# Discovering Leonardo Da Vinci’s Lost Portrait I SLICE HISTORY | FULL DOCUMENTARY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwHuARlBWSU

[00:12] One morning in 2008, an art collector contacted me to examine his collection of paintings.
[00:18] As an art historian specializing in historic paintings, I immediately decided to go to his home in Solerno to look closely at his collection.
[00:29] It's your name.
[00:37] Yeah, it's Nicola Barbatelli.
[00:51] There were about a 100 paintings in the collection.
[00:53] Some works were mediocre and others quite interesting.
[00:59] At the end of my visit, the collector asked me to look at one particular
[01:05] painting.
[01:07] He showed me a portrait wrapped in a fleece blanket.
[01:09] I'll never forget that moment.
[01:13] He said, "Look at this little painting.
[01:16] It's a painting I want to auction off.
[01:18] Meet Galileo."
[01:22] "What do you mean Galileo?"
[01:24] I said, "It's Leonardo.
[01:27] [Music]
[01:34] I immediately thought it was a portrait by Leonardo because the iconography was found in a similar painting in the Euphitzi Gallery.
[01:44] This painting exhibited in Florence's biggest museum, the Aizi Gallery, was considered for many years to be a self-portrait of Leonardo da Vinci.
[01:51] But in 1938, an expertise proved that it had been painted in the 17th century, 100 years after the artist's death.
[02:04] Therefore, it was a
[02:07] fake.
[02:10] How could the striking resemblance between the two paintings be explained?
[02:15] Could this portrait be the original one copied in the Azi?
[02:18] Could it be the authentic self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, believed to have disappeared forever?
[02:28] A great deal was at stake here.
[02:31] There are only a mere 15 paintings by the Tuscan master, and nobody knows exactly what the artist looked like.
[02:38] The potential discovery of a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci immediately raised the issue of dating.
[02:49] Nicola Barbatelli goes to see Jian Caralo Napoli, a restorer specialized in expertising works of art.
[03:05] In my life, I have been fortunate
[03:08] to have seen a large number of paintings because I have always worked for major museums and collections.
[03:14] My instinct and my eye have never let me down.
[03:19] However, in the case of this painting, when I saw it, since it was in such good condition, I thought it could have been one of those copies made in the 19th century.
[03:29] So, my immediate impression when I saw it was that it was too beautiful to be from the 16th century.
[03:51] Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452 and died in 1519.
[03:57] The Lucan portrait depicts a man of approximately 50 years old.
[04:01] If it represents the artist, it would have to have been painted in the early 16th
[04:09] century.
[04:11] In the city where Leonardo lived,
[04:24] Florence.
[04:24] In the 15th century, Florence was the city where an art revolution was brewing in painting, sculpture, and architecture.
[04:36] It would later become known as the Renaissance.
[04:41] For the 15th century, Florence had an extremely high literacy rate and I should also say a very high rate of numeracy because of the fact that the Florentines were the great merchants of the Middle Ages.
[04:53] You had these great first of all wool merchants and then secondly the bankers.
[04:58] And so that then really becomes the economic precondition for the cultural effescence of the 15th century in Florence.
[05:07] The Florentines had a
[05:10] Republic.
[05:12] They felt that they were unique in Italy at least in having a kind of self-government.
[05:17] And so if they look for historical precedents for that kind of government, of course they would look to the Roman Republic.
[05:23] And so their whole idea of having a a renaissance was to bring back the uh the glories of ancient Greece and ancient Rome.
[05:35] The Medici dynasty was at the head of the Florentine Republic.
[05:38] They were bankers and art lovers.
[05:40] First Cosmo, then the man nicknamed by his contemporaries Lorenzo the Magnificent.
[05:49] Lorenzo was passionate about architecture and poetry.
[05:54] He contributed to the protection and promotion of many artists including Buchelli, Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci.
[06:05] One of the most important workshops in Florence was that of the sculptor and painter Andrea Verrochio, a protetéé of the Medici.
