(Adebanji) Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa.

It's the most famous painting on the planet.

So famous that in normal times more than 30,000 people a day queue up at the Louvre Museum in Paris to see her.

But why is this picture so revered?

What makes it so special?

(spirited string music) I'm Adebanji Alade.

I'm an artist, I teach, and I 'm vice president of The Royal Institute of Oil Painters.

This guy was crazy.

I've always admired Leonardo and I'm keen to find out why the Mona Lisa has captured the imagination of art lovers for more than 500 years.

To do that, I'm taking on the biggest challenge of my career.

I'm going to recreate Leonardo's masterpiece and try and paint it myself.

I want to understand the man, his methods, and the painting itself.

Leonardo was painting with all these strange materials.

You've got weeds here, soil there, this is made from an old root.

(Adebanji) I'm enlisting the help of artists and conservationists who are keeping traditional ways of working alive.

-There you go.

-Woo!

I'm going to use the same materials... Look at this.

Amazing.

...the same paints, and the same techniques... Never in a thousand years thought that I'd be doing this, no.

...that Leonardo used on his famous painting.

(Alan) And you've given yourself how long, a month or is it...

Boy, four weeks.

And he took four years.

Well, so it's gonna be a real challenge.

(Adebanji) This could be an impossible task.

My reputation is on the line but I'm determined to give it my best shot.

For me to even attempt to do something close to what he did, I definitely know this is gonna make me a better artist.

I'm going into the mind of this guy.

I'm gonna live in his skin.

♪ (soft, quirky music) ♪ These are some of my sketchbooks.

♪ I started with these ones.

They were just 10p, and when I was in college, I just needed to sketch.

♪ That's the thing about sketching is that you can use the most inexpensive material.

Armed with a little jotter and a ballpoint pen, you're still gettin' it done.

♪ Leonardo was born near Florence in Italy over 500 years ago.

He became famous when he took painting with oils to new heights of perfection.

♪ The one thing we have in common is our addiction to sketching.

This is nine sketches of the same girl and this was from London Bridge to Abbey Wood.

♪ I think people are just amazing.

There are no two people that look the same.

Everyone is unique.

So I don't want to miss an opportunity to capture someone who I may never see again.

♪ I started sketching at the age of seven.

♪ It's the one thing my parents didn't have to tell me, "Go and do that!"

♪ I moved to Nigeria at the age of eight.

I had one report card to take away from London to Nigeria.

My teacher, she's written that, "His artwork is of a high standard."

I became a painter but sketching is still at the heart of what I do.

And the same was true of Leonardo.

♪ I literally adore this guy.

I went to view 500 drawings at The Queen's Gallery and I was just awestruck.

It just blew my mind.

But he wasn't just an artist.

He was an engineer, an architect, a scientist.

He had a mind that was way beyond the time he was living.

Throughout his life, Leonardo kept notebooks full of amazing ideas about anatomy, physics, and futuristic inventions.

Everything about this man was different.

He was the illegitimate child of a lawyer and a local peasant woman.

He was largely self-taught, left-handed, and vegetarian.

(upbeat music) To stand half a chance of walking in Leonardo's footsteps, I'm going to have to learn how to paint in a way I've never done before.

♪ The way I paint is totally different from the way Leonardo paints.

Now, the way I paint, it's called direct painting.

What I do is to go straight into the painting, mix on the palette, and go blop.

♪ I call myself an Impressionist.

I mean, I'm gonna give you the impression of what's there.

But the way Leonardo works is totally the reverse.

Now, he has the color where he's going in mind.

To get there, he's building up layers and layers of transparent color.

So this is totally new for me.

(bright music) If I work really hard, I can finish a canvas in a couple of days.

But experts reckon Leonardo took at least four years to complete the Mona Lisa.

My challenge is to paint it in four weeks.

I wanna understand what he's done but I can't do it by just reading about it.

I can't do it by just, you know, going on YouTube, looking for videos and demos.

No, I want to do it.

There are only about 20 paintings officially attributed to Leonardo, all of them masterpieces and worth a fortune.

