CREDITS
Tim Dunn is producer and director for BBC Arts. His credits include: The Divine Michelangelo (2003), and Around the World in 80 Treasures (2004).
Sarah Aspinall began working for the BBC in 1992. She has directed Vermeer: A Private View (2001), Lee Miller: A Crazy Way of Seeing (2001), Orlando (2002) and André Breton's Naughty Bits (2003). DIRECTION Tim Dunn, Sarah Aspinall
PRESENTOR Alan Yentob
IMAGE Andrew Mott
ASSEMBLY David Murray, Andrew Quigley
MUSIC Rob Lane, Simon Whiteside
PARTICIPATION Alan Yentob, Jacquie Cozens, Rosheim Mark, Simon Sanderson, Robbie Whittall
CAST Rylance Mark, Adam Croasdell, Che Cartwright, James Frain, Christopher Benjamin, Kai Pertman
PRODUCER Leslie Megahey, Michael Mosley
PRODUCTION BBC One
DISTRIBUTION BBC Enterprises

Who was Leonardo? Alan Yentob doesn't seem to know, says Jonathan Jones

Monday May 5, 2003
The Guardian Too reverential: Alan Yentob (right), with Mark Rylance as the painter. It is the late-15th century and an artist and two young followers gather round a wooden box in a monastery in central Italy. Over an open side they have fixed a transparent square of pig skin, and behind this a lamp. When the artist begins to work a bellows, a "talking head" appears on the "screen" and begins a lecture about the art of the medieval genius Giotto. Leonardo da Vinci has invented television. He has also, it seems, invented the art documentary. All right, I made it up. But from the inventions re-created in Leonardo, Alan Yentob's three-part BBC1 blockbuster that concluded last night, the artist might easily have come up with the television: we saw the army puzzle over his tank, a couple of eccentrics try to fly, a diving suit, even a slightly pathetic robot.

He would have had to think of something to broadcast, of course. Ever since the 15th century, it sometimes seems, programme-makers have been trying to fit art on to the small screen. Art is not natural television, as nature is. Few of us are ever likely to see the worlds revealed by the Blue Planet in any other way. We all, however, can go to an art gallery. As for seeing the Mona Lisa, we can hardly avoid it. So a programme about art needs a lot of insight and originality.

Yentob was an urbane presenter. He smoked a cigarillo while meditating on the Mona Lisa in a bar. Was he trying to chat us up? He also gave us interviews with academics, vox pops, landscape photography, Mark Rylance as the artist being driven around Italy in a cart, and a digression into detective television.

Yentob has made his share of classics. His Arena interview with Orson Welles was one of the great moments of British television. Leonardo never came across as a man as magnificently as Yentob's Welles. Of course he has been dead 500 years so an interview was out of the question. All the parrying around the subject didn't deliver the fatal blow. Who was this man really?

The best insights were the simplest. Finding and filming the toothy rocks in Tuscany that resemble the dreamlike landscape behind the Mona Lisa was insightful and moving. The dramatised scenes from Leonardo's life were 10 times better than such things usually are.

The programmes were obsessed with getting it right, relying for most of their insights on leading academic authorities filmed in book-lined studies. In fact, the series so perfectly reflected contemporary academic thinking that it incorporated its weaknesses. In the past 100 years, perceptions of Leonardo have been turned upside-down. What changed in the late-19th century was that Leonardo's notebooks started to be studied systematically; the first comprehensive edition appeared in 1883. The Leonardo we revere is different from the one Vasari revered. Vasari's dilatory artist, with enigmatic intellectual concerns, has become, for us, a scientist, inventor and polymath who also happened to paint. But this view of Leonardo has become a cliche: his paintings are more rewarding, and indeed numerous, than the programme made them seem. And his drawings are, when all is said and done, art - the world's greatest art.