[06:16] If you wanted to be an artist as a a young man, say when you were 12, 13, 14, you didn't go to art school.
[06:21] What you did is went into a bodega, a a workshop, and you became an apprentice.
[06:27] There was an apprenticeship system, and you went into the workshop of an established painter, goldsmith, sculptor.
[06:35] And in that workshop, you would learn all of the secrets of the trade.
[06:38] You would learn how to grind pigment.
[06:42] You would learn how to apply paint.
[06:43] You would learn silver point.
[06:45] You would learn draftsmanship.
[06:47] You would learn ultimately things like painting with tempera.
[06:51] And then finally by the end of the the 1400s at least how to paint in oil.
[07:02] Young Leonardo da Vinci began his apprenticeship at the Verrochio Bota in 1467 at the age of 15.
[07:11] He started off drawing and painting but also learned sculpture, architecture and
[07:17] mechanical arts.
[07:26] He remained with Verrochio well into his 20s and Verio I think spotted Leonardo very early, recognized his talents, nurtured them and so we see the two of them in the 1470s working in tandem, working in partnership together.
[07:46] The baptism of Christ is a testament to this collaboration started by Verrochio.
[07:52] This work was finished by Leonardo da Vinci to whom the angel in the extreme left of the painting has been directly attributed.
[08:03] In parallel to this apprentice work, Leonardo da Vinci began to paint under his own name.
[08:10] The Benedicting monks from a Tuscan Abbey commissioned his first work, the Annunciation.
[08:35] One of the fascinating things about the enunciation is that we get a glimpse here of Leonardo at the start of his career.
[08:43] Even then, as a young man, he wanted to get everything right.
[08:46] He wanted to get the perspective of the hills right.
[08:53] So, it was a convincing representation of what perhaps the Tuscan hills would have looked like.
[08:56] And crucially also the wings of the angel of the enunciation.
[09:00] These are the wings of someone who has looked at the wings of birds.
[09:10] I think Leonardo da Vinci's angel has a much better chance of flapping and and flying and landing than that of any
[09:19] other angel that came before.
[09:24] In 1476, while Leonardo da Vinci was still working at his master's workshop, he received a commission for his first portrait of Janevra Deni, the daughter of one of Florence's most powerful families close to the Medici.
[09:48] 15 days after his initial visit, Nicola Barbatelli is contacted by Dian Carlo Napoli.
[10:00] The restorer has finished cleaning the painting.
[10:14] The painting looked very different.
[10:17] It had snags, dents,
[10:25] cuts.
[10:27] We wondered where all this damage came from.
[10:32] The restorer told me that they had been covered by previous restorations, which he removed during his cleaning process.
[10:40] These marks are only the tip of the iceberg.
[10:44] When I started cleaning the painting, I noticed micro cracks which were actually caused by the wood moving over the course of centuries.
[10:55] This is typical of Renaissance paintings.
[11:08] The restorator's conclusions are encouraging, but to confirm that the painting is definitely from the 16th century, it needs to undergo further investigation.
[11:20] This is the beginning of
[11:22] a major investigation which will take the Lucan portrait across Europe.
[11:36] The first stop is the Inova Center in Naples, specialized in the scientific study of historical monuments and works of art.
[11:54] The Lucan portrait was given to Giovani Patinosta, an expert in X-ray analysis.
[12:02] This technique makes it possible to determine the precise age of the pigments that were used.
[12:15] You must bear in mind that from antiquity through the end of the 18th or 19th century, pigments basically didn't
[12:23] Change.
[12:27] They were mineral pigments or sometimes vegetable or animal-based.
[12:31] It was only from the 18th or 19th century onwards that synthetic or organic pigments were developed.
[12:41] Right off the bat, one element of the portrait, the white feather decorating the hat, intrigues the researchers.
[12:49] Its extreme whiteness seems to indicate that it was painted with a synthetic pigment.