♪ The Salvator Mundi, long thought to have been lost, was rediscovered, restored, and sold at auction in 2017 for 341 million pounds, breaking the record for the highest price ever paid for a work of art.

(he chuckles) Mona Lisa is now so valuable no one can put a price on her.

Even a humble reproduction gives me the shivers.

I get this awestruck feeling in the presence of it even though this is not the original.

It's the complete portrait.

I just love the soft transitions between the dark sides of her face to the light.

It really gives it a powerful three-dimensional feel.

(upbeat jazz music) I'm looking at the hair and then the embroidery along this lace here.

(softly exclaims) ♪ The smile.

The detail.

The folds.

♪ I'm in for something here.

♪ (water trickling) (soft music) To begin my journey painting this masterpiece as authentically as I can, I want to start where Leonardo did.

Before canvas was invented, artists painted on wood.

These are poplar trees, the same kind that grow in Lombardy in Italy.

Their fine-grained timber make a great surface to paint on.

It's in a place like this 500 years ago that Leonardo would have sourced a panel for the Mona Lisa painting.

♪ (engine rumbling) To cut the wood to size, it would have been taken to a specialist workshop.

(knocking on door) -Hello?

-Hello.

(Adebanji) Ah, hello!

♪ Alan Moulding prepares panels for artists who still paint on wood.

Wow.

This is some place.

(Alan) Have you painted on panel before?

(Adebanji) Not the kind that I have commissioned you to do.

(Alan) And you've given yourself how long, a month or is it...

Boy, four weeks.

And he took four years.

Well, so it's gonna be a real challenge.

But you normally use oil paints?

(Adebanji) Yeah, I normally use oil paints.

So, well, Leonardo was painting with oil paints.

So you're halfway there.

(Adebanji) I like that.

That's encouraging.

(laughing) It's rare nowadays to find a piece of timber wide enough to create a single panel.

So Alan's joining two pieces together.

(Alan) So now I'm going to cut this poplar board down to the actual size of the original Mona Lisa.

(Adebanji) Mm-hm.

I've got the specifications.

53.2 centimeters and then the other one is 79.4.

(bright, upbeat music) (buzzing of saw) ♪ -Ta-da!

-There you go.

(Adebanji) Woo!

♪ (Alan) Is he gonna sneak into the Louvre and try and swap it over?

I wonder.

♪ (Adebanji) The next thing to do is to prepare the panel for painting.

Nearby lives Andrew Scott George, an artist who still uses Renaissance techniques.

-Hello, Andrew.

-Hello, Adebanji.

Welcome to Somerset.

-There we go.

-I know.

To create a flat surface to paint on, Andrew's covering the panel with layers of reflective gesso, a mix of traditional rabbit skin glue and chalk.

We will put one coat on, let it dry, then another coat, and we'll repeat this process for eight coats.

So then we can sand it down to create this very flat, smooth surface.

Leonardo would use the luminosity of the board so that this gesso shone through the colors.

And he would build up layers of oil over the top.

♪ (birds chirping) (Adebanji) I've left Andrew to finish the gessoing and I've come back to my studio to start the next stage.

I've decided to do a pencil sketch as the basis for my painting that would then be transferred to the finished panel.

For accuracy, I'm using a traditional gridline technique to help me map out every detail of the picture.

I definitely know Leonardo would have done a preparatory sketch for Mona Lisa because he's worked that way with other pieces that he's done.

Everything I love in a drawing is right here.

It's the beauty of the lyrical line.

You can almost feel his heartbeat in every line pulled.

It's pulsating, it's energetic, it has flow, there's rhythm.

And then, there is no mistake about it, he's seeing beyond what the ordinary person's seeing.

He's seeing to investigate and to reveal things.

(dramatic orchestral music) ♪ So all these parts, they're-- you can't overlook them, you know?

Even though they look like something you can overlook, but no way.

Not in his world.

And everything matters.

♪ You think you got it and then all of a sudden it's gone.

♪ Ah, la-la-la.

♪ Ah!

This is killer.

