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

Episode Date: May 12, 2023

In this special episode of You’re Dead To Me, recorded in front of a live audience, Greg Jenner is joined by Professor 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?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 OrchestraThe Athletic production 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! 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. Orchestra. 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-round polymath and my favorite person from all of history ever which is some feat he was a literal renaissance, 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 Mantel's Wolf Hall. And you will remember her from our episode on the cheeky cheeky Borgias,

all 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 that's overkill. I did, however, send in the sheet music for my walk-on music, which seems to be lost, which is Love for 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, you know, I think you bring your own grandeur, your own magnificence. You're very kind. I did also insist that I be described as magnificent. Well, we'll say it's Lorenzo the Magnificent, it's a proper Renaissance term. Yes, it may well be.

But that'll be history and I'm not in that corner, so I don't know. I just do magnificence. But your scientific credentials are unquestionable. You are properly, properly into your science. But where do you stand on history? This is your first time on the show. So do you enjoy history? Happy to dump it as a subject

and just do lots of sciences. So no, in many ways, this is actually kind of my guilty secret. I'm very bad at this thing because we all had a bad teacher. We had a bad teacher. Look, that's the excuse I'm 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. So. All right. 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. Beard model. Beard model. A general man about town. Left a series of clues. Discovered at a later stage. I mean, he was really playing the long game with that one. 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. He was like very much like the Man City or Newcastle United. His work was broadly funded by despots of dubious morality and political outlay. That's correct.

And also only 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.

We've got a bit of time. We've got a professor in History Corner to try and convince you. But we need to proceed with the format before Dara breaks it. Oh, I'm sorry. did I give away the ending? He's dead, people, he's dead. That's a twist.

All right, well, let's proceed then. So, lovely stuff. That brings us onto the first segment of the podcast. It is called the So What Do You Know? I've heard that all day and I still am not tired of it. It's absolutely enjoyable. Right, this is where I'm going to 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 okay yes he's surely in the world's top two leonardo's alongside dicaprio um and he painted the world's most famous painting the mona lisa and maybe painted the world's most expensive painting the salvator 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 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 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, which, you know, I don't think anyone here really wants to get into, but perhaps Dara does. 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, I mean, like that's, I presume 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 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 uh i typed that in would he what what would he've written instead the uh catherine he's leonardo right he's leonardo he might have written le the Catherine he's Leonardo right he's Leonardo he might have written Leonardo Pictor as meaning painter if he'd been swatting up on his Latin which he wasn't terribly good at um but yeah Leonardo Pictor and Leonardo the painter would be plausible but yeah the Da Vinci thing is tricky because he's got so many siblings I mean there's probably a double digit number of siblings so you call out for Da Vinci I mean, there's probably a double-digit number of siblings. So you call

out for Da Vinci. I mean, which one of the 10 of the kids do you want? I mean, generally, if you call out a surname, all of the family may say that. So were surnames not a... Oh, well, posh people have surnames. Well-off people have surnames. Nicola Machiavelli, a little bit further up the social ladder, he's got a surname. Francesca Guicciardini is a big name historian in the period. He's got a surname, but Leonardo da Vinci is just your ordinary Leonardo from Vinci. Right, okay, and if you're the child, then the child just became wherever he happened to be at the time. He doesn't have any children, he never had children. No, he didn't. But, sorry, so da Vinci wouldn't have passed on with them and become... Well, at a certain point,

some of these names do eventually pass on, become surnames so you get people who are called Darragona which way back meant they came from Aragon in Spain but actually the surname becomes just a surname so eventually maybe that would have happened but I know you don't want to give the Corleones as an example but that that is, Vito of Corleone was the godfather's name when he arrived in Ellis Island and they became the Corleones. I'm just presuming

that's what would have happened. He would have been Vinci at some stage. Yeah, that's a brilliant actual historical example. You're doing better at this than I thought you were going to. Okay, so that brings us

to a point actually. He's not rich. So what is his childhood in Catherine? He grows up in Vinci, a town in Italy, but... 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.