[12:54] It could prove that the painting doesn't date from the Renaissance.
[12:58] To be sure, the experts x-ray the entire painting.
[13:03] Let's look at the graph of the cheek.
[13:06] There you have it.
[13:08] You can clearly see the presence of antimony.
[13:10] There's no puter and lead is very present, so it must be lead antimony, which could be a Naples yellow.
[13:17] The first traces of its use date back to the beginning of the 16th century.
[13:35] Naples yellow, vermillion red, indigo blue or azure green.
[13:44] These sometimes toxic substances were prepared by the apprentices.
[13:47] They were mixed with egg to obtain paint referred to as temporary grasser which will progressively be replaced by oil painting at the end of the 15th century.
[14:03] Here we can clearly see that the black on the hat has a much higher magnesium iron ratio.
[14:06] So it is probably umber or something similar.
[14:13] This pigment was common during the Renaissance.
[14:18] But what about the feather?
[14:24] Its pigment is made of titanium dioxide, which wasn't introduced until the
[14:28] beginning of the 20th century.
[14:30] This means that the feather was painted at a later date, probably during a restoration.
[14:40] Aside from the titanium dioxide used for the feather, all the pigments in the Lucan portrait are compatible with Leonardo da Vinci's era.
[14:48] For Nicola Barbatelli, this is a very promising result.
[15:00] He decides to pursue his analysis with Filipo Terrasi, a physics professor.
[15:10] It is time to examine the painting's base.
[15:12] The wooden panel is x-rayed.
[15:23] We were able to identify the type of wood.
[15:27] Popppler. Popppler was a very popular
[15:29] tree, very sought after by many artists for its lightweight quality.
[15:35] In fact, the Mona Lisa was painted on popppler.
[15:43] The back of the Lucan portrait was made up of pieces connected by an ingenious assembly system using butterfly joints.
[15:55] This type of assembly requires a certain level of botanical and technical knowledge because the goal is to avoid warping the wood which could affect or ruin the paint.
[16:10] It is logical to assume that Leonardo had these skills and that he was able to find a way to build this kind of system.
[16:31] Professor Terrasi uses carbon 14 dating to date the painting's wooden base.
[16:37] Three wooden fragments of several milligs are lifted from the back of the painting.
[16:46] The wood of the painting, like any vegetable or animal organism, contains carbon 14.
[16:52] When the organism dies, the amount of carbon 14 decreases over time.
[16:59] By measuring the amount remaining today, we can deduce the age of the wood.
[17:22] It is important to note that carbon 14 dating does not establish when the panel was used as a base for a painting.
[17:29] The information collected pertains to the growth period of the tree that the wood
[17:32] comes from.
[17:34] And the period that we identified is somewhere between 1474 and 1517.
[17:42] The scientific analysis of the Lucan portrait through X-rays and carbon 14 dating confirms that the painting dates from the Renaissance at the end of the 15th century or very beginning of the 16th century.
[17:56] This means it was painted during Leonardo's lifetime.
[18:00] [Music]
[18:03] In 1481, Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by the Augustinian convent at Sandonato in Scopito to paint in adoration of the magi.
[18:11] It was his first big commission.
[18:14] He had 30 months to complete the work.
[18:17] If you were a painter, you really had to wait for someone to come to you.
[18:23] Hopefully, a very wealthy businessman, maybe a band of monks, maybe if you were very fortunate, the pope or a cardinal.
[18:30] They
[18:33] would come to you and say, "My mortality is weighing on me.
[18:37] I have a tomb in a chapel in this church, and I want to have it decorated.
[18:40] I want a statue in it.
[18:42] I want a fresco in it, and I want you to do an altarpiece for it.
[18:51] Throughout the 15th century, Florence's chapels were decorated with fresco.
[18:54] For Angelico, Maceio, Glandio, Filipino Lipi, commissions abounded for Florentine artists.
