Serge Bramly knows his Leonardo by heart. Author of a biography of the Italian artist which is a reference (JC Lattès, 1988), he devotes to him a passion still intact thirty-five years and an Interallié prize later (Le Premier Principe, le Second Principe, 2008, JC Lattès ). The novelist returns, in images, to the life of a man who “was able to do so many things”, but whose painting remained “the main activity”. The subject is immediately reframed.

In a classic staging, seated with his back to a bookcase, Serge Bramly looks the viewer straight in the eye. With kindness, he will tell him “his” Leonardo, since his birth on April 15, 1452 in Vinci, in Tuscany. This illegitimate son of a notary, self-taught raised with his grandfather, showed an “absolute curiosity” that will carry him “above” all – including Raphael and Michelangelo – to reach the “universality”, its goal.

Several equally passionate specialists testify. From the historian Pascal Brioist, who explains that the child wrote from right to left, before being apprenticed in Florence to Verrocchio, another multidisciplinary artist, to Paolo Galluzzi, director of the Galileo Museum in Florence, who helps to reconstruct Verrocchio’s workshop, a vast hangar equipped with an oven and pulleys. An imaginary 3D gallery occasionally serves as a virtual showroom.

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Like any artist of his time, Leonardo da Vinci needed protectors. It will be, in Milan, Ludovic Sforza, for whom he will work for almost ten years on the realization of a monumental sculpted horse. A military engineer for the Borgias, he will meet the other great patron of his life, François I, who will invite him to reside at Clos Lucé in Amboise.

Serge Bramly insists on revealing the analogy between nature and engineering, hence Leonardo’s famous studies on the flight of birds, bats, or on the heart. But it is on the analysis, precise and very accessible, of certain paintings that the documentary is the most remarkable. Thus for The Baptism of Christ, directed by Verrocchio and Vinci, a pivotal work both for the young pupil and for the master. The same goes for The Virgin of the Rocks, of which two versions have been made. Why in one is the angel looking at the audience and not in the other?

The Mona Lisa is presented as a culmination. Vincent Delieuvin, curator of the Louvre in Paris, recounts his first time with Mona Lisa, the story behind the painting and the “freedom of invention” finally achieved.

Little about here, we understand, to scratch the myth. If not the evocation of the Saltarelli affair, for which the artist was accused of sodomy, and sent to two months in prison at 24; or even the first drawings of tanks that could not roll because of their reversed gears. Proof is also provided that Leonardo da Vinci did not die in the arms of François I as depicted in the painting by François-Guillaume Ménageot (1744-1816) in 1781.