Like we're back at #9.

The detail in Leonardo's work is unbelievable.

This has been a baptism into his world.

This, this is no joke.

♪ I'm just really, really stressed at the moment.

I didn't think it would be this tough.

♪ At the moment, it's a great, great struggle.

♪ (soft music) ♪ I'm Adebanji Alade.

I'm an artist and I'm on a mission to paint the Mona Lisa, staying as true as I can to the way Leonardo da Vinci did it over 500 years ago.

I'm heading to North London for a master class in how Leonardo transferred his drawing onto a panel.

My teacher is Renaissance specialist Gianluca Rotelli.

-Hello, Adebanji, how are you?

-I'm good, good.

-Good.

-All right.

-Nice to see you.

-Nice to see you too.

I've brought my sketch.

Just know I haven't finished and I don't even know whether this would work.

(Gianluca) Leonardo did the same.

He didn't finish the sketch, don't worry.

(Adebanji) The technique Gianluca is using is called spolvero.

It's completely new to me and uses charcoal, tracing paper, and hundreds of tiny pinpricks to transfer the sketch to the panel.

(Gianluca) First of all, we put tracing paper on top of your drawing.

(Adebanji) Okay.

This method allowed Renaissance artists to use the same traced figures over and over again.

(Gianluca) We draw just the essential lines that we need.

And ask yourself, "What is important for me in order to draw a portrait?"

The position of the hands, face, nose, and lips has to be correct.

If you put, for example, this eye two millimeters lower, then you will have-- if you put the lips too low respective of the bottom the nose, two millimeters, then you will have a problem.

(Adebanji) Right.

(Gianluca) You have done a really good job because everything is in place.

(Adebanji) All right.

Just last year, a new photography technique revealed for the first time how Leonardo used the spolvero method with its tiny pinpricks to transfer his drawing of Lisa onto the panel.

(bright string music) ♪ I never in a thousand years thought that I would be doing this, no.

(Gianluca) The effect, at the end, it will be fantastic.

When you transfer, it's so incredible, so simple.

♪ -That's it.

-That's it.

(Adebanji) That's the baby.

Wow.

♪ (Gianluca) Think it's amazing.

I think it's great.

(Adebanji) Copying the Mona Lisa was a big, big challenge for me.

He used so much detail.

♪ Coming to Gianluca, he says, "Well, you don't really need too much of that.

All you need is the basic outline."

I said, "Why did I go through that this morning?!"

All I coulda done was the outlines and that would have been it.

Now I'm going to go over what I did this morning all over again with paint, but I'm up for it.

(grunts) There you go, baby.

♪ All right.

(traffic buzzing) Before I start painting, I need to get to grips with how Leonardo painted so I'm heading to the National Gallery to see his work in person.

(soft orchestral music) (Larry) Hi, Adebanji.

I'm Larry.

Larry Keith, Head of Conservation.

-How nice to have you here.

-Nice to meet you!

♪ (Larry) So welcome to the Sainsbury Wing, where we keep all our Renaissance paintings.

-Let's go see some Leonardo.

-Oh, I can't wait.

Larry's kindly volunteered to give me a master class in Leonardo's innovative technique.

The Virgin of the Rocks, first started in the 1490s, predates the Mona Lisa by about ten years.

♪ In a nutshell, tell me, what was Leonardo's signature way of working on a painting?

(Larry) He's asking interesting new things of oil paint.

The way the first washing in, the kind of more monochrome color, gradually develops into a painting and the way the paint that's on top of the paint below, how they affect one another.

What you can see through, what's planned to see through, what's transparent and what's not.

Something like these rocks, that's that first kind of sketchy, washy, monochrome, almost like a wash drawing.

Think about how that angel's drapery is painted or even the face.

There's not a lot of local color.

(Adebanji) So it's all underpinned by the power of the first layers of that transparent brownish wash. (Larry) Essentially, it's about the lack of transition and the infinitesimal transition from light to dark.

Make those thin layers pull across the darker ones, getting ever thinner.

There's not really a transition, it's so soft.

