The Enigmatic Origins of Leonardo da Vinci's Genius: Nature, Exploration, and Possible Extraterrestrial Encounters
The North Apennines and Leonardo da Vinci: Nature's Influence on a Renaissance Genius
The North Apennines, Italy. Here in the hills just outside Florence, a young Leonardo da Vinci spent much of his time exploring the mysteries of nature. Because his parents were not married, he was excluded from the prestigious academies, attended by many of his contemporaries.
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The Exclusion from the Platonic Academy
PHILIP COPPENS: In Florence, the Platonic Academy is reformed and this Institute of Learning comes about. Now we know that Leonardo da Vinci is not allowed to enter this academy.
WILLIAM WALLACE: This is a young man who's pretty much left on his own in some ways for up to 19 years, traveling around the countryside. He was looking at rocks. He was studying birds. He was looking at the flow of water. He was studying mountains. He was literally immersed in nature. No other artists in the Renaissance really showed that much interest in the natural world and the surrounding world.
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PHILIP COPPENS: He strives for knowledge. He strives for information. He is able to create a body of knowledge which is on par with the body of information which the Platonic Academy, as a group of beings, is able to put out.
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Leonardo's Solitary Pursuits in Nature
It was also in the North Apennine Mountains that Leonardo is believed to have discovered the cave that he wrote about in his journal.
The Discovery of the Enigmatic Cave
SEAN ROBERTS: The story of the cave, it's very likely that it happened around 1480 since it appears that that's the moment at which this is written in the Codex. The fact that Leonardo chooses to record this encounter with the cave, I think indicates that it had a significant impact on the artist psychologically.
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The Significance of the Cave in Leonardo's Genius
But although the exact site of the cavern and the date Leonardo uncovered it remains unknown, there are many who believe that it may provide the key to understanding the origin of the artist's extraordinary genius and the answer to the enigma of what occurred during his missing two years.
WILLIAM HENRY: It goes inside the cave, then he disappears and it suggests to me time travel portals. These opening portals were star gates and beaming to either the past or the future and then returning to the present time.
DAVID CHILDRESS: In history you have certain people like Leonardo da Vinci whose genius is just so incredible and the visions that they have. In many ways it's like they're able to see the future and they're not going to just influence the world then. But what they’re going to do is going to significantly transform the world forever. You have to wonder where individuals get this kind of inspiration. And in the case of Leonardo, he was able to perceive things and create them in a sense. Things that we weren't going to have for hundreds of years.
Theories of Extraterrestrial Encounters and Time Travel
Is it really feasible that Leonardo da Vinci may have acquired his astonishing creative and scientific knowledge as the direct result of an extraterrestrial encounter? Or might Leonardo have fallen through a time portal, one which allowed him to actually visit the future? A future where robots, helicopters, military weapons and other amazing machines actually existed in which the artist would later try to duplicate. Some ancient astronaut theorists believe the solution can be traced back to work he did on the Annunciation and the significance of his so-called vanishing angel.
Leonardo's Hidden Messages and Mirror Writing
SEAN ROBERTS: Leonardo and Verrocchio's Annunciation portrays the moment at which the angel Gabriel has arrived and is telling the Virgin Mary that she's pregnant with the son of God.
GIORGIO A. TSOUKALOS: What some scholars have speculated is that by painting the angel in the Annunciation so that this appears under X-ray, he is telling us that like Gabriel, he is the messenger. And then with his next painting, we're told that this great gift to mankind has arrived. And Leonardo da Vinci's contributions to mankind are truly a gift to the world.
DAVID CHILDRESS: You have to wonder if Leonardo wasn't doing this because he was being encouraged in secret by some kind of extraterrestrial masters who were somehow behind him.
Decoding the Mona Lisa and Other Masterpieces
Mightly Leonardo da Vinci, the man many have called the greatest genius who ever lived, have been chosen by extraterrestrial beings to accelerate the advancement of the human race. Or was he merely trying to communicate the incredible future inventions he had witnessed in the first hand?
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GODEREY HARRIS: Without doubt, the most influential personality of the first millennium was Jesus. Now you go to the second millennium and I believe Leonardo is the most important dominant personality made the most contributions in the most areas during those thousand years.
PHILIP COPPENS: Whenever we look in ancient times, we find that the genius was always identified with super hero divine qualities. Even today we put geniuses on a separate pedestal and almost worship them. This is really something throughout mankind's history. So the question is where does this originate? And whenever you look into mythology, you will also find that the geniuses were the ones who were created by the gods. And divine go hand in hand.
Florence, Italy, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci begins work on a portrait commissioned by a wealthy silk merchant for his spouse. But it is a painting he will never relinquish. Obsessing over every detail for what would be the last 16 years of his life. The Mona Lisa.
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WILLIAM WALLACE: It is only a portrait and yet it seems to have dimensions and mysteries that have yet to be explained.
SEAN ROBERTS: The Mona Lisa’s smile is not the type of smile that we typically see in portraits. It seems to know something that we don't.
MARTIN KEMP: What begins as a portrait, a depiction of a woman, transforms into something entirely different. It turns into a kind of philosophical meditation on all his intellectual interests.
What was it about the Mona Lisa that would so engross the concluding years of Leonardo da Vinci's existence? And why would he dedicate so much of his time to a single 20 by 30 inch portrait?
WILLIAM WALLACE: There are a lot of theories that Leonardo has secret symbols and secret messages and his paintings. Everything he's doing, he's rethinking even traditional subjects in the very beginning and really imagining them in new and creative ways.
All his life, Leonardo da Vinci incorporated a technique called mirror writing. Is it possible that he also used a similar technique in his artwork, leaving hidden messages that can only be revealed with the use of mirrors?
