged 67 on the 2nd of May 1519, likely of a stroke. And in his will, he left his books, his instruments, the art materials and his property to his pupils, Francesca Melzi and Salai. Yeah, and Salai may have been his lover, we're not sure, but they were like lifelong companions. So yeah, he dies at 67, which is quite old for the era, but there's a sense here that he wasn't at his full powers when he was in France. It's an incredible life.

But it's time now for The Nuance Window. The Nuance Window! Well, that was fun. There's nothing more nuanced than you shouting the word nuanced. That's a fair critique. I'll take it on board. This is where Dara and I procrastinate Leonardo style while Professor Catherine has two minutes,

uninterrupted minutes, to tell us about Leonardo. Professor Catherine, can we have the nuance window, please? How did the Mona Lisa get to be such an icon? It's a fascinating painting, but it hasn't always got the hype it gets today. How do you make a painting really famous? Vincenzo Perugia was working at the Louvre cleaning canvases and putting them under glass when he learned that Napoleon had stolen many works of art for the museum's collections and mistakenly believed that among them was the Mona Lisa. As an Italian patriot, he resented the fact that this national treasure was

hanging in a foreign gallery. So he lifted it off the wall and smuggled it out, concealed beneath his smock. For two years, he kept the Mona Lisa in a trunk in his apartment. Now, we know that Mona Lisa is a lovely painting, all Leonardo's anatomical detail, plus there was a mystery for many years around exactly who the model was. But add to that the heist of the century. Imagine the press coverage when they brought Picasso in for questioning. Now, sure, American art critic Bernard Berenson, who'd never been a fan of the Mona Lisa, pronounced from his Tuscan villa that the Louvre was well rid of that incubus. But when Perugia tried to sell it on, the painting was recovered. And the fact is that being involved in a heist gave Lisa a gloss and glamour that few artworks can compete with. You can't buy that

sort of publicity. And from there, things just took off. Marcel Duchandre Chandra moustache and a rude slogan on a Mona Lisa postcard. Andy Warhol made his Mona Lisa prints. That face became an icon. But there's a good case for saying that the Mona Lisa is as much an icon of the 20th century mass media as she is of the Italian Renaissance. You got a favourite old master? You want to make it really famous? Well, now you know what you got to do. So, Dara, what will you be stealing to promote? I might steal stuff from my own house. Increase its value, that would be great.

That surely would would work so it wasn't fair it wasn't as famous or anywhere near this level of icon before the theft no the theft i mean theft makes a massive difference and it's that theft at that point when you've got newspapers reporting on it you've got celebrities like picasso suspected of having done the crime it just you know becomes this national I mean, how could somebody just walk into the Louvre and steal a painting? I mean, they didn't believe it was one of the cleaners to start with. They thought, you know, it must be Picasso and his fellow artists, this gang of really well-organised, sophisticated Spanish art thieves. Loads of people got sacked for having

failed to protect the Mona Lisa in the National Gallery. I mean, it was just a huge outcry. And eventually, Vincenzo Perugia decided that he was going to try and make some money. And that was when he got caught, because there's no way you can actually fence the Mona Lisa. Well, now it is time for our big quiz, which is called, So What Do You Know Now? So what do you know now? This is our quickfire quiz for Dara to see how much you have remembered and learned. You've been taking notes through the show.

No, no, no. I was scribbling down potential jokes. That's literally what my job. And then my pen ran out, so you'll probably, in the second half, fewer jokes. I'll tell you one thing, your band are overqualified. We've fired a lot of history at you and you knew quite a lot. You've come at this with some serious science knowledge

and some stuff, you know, odometers. But how are you with quizzes? Are you feeling prepped? I'm OK, yeah. I mean, this is always my thing with history, that I would, you know, the dates, I would blur in the dates and the details. I'm not a details person, I'm more of a big picture guy. So, yeah, I'll go with that.

Yeah, absolutely. Is it on stuff we've literally just done? Oh, no, it's on something completely different. Oh, OK, fine. It's stuff we've talked about, don't worry. OK, we have ten questions, and the orchestra will be helping me out as well. So, good luck to our O'Brien.