[19:00] For the most part, what you were given was a set of rules, things that you were going to do, and of course, usually the hard and fast rules.
[19:06] The three things that were were absolutely key were the subject matter, virgin, a child, crucifixion, whatever it was going to be, the amount you were paid, and that payment would include what you had to spend on materials, and then thirdly, and this was a crucial one, the
[19:38] Deadline.
[19:40] Leonardo da Vinci never finished the adoration of the magi.
[19:44] The recently restored painting has now been returned to its original state.
[19:49] For the first time, the wealth of detail and the virtuosity of its composition are visible.
[19:58] The artist managed to give each character the appearance of movement while drawing the viewer's attention to the virgin and child at the center of the painting.
[20:19] During the same period, Leonardo da Vinci began work on St. Jerome, an audacious painting in which she started to affirm some of his formal ambitions such as anatomical precision and the presence of landscapes.
[20:46] In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci set off for
[20:49] New
[20:50] Horizons. At 30, he left his native
[20:53] Tuskanyany for Milan in the court of the
[20:55] Duke Ludovvic.
[21:00] Leonardo had not ingratiated himself
[21:02] into the Medici circle. he had not quite
[21:05] become their their favorite painter. And
[21:08] in fact, in around the time that he
[21:10] left, a series of painters were sent by
[21:14] Lorenzo the Magnificent to Rome to work
[21:17] on the walls of the Systeine Chapel,
[21:19] which had been newly completed at that
[21:21] time. And they were people like Sandro
[21:24] Boricelli, Petro Peragino, Michelangelo.
[21:27] And he was passed over. He was not sent
[21:29] to Rome.
[21:33] [Music]
[21:34] At the end of the 15th century, Italy
[21:37] was divided into a number of citystates,
[21:39] kingdoms, and dukedoms who made a pact
[21:42] to stop fighting each other.
[21:45] One of the most powerful entities was
[21:47] Milan, ruled by the Toroza
[21:52] [Music]
[21:58] dynasty. Eager to be hired at Ludviko's
[22:01] court, Leonardo da Vinci highlighted his
[22:04] versatility and skills.
[22:09] He wrote a letter to the Duke of Milan
[22:12] in which he presented himself as a
[22:14] military engineer and architect able to
[22:16] design mobile bridges and catapults,
[22:19] private and public buildings, and cast a
[22:22] bronze horse to the immortal glory and
[22:25] eternal homage of the illustrious house.
[22:32] He really wanted to go to a court to
[22:35] someone who had deeper pockets and was
[22:37] on a stronger financial footing. Someone
[22:39] like Lorovikos Schwartza, the most
[22:41] powerful man in Italy at this point, and
[22:43] he wanted to work with him and get
[22:45] commissions.
[22:47] The Florentine painter was welcomed with
[22:50] open arms by the Duke, whose court was
[22:52] lacking renowned painters and
[22:54] sculptors. He stayed in Milan for nearly
[22:57] 20 years. He worked as a military
[23:00] engineer and architect and contributed
[23:02] to the Navigli, the network of canals
[23:05] that made navigation through the duchi
[23:07] possible. He painted a major work, the
[23:10] fresco of the last
[23:16] [Music]
[23:18] supper. Back in Seno, Nicola Barbatelli
[23:21] goes to see the restorer who has made an
[23:23] incredible discovery on the back of the
[23:25] painting.
[23:32] [Music]
[23:45] During the cleaning process, the words
[23:47] pinkit maya appeared written
[23:49] backwards. It was strange.
[23:53] The text was written from right to left
[23:56] with a graphic inversion of the
[23:58] letters. This mirror writing is
[24:00] characteristic of left-handed people.
[24:05] [Music]
[24:06] It was used by Leonardo da Vinci who
[24:09] wrote and painted with his left
[24:11] hand. His notebooks called codeexes in
[24:14] which he recorded throughout his life
[24:16] his thoughts and experiences in such
[24:18] diverse areas as anatomy, hydraulics,
[24:21] architecture and bot confirm
[24:25] this. Thousands of handwritten pages are
[24:28] systematically written backwards.