It's really impaired my lifestyle. 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, 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 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. So we're going to show you... Were they like the meme of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus, but he crams in a cat pic when he can. So we're going to show you. 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, like, you know, they very rarely see those two characters with something else. Like, you know, 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, am I right in saying that he did one of the cherubs in this. That's right.

That's the angel, bottom left. Right, okay. 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 or you can come on for a little while. Would the...

The rockio. The rockio 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, right? So if he could make more paintings by contracting out some of the corners of them and some of the background to his apprenticeships, then that's more money for the business. I mean, these people are entrepreneurs. They're trying to sell their work to monasteries,

to lords and ladies. You know, they use the apprentices as labourers. So they're learning. It's part of their training. But yeah, they're very much part of the firm. 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 in the ground. Wow. I mean, there's no is caught in the ground. Wow.

I mean, there's no new stories, are there? No. Because it is, I would say, of the two angels there, the one, Leonardo, is better than the other one. The other one isn't great. And the other one seems slightly, A, not good eyes, but B, slightly startled to have a better angel popping by his side.

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's both illegal and super common. And your average young man in Florence probably at some point does experiment, at least having sex with other men. 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 um didn't marry as far as we know didn't have children was probably what we now

call gay or bisexual even if those are not the terms that were current at the time yeah and the charges are dropped but this people were executed for this so it's a serious threat to him but he escapes that uh 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 you know just 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. Yes. 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 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 summarise 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 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. Literally, last thing on the... Last thing. Last thing, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe, last thing on the last thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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 draining swamps and constructing and destroying bridges. These are all claims, presumably. Was he able to back any of this up? Were any of his machines built? Did he ever lead an army?

Did he ever attack a castle, even a stone? Were any of those claims, did they have to follow up on that? Well, we'll come on to his military campaigns in a minute, I think. But 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 a personal 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 there that he can turn up and say, look, here is my siege weapon. I mean, it's not completely just a blackened covering letter. But you are correct to say it is a pivot. Yeah, but they're also just drawings. I mean, I return to the six-year-old doing an interview as the commander and producing the Lego model of, this is what I think we should use. We shall use the floating mech,

which also shoots rockets. Because none of these things were built, were they? Were they built at any stage? I mean, 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 what he's built but he's he's promising yes and sometimes that's what you need i mean the thing about guns what what he seems to do he's got this german technician working in his household and these 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, in that case, that are already around 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. The positive spin would be he was an ideas guy. And the negative spin is he was just a bullshit.

Would that be unfair as a characterisation of the actual value of what he did? I mean, I think what we can say is that he has... Well, actually, I mean, let's talk about it. We have these incredibly densely packed notebooks with, what, 7,500 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? I know that because he was left-handed. Yeah. Did he always write backwards? And even his... What I was always thinking is that his hash marks when you shade things in a right handed person goes

I think bottom to top left to right and he would go the opposite way and as you can tell he was left handed because the natural curve of his hand

so are they all though written in that they're all 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. But presumably this took an effort to do because nobody's teaching left-handed children to write right to left. We're still in the era of, you know, Sid and Stern Dexter, that left-handed people are kind of slightly weird and freaky and should be avoided.

That there was something wrong about being left-handed people are kind of slightly weird and freaky and should be avoided? Like, yeah, that there was something wrong about being left-handed at that stage? Yeah. I mean, he's not the only left-hander, though, is he? We know of others. I think it's to avoid smudging, mostly. As a lefty... Oh, yeah, your hand doesn't draw across. You don't want to smudge across the ink,

and obviously ink back then wouldn't dry as well because, you know, you had it. So we have these incredible notebooks which are full of ideas. You say an ideas guy, so many ideas. Right. Arguably arguably too many ideas but hey yeah it's a pain for the historian i mean we have these big codexes their net the codex lester the codex atlanticus the codex arendelle 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. And he's not just a prodigious note-taker. He's a writer in a creative sense too. You know, like any good comedian, he has material.