PHILIP COPPENS: The mirror writing is something which defines him. And so the possibility that he was also using the mirror as an unknown dimension whereby he needs to have the mirror to see certain things within his paintings is definitely something which I think we need to explore.
At Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, graphic designer Terence Mason uses computer technology to search for hidden messages in Leonardo's masterworks.
TERRENCE MASSON: We know that he was insatably curious about reflections and refractions and optics and the human anatomy of the eye and how that mirrored reflections of conical shaped mirrors.
Is it plausible that Leonardo utilized his mirror method to conceal hidden messages in the Mona Lisa? But if so, why?
TERRENCE MASSON: To our classic Mona Lisa, Leonardo's portraiture always had very dramatic hand positioning. His hand position was an indication to the entry points of pivot of these mirrored angles. So if we try this, what do we see?
Is this helmet shaped creature simply the product of a parlor trick? If so, then why can a similar entity be observed in another renowned artwork by Da Vinci? Virgin and Child with Saint Anne.
TERRENCE MASSON: Well, this painting, Virgin of the Rocks, we always notice the dramatic hand poses of Leonardo is that giving us a hint about where to put the reflective plane. Well, we're in a 3D environment here, we do anything we want, we just make a little duplicate. Come in a little closer. That's a little spooky. So interesting similarity to what we did with the Mona Lisa, right? We've got something close to modern understanding of alien heads.
Could there indeed be hidden messages in Leonardo da Vinci's artworks? Messages that disclose the creator's link to otherworldly entities. Ambua's friends, 1513 at Chateau de Cloluse, a 61-year-old Leonardo da Vinci, begins work on what will be his final painting. Three years later, he completes his portrait of an androgynous figure emerging from a shadowy background, Saint John the Baptist.
KWAKKELSTEIN: Picture this painting in a dimly lit chapel. Before lighting the candle, you don't see anything. You light the candle and the light of the flame illuminates the painting and their emerges against a dark background, Saint John the Baptist.
WILLIAM HENRY: And the pointing upward to heaven, saying, I'm from the light, I'm witnessing to the light, he's pointing to another realm.
KWAKKELSTEIN: Oh yes, this is where the divine wisdom comes from, this is the source of everything, the first words of Saint John. Or I saw the light, I will come to this earth.
LYNN PICKNETT: Leonardo was encoding extraordinary secrets in his paintings. He wanted to imbue his work for the future generations with his own private message. His paintings are like portals to another world where the real Leonardo inhabits. But whether we're big enough to accept what he has to say is quite another matter.
GEORGE NOORY: I think he had some very subtle messages he wanted to convey to not the people of that time, but to the people of our time. And we have to look for it. Is he talking about extraterrestrials? Is he talking about the future?
DAVID CHILDRESS: Investigators have recently found some pretty astonishing things about Leonardo da Vinci's painting, John the Baptist. And they mirror the image to create a double image. And then through an enhancement process, they're able to bring out what seems to be the face of an extraterrestrial. It's a pretty unusual thing. And we know that da Vinci did use this mirroring technique. And so this isn't something that is so far-fetched that he would do.
WILLIAM HENRY: Da Vinci is one of a long line of artists who have told us, beginning with the ancient Egyptians and running through the early Christians into bettens, that art is a medium. It's a channel through which ordinary individuals can link with higher dimensional entities, even extraterrestrials. And I believe this is the ultimate message that Leonardo embedded in the codes and the symbols within his artworks.
Did Leonardo da Vinci experience an extraterrestrial encounter? One that expanded his intellect to what was once regarded as forbidden wisdom. Florence Italy, 2002 Using infrared diagnostic techniques, Dr. Mauricio Sericini uncovers the under-drawing or preliminary sketch done by Leonardo da Vinci for his unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. Commissioned in 1481, the work depicts the biblical story of the three Weismann visiting the infant cheeses in Bethlehem. But by viewing the painting with this new technology, it becomes apparent that Leonardo's original sketch actually included many more details than those that could be seen with just a naked eye.
MAURIZID SERACINI: The first time I aimed the camera, the infrared camera to the other Asian, I felt very privileged. Because for the first time in 500 years, I managed to see probably the best creativity effort of Leonardo on a work of art. Science can help you to go back like if you were in a time machine and I saw dozens of figures fighting horses, nature, architecture. And now my eyes alone could not see them because they were covered by a brownish monochrome layer of paint. That afterward I comprehended was not employed by Leonardo. In the background of the top left, you could see a couple of people sitting in despair on stairs of the temple in ruins. Well, aiming the camera at the scene, then suddenly a completely different viewer came out.
UN: The detail that was painted over was a scene of a pagan temple that was rising up through the ruins of a Christian church. And this was considered problematic during the Renaissance period with Christianity as the one and only true religion.
Upon close inspection of Da Vinci's initial draft, instead of a sanctuary in disrepair, the artist appeared to be illustrating a scene in which an Egyptian sanctuary is being reconstructed. Most significant is the detail that one of the sanctuary pillars is topped by a lotus bloom, which in ancient Egypt symbolized the so-called flower of life.
The Flower of Life: A Symbol of Universal Mysteries
Caroline Cory: The flower of life is the information behind how the universe was created. Everything in the universe is geometric. Sacred geometry implies that there is intelligence behind it.
WILLIAM HENRY: It's believed by mystics to be a symbol of advanced super consciousness, a way of plugging into the knowledge possessed by extraterrestrial beings. Da Vinci, we can fairly say, was practically obsessed with it. And one speculates if Da Vinci truly accessed the ultimate universal mysteries symbolized by the flower of life.