[24:31] [Music]
[24:37] Pinksit mayor. Two Latin words. What
[24:41] could they
[24:53] mean? In Vinci, the artist's native
[24:56] village. Peter Hoenstat, an expert on
[24:59] Leonardo, goes to the library which
[25:02] holds exact reproductions of the Tuscan
[25:04] mast's
[25:07] codeexes. Pink it may. It's a text which
[25:13] the Latin is not 100% correct. It could
[25:19] be very easily read. Maya means probably
[25:24] myself. Yeah. Could be. Yeah. And pings
[25:28] it. He has painted
[25:32] uh myself. Uh could be a play. Yeah. To
[25:37] saying that uh I is the one who's
[25:41] talking but is also the one who is on
[25:42] the painting. But the Latin translation
[25:46] doesn't really support it perfectly.
[25:52] We know that the artist wrote most of
[25:54] the time in Tuscan
[25:56] dialect. The illegitimate son of a
[25:59] Florentine notary, he couldn't attend
[26:01] the university. His Latin was
[26:05] self-taught. Could his limited knowledge
[26:08] of Latin explain the strange grammatical
[26:10] form of Pinkit Mayor?
[26:22] In
[26:23] Monteiforino, a meeting is scheduled
[26:25] with Silana Uliano, a criminal
[26:27] handwriting
[26:30] expert. The handwriting analysis is
[26:32] based upon a comparison of various
[26:34] writing samples. Silana Uliano works
[26:38] from reproductions of the Atlanticus
[26:40] Codeex, which contains over 1,000 pages
[26:42] of Leonardo da Vinci's notes.
[26:47] The codeexes represented an extremely
[26:49] rich source for us because they were
[26:51] from his hand and written in total
[26:55] spontaneity. In graphology, the
[26:57] handwriting must be spontaneous to be
[26:59] analyzed. We couldn't have wished for
[27:02] better source
[27:08] material. Each letter is blown up to 40
[27:10] to 100 times.
[27:13] Each letter is blown up 40 to 100 times
[27:16] with a microscope so its characteristic
[27:18] details can be studied. These details
[27:21] are the product of fleeting and
[27:22] spontaneous gestures which are beyond
[27:25] the writer's control. They make each
[27:28] writing sample unique and identifiable.
[27:33] These characteristics, these minute
[27:36] details that we come across in certain
[27:38] letters were evaluated and compared with
[27:41] the Psit Maya letters which reproduce
[27:43] the same
[27:46] specificities. Let's say that the CEXes
[27:49] reinforced our conviction that Psit Maya
[27:52] was very likely written by Leonardo
[27:55] himself.
[28:00] [Music]
[28:04] If Leonardo da Vinci was the author of
[28:06] the Pinksit Mayor inscription, the Lucan
[28:09] portrait could indeed be his
[28:12] self-portrait. It portrays a man in his
[28:15] early 50s. The painter was born in 1452
[28:19] and the Lucan portrait could have been
[28:21] painted around 1500.
[28:29] That year, Leonardo da Vinci was forced
[28:31] to leave Milan. War had started up again
[28:34] in Italy. King Louis V 12th's French
[28:37] army had invaded the Lombard city,
[28:39] causing the fall of his protector,
[28:44] Ludvikotza. Leonardo chose to return to
[28:46] Florence, the city where he had spent
[28:48] his first years of apprenticeship. He
[28:51] arrived in the spring of 1500.
[28:54] 20 years had gone by. The Tuscan city
[28:56] had changed a great deal. The Medici
[28:59] were no longer in power. At 50, the
[29:02] artist had to start all over again. He
[29:04] hoped he would still find some support
[29:06] in Florence.
