The Forum: Inside The Mind Of Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci is best known as the painter of the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, but through the thousands of drawings and notes he kept during his lifetime we know him also to have been a sculptor, mathematician, botanist, palaeontologist, anatomist, architect and engineer, recording insights and inventions that were astonishingly ahead of their time.

Leonardo believed that painting was a scientific pursuit, and to achieve accuracy one needed to understand the natural laws of the universe.

So what do his observations tell us about his unique understanding of the visible world around him, and about the preoccupations and anxieties of his time?

To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death, Bridget Kendall talks to Leonardo scholars Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University; Carmen C. Bambach, a specialist in Italian Renaissance art and curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; and Prof Marina Wallace, an Italian curator and co-director of the Universal Leonardo programme.

• A BBC World Service Production
• Producer, Rebecca Vincent

Publicity contact: TC