And in Milan, he doesn't just get hired to do weapons or whatever. He's doing riddles, fables, theatrical entertainment. He's writing for performance. He's writing for a crowd, for courtiers. He's putting on plays. You know, his job is to entertain. But he's not convinced about the power of the written word. He's an unlettered man.

That's what he calls himself. I am unlettered. I'm uneducated. He's all about the doing rather than the writing, 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'll guess which one of these is not a Leonardo invention. And I'm going to have some help from the BBC Concert Orchestra. So after each one, we'll hear a little jingle. So 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? Christ, 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 going but if we were tiny then it would be huge some of them are a bit

what have you bespoken Leonardo I'm just saying if we were really small the things that are normal sized would be enormous and it would be crazy

so I'm going for the battle tank with cannons or the night vision goggles okay you want to choose I'm going to choose night vision goggles. Oh, you're correct. You got it.

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 scy scythe wheels chariot and the massive crossbow that's

a crossbow it's just a normal crossbow uh and he's put and he's put a minifigure next to it and claimed that this could all scale up uh you're going really would it would it go with the cables um yeah i mean, there is, there was a few, the one that's more famous is the Ornithopter. Yeah. The 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 the, 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 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 favorite thing though is when he's designing his backwing flying machine he notes to himself test it over water yeah and wear an inflatable girdle so 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 sort of chest. It's basically Dick Van Dyke in Choo-Choo-Choo-Choo-Bang-Bang. It's a slightly sort of loony guy just going like, oh, 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 think that's possibly a little bit of tourist board excitement. 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. There's so much in it. I mean, we need to talk about Leonardo the anatomist. 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. He is interested in geology.

He goes out into the hills and describes visiting mountain ranges and finding fossils from ancient sea creatures and wondering how the bottom of the sea has become these mountain ridges. And he just has this absolutely endless curiosity. And one feature of that is the interest that he takes in the human body. 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, along with notes on exactly what he was wearing. 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 classy, yeah. I mean, it's bleaches and bleeding and all that. We're still there. So it's not quite... I mean, and is there an equivalent of, to fine irish immigrants it's going to be burke and hair uh well is there i mean is he do corpses come to him to to do this work on yeah and it's it's

legit and you know there's a sort of myth i think that the church spans anatomy that that's not true that there is scientific work being done here with corpses and everyone sort of is kind of okay with it right he's got his hands on what yeah i think he does need to have the collaboration with professor of anatomy this is later on his career after he's really made his name i mean if you're just a random artist tips up says can i have a corpse then they're probably not going to go along with that but for legitimate for legitimate medical research yes you can do dissection. Some people don't approve of it, but it's not banned by the church, as some of the mythology around Leonardo would have it.

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 the other thing, what I love about him, he's my favourite person from history,

and here you are belittling him, Dara. No, but what I love about him... That is awkward. It's okay. Of all of the people in history? I'm so sorry, man. It's okay, I'll get over it. But what I like about him is he's funny.

He's got jokes and puns. I love a pun. 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. Why do dogs gladly sniff each other's arses? Great questions.

I mean, these are the questions that scientists ask And comedians ask, right? Yeah, I mean, we've covered that ground now I feel many of these things And also, I think the woodpecker one That's probably not the only one you went Eh, is that a really big question? I mean, sneezing, coughing and arses, okay

But the woodpecker tongue one That feels like a very specific request To what a woodpecker tongue is, that feels like a very specific request to what a woodpecker tongue is. But yes, I mean, that's great that he's asking questions again. Is there an element, and again, I'm not trying to undermine,

that he flitted from thing to thing too much? 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 work, could he genuinely have made something of himself? I mean, I'm going to step up and say that the reason he's so brilliant is that everything goes into everything. He's a holistic thinker. So when he's getting distracted by one

thing it's going to make him better at the other thing right he he sort of wants to have a theory of everything he wants everything to be connected and we start to see this in you know not just in the anatomy stuff and in the way that he's drawing these parallels between rivers and so forth but also you know when he starts to think about these ideas of the microcosm and the macrocosm, when we get on to the golden ratio, I think we might have a picture. Shall we go on to that? Well, yeah, I mean, we'll show you actually something,

well, you may have heard of it, Vitruvian Man. You heard of it, Dara? Oh, sorry, that's just me doing star jumps. Sorry, if we've got Vitruvian Man, that's embarrassing. Sorry, that's... He designed it for the World in Action team. There's an up-to-date reference. But Vitruvian Man is iconic, right?