And that's this famous sfumato.

(Adebanji) Sfumato comes from the Italian phrase "vanishing like smoke."

Leonardo didn't invent the effect but he perfected it.

It's what makes the subtle shading of Mona Lisa's face so unbelievably beautiful.

And you can see it in this painting too.

Ohh.

(soft orchestral music) This guy was crazy.

(Larry chuckles) Larry is in charge or restoring and preserving the gallery's masterpieces.

He wants to show me how layers of old varnish can affect the look of a painting.

♪ So come on in to the conservation studio.

This is where we cleaned and restored The Virgin of the Rocks about a decade ago.

Look at this luminous, romantic kind of golden landscape.

And then look at this cleaning test.

-Oh!

-Now if I asked you to make me a copy of this painting, there's a very dramatic example, which would you do?

(Adebanji) So that sky would have been that sort of cobalt blue.

-Yeah, a deep blue.

-There you go.

♪ The Mona Lisa's over 500 years old.

Aging varnish has had a big impact on how she looks.

(Larry) It's really interesting to think about colors.

When you think about this discovery of a picture that's in a museum in Spain in the Prado, which is a studio version of the Mona Lisa, which we're pretty sure was made more or less side by side with the Mona Lisa, you know, if you subtract the yellow varnish from the Louvre picture, it's going to look more like this.

(Adebanji) Oh, wow.

(Larry) In terms of the process of making a painting informed by how he painted, then you have to decide, in a way, which-- (Adebanji) Which one am I going to-- (Larry) Yeah, whether it's about the way the picture looks now or something of how he painted it.

Do take these with you and I hope that they guide you a little bit.

(Adebanji) This will give me food for thought.

(Larry) Yeah, you've got plenty of that now, haven't you?

(funky music) (Adebanji) To achieve anything near Leonardo's standard, I'm gonna need specialist materials, so my next stop is Cornelissen's.

It's been a paint and brush supplier for over 150 years.

(Leon) So where should we begin?

What are you looking for today?

(Adebanji) I have a list, you know?

Leon Pozniakow is going to advise me.

(Leon) So these are long hair or hog hair.

So this is a squirrel mop.

(Adebanji) Oh, this is really soft.

I like this one.

I really like this one.

(Leon) I think you're set with those.

There's one thing though, because you're working on this gesso surface that's very smooth.

Leonardo definitely would have used something like this, a fan, which is the same bristle, and again, just to gently agitate that paint and just to smooth it and blend it.

♪ (Adebanji) Look at this.

Amazing.

So tiny, and I'm gonna use this for some of those minute details in the piece.

I can't believe I've got something as small as that.

Ha!

My final stop before I put paint to panel is East London.

Paint from a tube like I normally use was a 19th century invention.

Up to that point, they were mixed by hand.

(soft orchestral music) I'm here to see Lucy Mayes, a paint and pigment specialist.

She makes paints from natural ingredients in the same way they did in Renaissance Italy at the turn of the 16th century.

-Hi, Adebanji!

-Nice to meet you!

All right.

We do the old, um... Yeah, well, good.

♪ (Lucy) In front of us now is a whole array of colors, some of which he would have used and these are the closest equivalents that we have.

We can start with this one here which is the raw umber.

This pigment is from London clay.

It's an iron-rich pigment which would be very, very similar to the umber that he would have used to determine the lines and the first image of the painting itself.

Leonardo was painting with all these strange materials that actually you'd never consider would be on the surface of a painting.

So you've got weeds here, soil there, this is made from an old root.

For oil paint, you really, really need a vegetable oil that is a drying oil.

And when it dries on the film of the painting, the film itself will dry really hard and will actually protect the pigment.

In Leonardo's case was walnut oil.

(Adebanji) Is it the same kind of walnut oil that I can get from Tesco's?

-Yes.

-Oh!

(Lucy) Exactly.

Exactly the same.

Okay.

All right.

Leonardo would have had around four assistants in his studio to help him mix pigments into oil paint.

The pigment I'm mixing has been extracted from the root of the madder plant which comes from the same family as the coffee bush.

