The life of Leonardo da Vinci

I'm Martin Clayton, head of prints and drawings at Royal Collection Trust, and I'm here in the print room at Windsor Castle, where more than 500 drawings by Leonardo da Vinci are housed. These drawings have been together as a group since Leonardo's death 500 years ago. When Leonardo died in France in 1519, he left his drawings to his favourite pupil, Francesco Melzi. On Melzi's death they were bound into a single album. That album came to England in the 17th century, and we think around 1670 they were given to Charles II in thanks for the restoration of the Norfolk lands and titles on the restoration of the monarchy. Leonardo was experienced and skilled in painting, sculpture, architecture, engineering, and many branches of the sciences as well. Leonardo was also one of the most skilled draftsmen of the Renaissance, so he was able to take this wonderful vision of the world around him and to get it down on paper with lucidity and intelligence. It's important to understand that these are Leonardo's working papers, and it's through his drawings that we get an insight into Leonardo the man, what he was doing on a daily basis, how his mind worked, how he pulled his projects together. He never intended anybody else to see these, not that he meant to keep them secret, and he certainly never imagined that they would be mounted and framed and hung in exhibition galleries as we see them today. Leonardo was born in 1452 near the town of Vinci, just a little bit to the west of Florence. We know very little about his training, and it's hard to pin down quite what it was that would have singled him out as being unique at that time. Leonardo was just one of a generation of highly talented artists, such as Botticelli, who came to maturity during the 1470s, but it wasn't until he got onto the adoration of the Magi around 1481 that his supreme skill as a That painting, however, remained unfinished, and Leonardo moved soon afterwards to Milan. We're not sure what led Leonardo to Milan in the early 1480s. It could have been news of a commission to execute a great equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, the former Duke of Milan. That commission came from Ludovico Sforza, who was to go on to become one of Leonardo's great patrons. Leonardo worked on the great equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza for about ten years. Ultimately, it was abandoned, and Leonardo was then put on to paint The Last Supper, his greatest finished painting. But as a court artist, Leonardo was requested to do a great deal else besides, portraits, designs for costumes and festivities, and so on. In 1499, Ludovico Sforza was overthrown as Duke of Milan by an invading French army. Leonardo left Milan soon afterwards to return to Florence, the city of his youth. He started work on the Mona Lisa, his most famous painting of course, but also the Battle of Anghiari, which was to be a huge mural, maybe 60 or 70 feet wide, in the main hall of the seat of power in the city, the Palazzo del Signoria. As well as working as a painter during this period, he was also a mapmaker, producing military maps for the commander of the papal forces, but also surveys of the River Arno for the Florentine government. Leonardo's preparatory work on the Battle of Anghiari led him back to the study of the human form, and he started to dissect human bodies in monastery hospitals. Anatomy was to become one of Leonardo's great pursuits over the next 10 years. Unfortunately, in 1506, the French occupiers of Milan requested that Leonardo return to Milan from Florence, and the Battle of Anghiari sadly was left unfinished, and 50 years later was destroyed. In Milan, Leonardo is working on a painting of Leda and the Swan, which is to have a foreground teeming with plants and flowers. So he starts to study plants, their structure and their growth, and this is typical of Leonardo's studies throughout his life. Very quickly they become much more detailed than was necessary for the narrow confines of that project. In 1513, the French lose power in Milan, and Leonardo and his household move to Rome. He was under the patronage of the brother of Pope Leo X, and was expected to turn his hand to all sorts of different projects. It's hard to get a picture of what Leonardo was achieving at that time, and after two and a half years of what seems to have been frustration, he left to move to France. As court artist to King Francis, Leonardo was expected to produce not just painting, but also designs for architecture and costumes and so on. He was essentially an adornment to the court, somebody that the king liked to engage in conversation every day. Leonardo is, however, in his mid-late 60s and in increasingly ill health. He loses the use of his right arm, possibly through a stroke, and starts to become obsessed with ideas of death and destruction. He writes long descriptions of a huge deluge overwhelming the earth, and draws this in a sequence of drawings of which there's no parallel in Western art. These deluge drawings can be seen as a summary of Leonardo's whole career, an attempt to get down on a sheet of paper the forces of the universe. We're incredibly fortunate that all these drawings survive to the present day, allowing us a look inside the mind of one of the greatest artists, scientists, and thinkers in history.