This is the renaissance. When you write a book about the renaissance, you pop this on the front cover. But actually, Vitruvian Man, it's special for reasons beyond simply biology. It's mathematics and biology. It's mathematic. It's the golden ratio. It's also to do with architecture.

I mean, Leonardo, in the late 1480s, has been spending time with an architect called Francesco di Giorgio, and he's very keen on this idea of designing buildings in the same ratios that we find in human anatomy. So when we've got this drawing here it's not just about a person it's about everything how tiny things can be made both by god but then echoed by human artistic creation to the same proportion as great things now i mean as the name vitruvian suggests this is not a new idea it comes from vitruvius, who's a Roman architect and engineer, but these ideas of the

great and the small become really central to Leonardo's work. So coming back to that obsession with water, we've got rivers, there's veins of the earth, finding their parallels in the veins of blood flowing through the body. And I think that really shows the kind of imaginative jumps that Leonardo makes. I've always been intrigued by why, what was better explained by, I mean, the Vitruvian Man, for those who are, the man standing in the circle

with his arms out and then for some reason has extended his legs out, airing his crotch, essentially. Which seems to be the only gain, the only thing he's gained in this. It's not like if it was front and then back, that would make sense.

But no one's going, ah, yes, I know what a man looks like when he stands with his legs together. But how would he look if his legs were slightly apart? That is the mark of a true genius, Leonardo, if you can draw a man where his perineum is being aired.

So I've never understood what the point of Vitruvian Man was exactly. Well, the funny thing actually is this. This is Leonardo trying to literally square the circle. Mathematically, he is trying to put, if you see the circle around it and you see the square in the centre, you can see two shapes overlapping. And the thing I absolutely love is that plenty of men in history have measured their dicks,

but only Leonardo would try and square his dick as a circle because this might be a self-portrait. And also he argued the penis is the very centre point mathematically of the human body on this particular man. So he's literally making a case for square dick ratio theory. Right. OK, no, honestly, that was it. He says, if I extend this far, then I can just curve around

and create the circle that I'm in, which is obviously not true and not how that works. The gold ratio, I'm genuinely very interested in always in because it's one plus root of five over two. It's the roots of, I think it's x squared plus x minus one equals zero. I think, I'm doing that off the top of my head,

but it has a very strong, simple mathematical existence but do they stumble across that by accident? How do they go, oh wow, that's the same as that number that turns up in Fibonacci sequences and, you know, is an important ratio. How do they draw the part of that and, well, if we put the ship slightly

off centre in our paintings it's kind of a bit like that if you know what I mean? We'll get to maths a bit later actually. I'm sorry, I keep jumping ahead It's alright man, it's just, it's kind of a bit like that, if you know what I mean? We'll get to maths a bit later, actually. I'm sorry, I keep jumping ahead. It's all right, man. It's exciting because it's a tumult of stuff, because there's maths stuff, and then there's later work as a choreographer. We'll presumably get to that as well.