Yentob's programmes reflect current perceptions in dwelling on Leonardo the scientific genius, who was so far ahead of his time in anatomy, geology, flight. We want to make him modern by reconstructing his inventions, seeing if they work - but is this the point? Most of them didn't work. If they had, they would have been murderous. He tried to divert the Arno to destroy Florence's uppity subject city, Pisa. He listed the ingredients of "greek fire", to burn ships along with the sailors. He enthused about what it would be like to possess magic powers: "Surely a man who could command such crushing forces would be lord of the nations, and no human ingenuity could resist his crushing force."

Then there are his grotesque caricatures of the human face, suggesting someone with a very uncomfortable relationship to his fellow humans. Yentob's series downplayed this strangeness, with the result that Leonardo's personality eluded us. By making Leonardo a holy innocent we strip him of personality. Although Vasari called his genius "divine", it is our age that has made him into a Christ-like untouchable.

What is lost when Leonardo is co-opted for a whiggish history of reason is the utopian folly and wit of his imagination. Leonardo's drawings indulge the imagination. EH Gombrich said Leonardo's idea of drawing as free experiment "argues for an entirely new conception of art. What concerns the artist first and foremost is the ability to invent, not to execute." Leonardo's drawings declare the freedom of the mind, and the right of the artist, previously a craftsman, to be regarded as a poet and intellectual. That was enough. Who cares if his television didn't work?

BBC Worldwide have announced the UK Region 2 DVD release of Leonardo / The Divine Michelangelo in a double-DVD set for 16th August 2004 priced at £19.99. Both documentaries explore and unearth absorbing facts about two of the world's most celebrated men, as well as re creating some of their most famous works and dramatising scenes from their fascinating lives.

Leonardo Presented by Alan Yentob, Leonardo is the story of the most imaginative mind in human history, as it's never been told before. Starring Mark Rylance as Leonardo, this is the portrait of a genius of extraordinary diversity who lived a roller coaster life of success and failure. Dramatic reconstruction and CGI recreate Renaissance Italy before the viewer's eyes, enabling them to retread Leonardo's footsteps through some of its most beautiful landscapes and most historic cities including Florence, Milan, Venice, and Rome. This is the story of the real Leonardo; the artist who left us Mona Lisa and The Last Supper; the scientist who dissected bodies and studied fossils; and the engineer who could re route rivers and invented flying machines.

The Divine Michelangelo Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo created three of the art world's greatest icons: the statue of David, the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and the dome of St. Peter's 'm Rome. This revealing documentary traces his development from angry young man to pride of Rome, unveiling the man behind the myth. Determined to discover the real Michelangelo and the true extent of his brilliance, modem experts are followed as they reproduce elements of his most famous works, and key periods of his life are reconstructed to provide a fascinating insight into the obsessions and inspirations of this complex character. Both Leonardo and The Divine Michelangelo were first screened on BBC ONE in Spring 2003 and gained over 4 million viewers.

New Statesman
April 28, 2003
by Andrew Billen

The parallels between the two renaissance men are unavoidable. Both are polymaths, both multi-disciplinarians, both networkers who strive to satisfy their rich and powerful patrons. And yet both are prevaricators, notorious for their flibbertigibbet concentration spans and more interested in starting a project than ensuring its end. Yes, between Leonardo da Vinci and Alan Yentob, the only real difference is that one is a genius and the other is a BBC executive. How appropriate then that Yentob, that great survivor of changing tastes and regimes at Television Centre, should choose Leonardo as his subject now that he has returned to documentary-making as the corporation's "Face of the Arts".

In his three-part Leonardo (7pm, Sundays, BBC1), Yentob unashamedly advertises Leonardo as being, in the words of one hired expert, Dr Sherwin Nuland, "the greatest genius of all time". Yentob is not blind to Leonardo's faults. He extolled the virtues of peace, yet designed instruments of war. He jealously sought to get Michelangelo's great statue of David sidelined. He was the evil Cesare Borgia's chief engineer. Because of his headstrong insistence on painting in oil, his fresco The Last Supper is now no more than a ghost of what it once was.

