Leonardo da Vinci

Dangerous Liaisons
Leonardo is in his 40s. He travels from city to city, welcomed by influential households, but never settling. We find him in Venice obsessed with nature and water, shunning lucrative commissions to study optics and flight.
A team of engineers reconstructs Leonardo's glider and sees it launched from Mt. Ceceri in Italy where Leonardo himself had planned a launch, had he ever had the staying power to see a single project through to completion. Instead he filled notebook upon notebook with almost indecipherable drawings and right-to-left, mirror writing.

Leonardo's desire to engineer finally gets the better of him - the pacifist vegetarian is offered a job he can't refuse. He returns to Florence and in 1502 becomes a military engineer to Cesare Borgia - the Pol Pot of the Renaissance.
But Leonardo hasn't left art entirely behind. In Florence, between his commissions of war, he paints the Mona Lisa, which we discover through new computer research, bears an uncanny resemblance to the artist himself.

Leonardo is asked to undertake a great new work - The Battle of the Anghiari. Two walls of a Florentine palace are to be painted. One by Leonardo and one by his bitter rival Michelangelo. There has long been a battle of words; now the stage is set for a battle of skill.

The old Leonardo is invited to live in France as a guest of King Francis I. As history is written, he is finally accepted... the illegitimate, unwanted, left-handed, homosexual dies in the arms of the king. But we discover that this cannot be true - for on the day of Leonardo's death records show that the king was over a hundred miles away. Leonardo died alone.