Leonardo Da Vinci has gone down in history as much for his art as he has for his inventions. His extensive notebooks are crammed with diagrams of complex self-propelled machines, ingenious weapons, innovative architecture and manufacturing equipment. Rarely have a man’s talents, interests and resources so perfectly fit his historical moment. Leonardo’s intellectual career was the creative culmination of an incredible process: a renewal of technical knowledge that all but perished with the Fall of Rome 1000 years earlier – the Renaissance. The film will employ dramatizations to plunge the audience into Renaissance Italy at a time when scientific inquiry was as valued as artworks. We will highlight what Leonardo brought to the table with his own particular genius and see him exploring flight, automation, anatomy, optics. But we will also see Leonardo the man, stigmatized as a homosexual, driven to overcome his humble origins and settle his scores with the elite Humanist circle that rejected him.In this film, we blend lavish reconstructions and interviews with leading experts to reveal how Leonardo sought out knowledge lost to Europe in the Dark Ages and helped launch a new scientific age. We will travel back in time, to Florence and show how the young genius began his journey from artist to scientist and follow him to Milan where he enjoyed the most productive period of his life, devising and testing many of the inventions for which he is famous today. Weaving in and out of this narrative, specialists dedicated to researching and reconstructing Leonardo’s machines will show how he built on the newly available work of his predecessors. By testing the ancient theories against his own exacting observation and experimentation, Leonardo built an unforgettable legacy that continues to this day to fascinate and inspire. He succeeded in picturing the future by looking to the past. This documentary is the story of the making of a scientist.