Just spread your legs slightly. Stop! That's not your signature move. I don't need to spread my legs slightly. We'll get to maths, because actually, he really gets into maths later on. Right. First, i want to talk about leonardo the urban planner um you know 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, 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, okay, 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 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 centre 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, wasn't it? That's Leonardo the Turtle coming in there. Sorry. Great bod, dude. Bod is, by the way the irish word genuinely the irish language word for penis so you've really got to let this thing damn it sorry

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 he wants all his staircases to be twisted and circular not vertical so people won't piss in the corners because you know what men are like right with their square penises um so he's thinking about all that 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, yeah, they're down in some sort of subterranean

level doing all this. How would I design? Yeah. I, do you know what? Because I have not said that I am Dara Bean. I will literally try to come up with an answer for any question, because that's very much Da Vinci's thing. So give me five minutes

to put on the Da Vinci thing. Yeah, I would design it like a penis, obviously. Channels, and there'd be two major meeting areas. Funnel the public through one, you know, there'd be kind of a walk,

like a boulevard. And they'd emerge from the boulevard out, out, into the countryside. And they'd emerge from the boulevard out into the countryside and that would happen semi-regularly. And it would ease congestion in the central gathering areas. Lovely. Yeah, so that's how I do that.

We'll submit the plans. Dude, yeah. I'm not sure which city has chosen to be the test pilot for this. Let's just... Southampton. Randomly build that shape in Southampton and see how that works out. Lovely stuff. Well, I want to live in Doraville.

Sounds great. 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. Yeah, 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 but 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. And 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. He basically invents the Fitbit and Google Street View in the same week.

Essentially, does he invent that thing with a wheel that you'd push along? Odometer. Yeah, he does. He's using an odometer. So this map is 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, got to go. Click, click, click, click, click. He was just planning the ideal city. You know, that's why he was there for us. 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, we'll get to that. He's just always sort of going,

hey, I'll knock it out next week. Oh, sorry, I'll do this. But this he does, this he does the maps. Yes. Yeah, no, this is genuinely useful. It just seems weird that nobody spotted, hey, aren't you that beard model that we discussed earlier on? Like, why are you mapping our town? Nobody asked.

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, know the latin and the greek and the oratory 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 an accountant a mathematical

expert in accounting who wrote the book on double entry bookkeeping this guy luca pancholi this is comedy gold uh who knows what crazy adventures those the original odd couple uh got up to why was in a flat share the way? That's slightly more weird. Art is not a reliable career. 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 a 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 and studying geometry. Yeah, 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. Yeah, I mean, sorry, I skimmed through it and I threw more information than needed to be earlier on. 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 just because, 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 all that kind of working with the golden ratio and so forth.

But it is very weird 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 lens. 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 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, 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. Soardo is living with a monk and we don't know his we don't know his religious views yeah

we get quite mixed messages about it i mean later on and the art historian georgio 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 le Leonardo's own work, he refers to God's grace and God's creations, but at the same 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, you know, he's by no means an atheist. I don't think we can say that,

but he is 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. Well, yes.

Don't bang on about it, Galileo. Just keep, you know what I mean? Like, 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 short rose-colored tunic reaching down to his knees and this at a time when long clothes were being worn Rose-coloured tunic reaching down to his knees. And 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, gadding about. With a beard down to his chest,

the ringlets, he wears pink. He's beautiful. People fancy Leonardo. He's gorgeous. The beautiful get away with a lot. Yes. Not doing a day's work in their life.

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. Now, sorry Isabella, you're not getting your portrait. Yeah. 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 fit once he'd been paid for the commission? You know, he was poorly motivated. Do we know what was...

Because it happened repeatedly. And were there warnings from his first master about this? Yeah, I mean, there were warnings because, you know, some of the very earliest art commissions he gets, there's an adoration of the Magi

that he doesn't finish. There's an altarpiece for the Palazzo Vecchio. I mean, that's the City Hall in Florence. That's a big deal commission. You're asked to do an altarpiece for the 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 seeing as he plonks it last on his list, his CV to 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. And I think we should stick to just saying that that attribution is hotly debated. You imagine 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 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 that's a small painting for four years. We should say 13. Yeah, 13 years. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so Francesco del Giacondo, 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 Giacondo, which is why in France they call it La Giaconde. So when you go to the Louvre, you say, where the mona lisa and they look at you and go what we have no such painting yeah 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 um no right francesco did

not get his painting because le because Leonardo hadn't quite finished the Mona Lisa when he took it off with him to France 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. chem established oh yes we'll be getting to that yeah jesus christ just send me a list of the topics and when they're due to come up like and i will stop fucking up the show for you 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 receive it he sends him a robot lion which is former host of robot wars i'm guessing wow in your wheelhouse instead of a robot you, which is former host of Robot Wars, I'm guessing, in your wheelhouse. You've made that, that's not a thing. It's a mechanical lion that sort of got automatic gears and can...