[29:08] Very kindly, um, one of his friends,
[29:11] someone that he knew when he lived in
[29:12] Florence previously, Filipino Lippy, um,
[29:16] handed him a commission that he was
[29:18] given, the Virgin and Child with St. and
[29:21] really helping him out financially,
[29:23] helping him find his feet in Florence
[29:25] and begin to remake his reputation. In
[29:29] some ways, it what what this little
[29:32] parable tells us is that the patrons
[29:34] were less concerned about who did it
[29:37] than they were about what was going to
[29:39] be in the painting. That they had a
[29:41] template. They had the idea of what they
[29:44] wanted in the altarpiece. And it might
[29:46] have been any one of a dozen people who
[29:48] could have done it for them.
[29:51] Leonardo da Vinci never completed his
[29:53] alterpiece. He only did a preliminary
[29:56] sketch which has unfortunately
[29:58] disappeared. But the artist worked his
[30:01] whole life on the theme of Santan, the
[30:03] Virgin and the
[30:06] Child. Two ink drawings, a painting at
[30:09] the Louvre Museum, and lastly, a
[30:11] charcoal sketched enhanced with white
[30:14] allow us to imagine what the first
[30:16] drawing must have looked like.
[30:18] [Music]
[30:23] The monk aed by Leonardo da Vinci's
[30:26] preliminary drawing decided to exhibit
[30:28] it publicly. All of Florence rushed to
[30:30] the servite monastery. During these
[30:33] troubled times with wars starting up
[30:35] again, people came to pray to Santan,
[30:38] the patron saint of
[30:40] Florence. But they also came to admire
[30:42] the Tuscan painter's
[30:45] style.
[30:48] Until the Renaissance, art respected
[30:51] certain rules of representation that
[30:54] were dictated by
[30:55] religion. Faces painted without anatomic
[30:58] knowledge was stiff and codified in
[31:00] their attitude and features. They
[31:02] appeared on a background generally
[31:04] covered in gold without perspective or
[31:06] landscapes.
[31:10] We all know what Gothic statuary and
[31:12] Gothic painting looks like. But if you
[31:14] think then of what's happening in
[31:15] Florence in the 1400s and 1500s is that
[31:18] they are now looking at humanity
[31:21] differently. We are not just religious
[31:24] souls waiting to die. We're not just
[31:27] waiting for heaven. We're living in this
[31:29] world. And therefore the way we're going
[31:32] to present humanity is very different.
[31:35] We're going to individuate them and
[31:37] we're also going to have them
[31:39] interacting. So what the painters are
[31:41] trying to achieve is a secular
[31:44] representation of humanity where we see
[31:47] life and movement and
[31:50] vivacity. This evolution brought with it
[31:53] a new perspective on painting whereby
[31:55] the style became as important as the
[31:58] subject. Considered craftmen up to this
[32:01] point, painters now entered the rank of
[32:03] artists. And this is something that is a
[32:06] a kind of hinge moment or a pivotal
[32:09] moment in the history of art because
[32:11] what Leonardo was saying is I am not an
[32:14] artisan. I'm not merely working with my
[32:17] hands. I'm working with my mind as well.
[32:20] And painting therefore is not just a
[32:23] trade. It's art.
[32:27] He was one of the first to demand
[32:28] creative freedom visav his patrons as
[32:31] witnessed in the painting the virgin of
[32:33] the rocks commissioned in 1483 in Milan
[32:36] by the confraternity of the immaculate
[32:38] conception.
[32:41] Leonardo went away and worked for the
[32:44] next 9 months or a year and seems to
[32:47] have ripped up the contract because he
[32:49] painted something absolutely and
[32:52] completely different. He painted what he
[32:54] wanted to paint. And I think this is one
[32:56] of the first times in artistic history
[32:58] we've seen this where an artist has laid
[33:01] out chapter and verse what he is to
[33:04] paint. And he completely ignored it. And
[33:07] when the dispute arose, Leonardo said,
[33:10] "I as the painter, as the artist, um
[33:13] know what this what it the way this
[33:16] should be done. And you are wealthy
[33:18] businessman. Businessman don't talk to
[33:21] me about art.
