Leonardo da Vinci

Eventually, he formed a partnership with brothers Ambrogio and Evangelista de Predis, who operated a successful local studio.

Together, the 3 artists secured a commission to paint an altarpiece for the chapel of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception.

The contract-- dated April 25, 1483-- specified that the altarpiece should include an image of the Virgin and Child, flanked by two smaller side panels.

Leonardo was to paint the central panel.

Verdon: Mary, of course, was the most common subject in medieval and Renaissance art.

Here, Mary is Leonardo's focus.

Mary's right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense.

The fingers are pressing into John's back, but the thumb is over his shoulder, and what she's doing is holding him back.

Mary, in the popular theology that Leonardo and everyone at the time knew, already understood her son must one day die, and here, he shows her preventing the prophet of her own son's future death from drawing near to Christ.

Christ, the child at her left, accepts this future death.

Indeed, He's turned to John the Baptist, and He's blessing him.

She's lowering her left hand toward His head, but her hand can never reach her child's head because there's a figure, an angel, kneeling behind her son, and the angel is pointing toward John the Baptist.

Mary, as human mother, knows her son must die but cannot accept that, and so God sends His angel to prevent Mary's instinctive, natural, maternal instinct from avoiding the future Passion.

It is absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance.

Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery, which is how, in a woman prepared from all eternity to bear the Son of God, humanity still fully expresses itself.

Narrator: After a disagreement with the monks over money, Leonardo and his partners withheld the painting.

Their dispute would go unresolved for decades.

Bambach: Leonardo will do what Leonardo does, pretty much disregarding what the expectations of the patrons are, and the patrons learned through their enormous frustrations-- and they would get quite angry-- that this was who Leonardo was.

Narrator: Leonardo soon formed his own studio in Milan, where he collaborated on portraits and religious works with assistants and other accomplished masters and offered instruction to eager apprentices.

He started but abandoned a painting of the 4th-century theologian and ascetic Saint Jerome.

He got further with a portrait of a musician, likely Atalante Migliorotti, who had traveled with him to Milan, and Leonardo finally began to get commissions from Ludovico Sforza.

Among them was a portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, the well-educated teenage daughter of a Milanese civil servant who had caught Il Moro's eye and soon after was living in a suite of rooms in his castle.

Kemp: What Leonardo has done is to tell a mini-narrative in this image.

She is holding the ermine, this animal which is symbolic of purity because the ermine was said to prefer to die rather than get dirty, and she is turning away from us, looking, and smiling slightly, so we must imagine the duke is over there.

We're looking at her.

She is looking at the duke.

She is given status by this unseen presence, which is just spectacularly remarkable, given the fact that portraits didn't have narratives in them.

Isaacson: The way her wrist is cocked protectively around the ermine, the way the eyes of the ermine and the eyes of the lady are both glancing in the same direction, and the way the light glints off of her eyes and off the white ermine, it's Leonardo at his best, showing a scene in motion.

The greatest task of the painter is to paint the figure and the intentions of the mind.

He says, "Where there is no life, make it alive."

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