In three, two, one, here we go. Question one. What does Da Vinci mean? It means I'm from the town of Vinci. It does. Look at that confidence straight in. Yeah, I'm going to nail this. Question two. What was Leonardo's mother's name? Oh. Ah, the confidence is gone.

It has, yeah. I'm going to go for Isabella. No, it's Katerina. No. No. I mean, you've got to wonder how often does a concert orchestra get to use that noise. Question three. What is special about how Leonardo wrote in his notebooks?

He wrote backwards because he's left-handed. He did, correct. Question four, how did a young, jobbing Leonardo get hired by Ludovico Sforza of Milan? Oh, he sent a long letter. I shall flatten cities and smite thine enemies. Essentially, he wrote that. A seven-point plan. Absolutely true, correct.

Question five, name three of Leonardo's military inventions. Well, I'm going to build up to my favourite. There was the spiral helicopter. Yep. There was the travelling conical battle tank. Yep. And there was the tiny man standing next to a normal-sized crossbow. Correct.

Question six. What safety measure did Leonardo suggest when testing his bat-wing flying machine? Think about the water. Oh, yeah, only test it over a canal or... Yeah, I'm wearing an inflatable girdle, absolutely. Correct. Question seven.

Half that and half wah-wah-wah, really. Question seven. In 1502, Leonardo pioneered which modern spatial mapping technique for Cesare Borgia? It was... Sorry, do we have a name for it? It was surveying. It was basically walking down the street and...

From which perspective? It was top-down. Yeah, absolutely. That's our view. Question eight. There are fewer than 20 surviving Finnish paintings by Leonardo. Can you name two of them? La Gioconda.

Yep. And... Oh, The Blasphemer. Very good. Question nine. What did Leonardo gift to King Francis I of France to impress him? La Gioconda.

No, something else. I know you're all doing animal pain. The entire room is doing animal pain. The entire room going... It's kind of funny because it's like the least threatening thing you could do. It's like 250 people going um a a big cat i do i can't i'm robot lion thank you it's one on and question 10 that's not a robot lion wouldn't go

question 10 what are the codexes at Atlantikus, Arundel and Leicester? There is no books. They are. OK. 8 out of 10. That's a very respectable score. Well done. Very good.

Have we convinced you Leonardo was all right? No, if anything, you've added to my pet theory that the man was a dilettante scammer and he just flitted from job to job and never did anything worthwhile in his life. And if he'd ever knuckled down and finished a few of those paintings, maybe people would still be talking about him to this day.

But as it is, he amounted to no good whatsoever. All that's left for me to say is a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. The Professor Fantastic... Well, the Professor Fantastic. Yeah, let's have Corner. The Professor Fantastic... Well, the Professor Fantastic. Yeah. Let's have it. The Professor Fantastic,

Catherine Fletcher from Manchester Metropolitan University. Thank you, Greg. And please can I have the concert orchestra for all my lectures now? And in Comedy Corner, we had the delightful, although not entirely impressed, Dara Obreon. APPLAUSE Thank you very much, Greg. It's been an absolute pleasure to be here.

Only one sound could sum up how sad I am that this is ending. Oh, Jesus! Oh, jeez. Oh, no, no. Jeez, I pointed at you. Thank you, Greg. It's been a delight to be here. At this point, really only one sound sums up how I feel that this is ending.

Thank you. ending. Of course, an enormous thank you to the BBC Concert Orchestra who've been absolutely brilliant. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we enlist two new apprentices to dissect more historical wonders. But for now, as the BBC orchestra plays us out, I'm off to go and buy myself a fetching pink tunic.

But not one down to my ankles. I'm going to show some leg. Bye! APPLAUSE Hello, I'm India Raxson, and I just want to quickly talk to you about witches. In this series from BBC Radio 4, simply titled Witch, I'm going to explore the meaning of the word today. It is a twisting, turning rabbit warren of a world, full of forgotten connections to land and to power,

lost graves, stolen words and indelible marks on the world. Because the story of the witch is actually the story of us all. Come and find out why on Witch with me, India Rackerton. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

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