But his multiple contradictions are another instance of his breadth. Leonardo touched all the bases from art to science: painter, anatomist, optician, central heating engineer, fossil hunter, and madcap designer of diving suits, tanks and flying machines. In the opening episode (27 April), I particularly enjoyed hearing about the daily "to do" list. Things to do might be: construct glasses to see the moon magnified; find out how to install bombards and ramparts by day and night; find out how to square the triangle; analyse the tongue of the woodpecker and describe the jaw of a crocodile. (The list would be unlikely to include: cancel the papers; collect dry-cleaning; cat food.)

Yet the programmes show off Yentob's spatter-gun intellect as much as Leonardo's. They are not traditional TV art criticism conducted by heads talking in front of paintings, although there are plenty of talking heads and paintings around. Nor are they drama documentary, although many scenes are dramatised -- with Mark Rylance doing his best to look, at all times, enigmatically intelligent. Sometimes the programmes go into Time Detectives mode. The final programme, for instance, claims that the mystery of the identity of the model for the Mona Lisa has at last been solved: she was Lisa del Gioconda, a revelation only slightly diminished for me when I realised that the same "middle-class housewife" had been fingered by my Everyman Encyclopaedia, published in 1957.

The episode on "The Secret Life of Mona Lisa" is actually the cuckoo in the nest of the series, but may be the best of the pack. It is more like an early Yentob Arena, in which the subject is the iconic importance of the object. Yentob carries a gilt-framed reproduction of the painting on to a Eurostar train and asks passengers to account for her smile. One woman says: "I see a woman who is saying, 'You have got me on the worst day of the month. What am I doing here?'" Another guesses that she is pregnant, which turns out to be Yentob's conclusion, too.

Within each episode is another strand that, knitted together, would have made up a different kind of programme altogether. In this, engineers, enthusiasts and madmen take Leonardo's sketches of sci-fi machines and build them to see if they would work in practice. The results almost beggar belief. With a little bit of creative doodle interpretation, the diving-suit with its compression chamber works and does not fill its wearer's lungs with water; add a tail, and the wings he designed for a man really do transport a stunt pilot through the air; reverse the gears, and Leonardo's sinew-powered tank moves. Most stunningly dangerous of all, a parachutist is attached to one of Leonardo's wigwams and falls from a hot-air balloon hundreds of feet above Africa. We assume he lives.

Yentob rations out these don't-try-this-at-home experiments and cues them in just when the art history risks getting a little dull. Leonardo is bravely scheduled on BBC1 at prime time, but if God did not put the BBC on this earth to make programmes as bright as these available to mass audiences, I don't know what He did have in mind for it.

Used to didgeridoo Rolf Harris's approach to great art, what BBC1 viewers will make of their vole-like host is another matter. Scruffy despite his Armani suits and T-shirts, often waving a cigarillo in his hand, Yentob is not shy about putting himself in the frame. We see him in front of the masterpieces, on train platforms, on hillsides as the flying machines take off, covering half of the Mona Lisa's smile with a paper napkin, and, most comically of all, in the garden of Leonardo's castle in Amboise, where he spent his last years, monkishly scowling over manuscripts in the hope of insight. One day, I trust, Mark Rylance will portray Yentob in a documentary of his life. It will surely hail this eccentric series as the great man's masterpiece.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
COPYRIGHT 2003 New Statesman, Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group

PRODUCTION INFORMATION:
Role: Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan
Year: April 20, 2003
Director: Alan Yentob
Genre: Documentary

THE CAST:
Mark Rylance ... Leonardo da Vinci
James Faulkner ... Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan
Che Cartwright ... Salai
James Frain ... Cesare Borgia
Adam Croasdell ... Michelangelo
Paul Brook ... Abbot
Christopher Benjamin ... The Pope
Kay Portman ... Giovanni
Dolya Ciavanski ... Mona Lisa

SYNOPSIS:
Leonardo explores how the man behind some of the most famous paintings in the world was also an engineering genius, anatomical scientist and inventor of wonderful machines hundreds of years ahead of their time. The three-part series brings together his public face and the private thoughts, illustrations and ideas explored in his notebooks, to paint a revealing portrait of the artist's passion for knowledge, which bothinspired and obsessed him throughout his career. The notebooks reveal a man with an incredible eye and hunger to understand the workings of the natural world, which he was also desperate to mimic in machinery.