Like an automaton lion? Yeah. Does it actually clockwork? Does it move? Yeah. Really? We don't have it, but like... So now he's a toy maker? Yeah. And the chateau in France is called Clos de Luce, but that's where he spends his last days. He sort of goes intoau in France is called Clos de Luce, but that's where he spends his last days. He sort of goes into 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 age 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 Solai. Yeah, and Solai 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 nuance that's a fair critique yeah 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 Dechendre a 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 work. So 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 scandal 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 cleanest 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. Turns out the reason people steal fine art in America is apparently that you can use it to negotiate a shorter prison term. He says, having recently watched an interesting documentary about art there. Because you'll go, OK, I've got 10 10 years for this but I can return this famous painting that's been stolen

and I'm going to use that too so they're stolen often as insurance policies against later criminals right I'm off to the National Gallery then wipe the beans off it

and away you go great well now it is time for our big quiz which is called 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. I mean, and then my pen ran out. So you're probably in the second half, fewer jokes. I tell you one thing, your band are overqualified. We 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 blur on the dates and the details. I'm not a details person. I'm more of a big picture guy. And 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, okay, fine. No, it's stuff we've talked about. Don't worry, don't worry. Okay, we have ten questions, and the orchestra will be helping me out as well.

So good luck, Dara 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 one. 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 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 with, as characteristic of him, total bullshit about things he could do. 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.

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, only test it over a canal. 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 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... A big cat. Robot lion. Oh, it's a robot lion!

Thank you. And question ten. That's not a robot lion. It wouldn't go... Question ten. What are the codices, Atlantikus, Arendelle and Leicester? There is no books.

They are. OK. Eight out of ten. That's a very respectable score. Well done. Very good. Well. 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 had 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.

OK, fair enough. I tried. Well, thank you so much, Dara. And listen, if you want to hear more from Professor Catherine, check out our episode on the Borgias. They were very naughty, although they also got in the cheese business, which, you know, less naughty. If you want more historical polymaths? Check out our episode on the Borgias. They were very naughty, although they also got in the cheese business, which, you know, less naughty. If you want more historical polymaths,

listen to our episode on medieval science, which is a really good one. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. But 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 have 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, no, no.

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. 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! Bye! APPLAUSE was Isla Matthews, and the audio producer was Steve Hankey. Huge thanks also to the BBC Concert Orchestra and their director, Charles Mutter, who not only arranged the music you heard, but also wrote original pieces for us. And thanks to you for listening. ¶¶

¶¶ Thank you. What could be more modern than a net zero travel show? A show about going places that never goes anywhere. Welcome then to Your Place or Mine on BBC Radio 4. I'm Sean Keaveney and I love travelling almost as much as I love staying at home and watching music documentaries. Travelling almost as much as I love, staying at home and watching music documentaries. I figure Massachusetts, you know, for somebody like you who doesn't particularly enjoy broadening their horizons, it would be sort of a baby step because Massachusetts is kind of the heart of New England. So, you know, it wouldn't be too shocking for you.

Each week, another fantastic and intrepid guest attempts to lull me out of my postcode with persuasion alone. Eat the insects too. I mean, that's what they do a lot in Oaxaca. They normally roast them and then you can scatter them on your guacamole. There's something deliciously kind of earthy and umami about insects. Anybody who's been on the back of my Uncle Paul's motorbike's eaten a lot of insects. Yeah, there you are. Because he goes very fast. Your place or mine. With me, Sean Keaveney. Listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds.

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