[33:26] Painting is an intellectual process
[33:28] first and foremost, one which feeds off
[33:31] all sciences. It is a cosmale, a mental
[33:34] activity, as Leonardo da Vinci would
[33:37] say. Behind the softness and finesse of
[33:40] the characters and the elegat landscapes
[33:42] lies a body of knowledge and
[33:44] intellectual processes compiled before
[33:46] starting to paint.
[33:49] He was interested in representation of
[33:53] reality. How I can make it that this
[33:56] painting looks as close at when I look
[33:59] in the world. This was his challenge.
[34:04] How does one create the illusion of
[34:06] distance between elements? How can one
[34:09] represent the floating sensation that
[34:11] accompanies this distance?
[34:14] Leonardo da Vinci perfected spumato, a
[34:16] painting technique that blends the edges
[34:18] and allows the eye to move smoothly from
[34:21] foreground to
[34:22] background. We can see the way he plays
[34:25] with the landscape background and gives
[34:27] us a very convincing representation of
[34:30] those hills fading away into the
[34:33] distance. came up with a prescription of
[34:36] the color blues to use as you did
[34:38] distant hills. That for every mile or
[34:41] two of distance, you should take away
[34:43] some of the bless, reduce the tone of
[34:46] blue.
[34:48] From the misty horizon of a landscape to
[34:50] the soft contours of a face, fumato
[34:54] delicately covers each element with a
[34:56] cloud of smoke, which creates a feeling
[34:58] of unity.
[35:00] There are no true lines in nature and
[35:02] there should be none in painting.
[35:06] You see Junda is perfect when you look
[35:08] at the original and you see how with
[35:11] this layer technique uh of the of the
[35:14] oil how he created this these surfaces
[35:18] is all flying. It's all cloudy.
[35:23] The attention paid to the painting of
[35:24] faces and bodies combined with the
[35:27] artist's anatomical research makes them
[35:30] look hugely
[35:35] realistic. The characters look like
[35:37] they're captured in a natural moment.
[35:40] Through a look that lights up or a faint
[35:42] smile, Leonardo da Vinci makes them seem
[35:45] incredibly alive.
[35:48] [Music]
[35:55] Can we find in the Lucan portrait these
[35:57] qualities associated with Leonardo da
[35:59] Vinci's
[36:01] [Music]
[36:03] painting? Is it possible that the man
[36:06] who painted the Mona Lisa also painted
[36:09] this portrait?
[36:11] [Music]
[36:16] Its dark palette is reminiscent of the
[36:18] other paintings by the Tuscan
[36:20] artist. If one compares the Mona Lisa
[36:23] with other portraits of his
[36:24] contemporaries, one is struck by the
[36:26] presence of Kiara Skuro, which contrasts
[36:29] with the bright colors of Renaissance
[36:31] painters.
[36:34] When looking at the portrait from up
[36:36] close, one can admire the transparence
[36:38] of the skin, the little hollow of the
[36:40] cheeks, which implies a slight age-
[36:42] related drooping of the tissues. It is
[36:45] the mark of an artist who most certainly
[36:47] studied anatomy like Leonardo da Vinci.
[36:51] The acute attention to
[36:54] detail that the artist glorifies in this
[36:57] painting. The jaw muscles including the
[37:00] slight indent in the cheek, the curls of
[37:03] the
[37:04] beard practically drawn hair by hair
[37:06] with extraordinary care. Especially the
[37:10] way the hair is is painted. This is
[37:14] typically his uh quality.
[37:20] But what most captures our attention in
[37:22] this portrait are the
[37:25] eyes. One is seized by this look that
[37:28] seems to follow the viewer wherever he
[37:30] may be
[37:31] standing. A gaze in motion reminiscent
[37:34] of the Mona Lisa.
[37:42] [Music]