Leonardo's Last Voyage

TVHD. A one-hour documentary.  Writen and directed by Sally Blake & Emmanuel Laurent.  Produced by Sally Blake, Emmanuel Laurent.  a coproduction Dash Films / / Films À Trois

Sometimes in late summer, 1516, at the age of sixty four, Leonardo da Vinci began the longest journey of his life, taking him out of Italy for the first time. He would never return. We know that at the end of the same year he was living in the Château de Cloux in the Loire valley, near the royal castle of Amboise. He was in the service of the 21 years old king of France, who had been victorious over Leonardo’s former patrons - the Sforza - just a few months earlier. History has all but ignored this journey and its motivations. At least we know he brought with him, according to the master himself, "the portrait of a certain Florentine Lady, painted from nature for The Magnificent Julian of Medici", known today as the Mona Lisa. Now old, partially paralyzed, his star eclipsed by the younger Michelangelo, Leonardo leaves Italy in search of what he thinks will be his last oeuvre — the design of François 1er utopian city. His traveling companions, the fair and young disciple Francesco Melzi and, in the shadows, the beloved scoundrel Salaï, symbolize the contradictions Leonardo walked with throughout his entire life. The journey becomes a means of telling the more personal life story of Leonardo the man, not the legend.
Following as much as possible Leonard’s route, and traveling as he would have done in the day, with mules, seeking remembrances of the past in the contemporary landscapes of Italy, the Alps and France, the film questions the life-long obsessions of the master.