Filmed across Italy and featuring actor Mark Rylancein the role of Leonardo, the series uses Leonardo's own writings to re-enact the story of his life and work. Leonardo's inventions - a parachute, hang-glider, tank, underwater diving suit and robot - are built and put to the test for the first time, 500 years after he designed them. Artist Leo Stevenson demonstrates some of Leonardo's many novel painting techniques, and experts in Renaissance art offer their views on his creative genius. But the brilliance of this ultimate Renaissance man was flawed: scandals dogged his private life; his devotion to his often bizarre experiments meant commissions were left unfinished; and a rivalry with fellow artist Michelangelo undermined his work.

FACTS/NOTES:
Leonardo is the BBC's first major biography of Leonardo da Vinci and, at the time it was filmed, marked the 500th anniversary of the painting of the Mona Lisa, which Leonardo began in 1503.

Paul Brooks, previously to Leonardo, co-starred with James in Covington Cross and Bridget Jones's Diary.

Interesting Fact: In Milan, Leonardo was used by his patron, Ludovico Sforza (played by James in the series), largely as a handyman. As well as being a painter and decorator, he did the plumbing and organised spectacular parties. He got the job by presenting himself as an engineer and designer of spectacular weapons, rather than as an artist.
Interesting Fact: During the 20 years he spent in Milan, Leonardo was constantly badgered by Sforza to complete one particular commission - that of an enormous bronze horse. Although he built a huge clay model, the statue was never finished. The bronze set aside to make the horse was eventually given to Sforza's chief military engineer to turn into a cannon.

Roelof Ruules Utrecht, The Netherlands
Date: 23 June 2003

Summary: For once, no old man-with-a-beard.

This is a documentary of the kind the BBC (or British tv) is rightly praised: knowledge combined with drama. The series depicts the life of Leonardo from early boyhood to his death (and even after). And for once, Leonardo is not shown as the old man with a beard as we all seem to know him. After all, even Leonardo must have been young.

We see him, travelling through Italy, fighting against sometimes mighty opponents and against ignorance. Although the acting is bordering on the dramatic at times, the overall atmosphere is very good, giving you a true feeling of a society rising from the middle ages. The dramatic scenes are interwoven with academic commentary. What's more, in each of the three 60-minute parts the crew tries to recreate and/or analyse one of Leonardo's marvels. Why are his drawings and paintings so special? Would his underwater-suit have worked? Or his tank, or his hang-glider? This is one of those documentaries of which one can only hope it will appear on dvd. In the meantime, you might want to check out the BBC web site dedicated to the series.

Leonardo is in his 40s. He travels from city to city, welcomed by influential households, but never settling. We find him in Venice obsessed with nature and water, shunning lucrative commissions to study optics and flight.

A team of engineers reconstructs Leonardo's glider and sees it launched from Mt. Ceceri in Italy where Leonardo himself had planned a launch, had he ever had the staying power to see a single project through to completion. Instead he filled notebook upon notebook with almost indecipherable drawings and right-to-left, mirror writing.

Leonardo's desire to engineer finally gets the better of him - the pacifist vegetarian is offered a job he can't refuse. He returns to Florence and in 1502 becomes a military engineer to Cesare Borgia - the Pol Pot of the Renaissance.

But Leonardo hasn't left art entirely behind. In Florence, between his commissions of war, he paints the Mona Lisa, which we discover through new computer research, bears an uncanny resemblance to the artist himself.

Leonardo is asked to undertake a great new work - The Battle of the Anghiari. Two walls of a Florentine palace are to be painted. One by Leonardo and one by his bitter rival Michelangelo. There has long been a battle of words; now the stage is set for a battle of skill.

The old Leonardo is invited to live in France as a guest of King Francis I. As history is written, he is finally accepted... the illegitimate, unwanted, left-handed, homosexual dies in the arms of the king. But we discover that this cannot be true - for on the day of Leonardo's death records show that the king was over a hundred miles away. Leonardo died alone.