(Lucy) That's it.

(funky music) And press down into the middle and you've got a little well and in that well, you can just put some of the walnut oil.

♪ -That's it, that's enough.

-That's enough?

Yeah?

It feels... sticky and tough.

Oh dear.

♪ (Lucy) So quite physical.

So you can imagine all of those assistants working away.

(Adebanji) I'm gonna be the studio assistant and the painter.

(Lucy giggles) I don't know about that again.

♪ So how much pigment did Leonardo use for the Mona Lisa?

(Lucy) I think you would be very, very surprised.

All of the pigment used for Mona Lisa would fit just in the palm of your hand.

(Adebanji) That means this thing must have been such a thin-layered painting.

(Lucy) Many, many tiny thin layers of glaze.

♪ (Adebanji) I've never used thin coats of oil paint, known as glazes, in this way.

My usual technique is to work at speed with just one or two thicker layers.

So more oil, more oil.

-Yup.

-More oil, just a layer, more oil.

-A lot of waiting.

-How long?

(Lucy) Years.

(he groans) (soft music) -Thank you!

-Take care!

(Adebanji) All right!

Bye-bye.

This feels like a totally different way of working for me.

I'm still struggling in my mind how I'm gonna get this to all work out.

My head's been spinning since yesterday.

I've really not been sleeping that well, just thinking about this whole thing.

Is it really gonna work?

This has just knocked me 500 years back.

(dramatic music) ♪ It's the second week of my challenge.

Though I'm totally immersed in Leonardo's world, I haven't even started to paint.

So it's time to get going with a base layer of raw umber.

This is my first mixed oil color.

Super.

Oh.

Look at that.

Look at my fresh oil color.

Feel like the Old Masters already.

(he laughs) Wow.

(upbeat music) Oh, now I bet you're feeling the way I'm feeling.

"He's gonna blow it."

No, I'm not.

I was born to do this.

Come on, you've gotta psych yourself up.

All right, so, eyelid.

So important, this.

That's it, boom.

I've gone ahead.

♪ So there's two things happening.

I'm adding tone and I'm also adding these important lines.

♪ I've gotta start this portrait from the eyes because that's the window to her soul.

♪ I know that because of the people I sketch every day on the Tube.

♪ I'm trying to create gentle shading to build up the sfumato effect.

♪ You will see when I start getting into the cheek areas where I start to use more to dry brush.

Just really just hone in on her cheekbone.

Just to create that lovely feel, you know?

Leonardo was the master of it.

Sfumato, that's what they call it.

I had to change all my mouth and all everything just to say that word.

A mouthful, sfumato.

(he laughs) Ahh.

♪ I think Leonardo was curious.

He had a curious mind that would not let the ordinary go.

He would wanna discover it, work on it, get something out of it.

♪ I mean, these are just folds.

You know, transparency with this cloth.

♪ And it's already affecting the way I work.

Beginning to take delight in details.

(he laughs) Oh, my days.

Just one fold.

I would have left this room ages ago.

♪ (soft dramatic music) My next step in painting the Mona Lisa is to learn the techniques Leonardo used when he layered color on top of the umber base.

-Hello!

-Hi, Mary!

(Mary) Welcome to the Hamilton Kerr Institute.

(Adebanji) Thank you!

I'm meeting artist and teacher Mary Kempski, a leading authority on Leonardo's painting methods.

♪ I'm hoping she's going to give me some pointers, so I've brought some photos of how I'm getting on.

-This is how far I've gone.

-Okay.

I think it would help in the next layers to have a bit more in her face, actually.

(Adebanji) Right.

(Mary) This will help with the sfumato in the following layers.

Leonardo got rid of most of his brushstrokes.

We don't see them in the final painting.

He's using brushes to spread the paint so you don't see the brushstrokes.

He's using his fingers as well.

(Adebanji) What do I do to the brushstrokes that are now showing?

How do I get rid of those?

That's my dilemma now.

(Mary) It's going to be a bit more work.

It would have been easier if you hadn't got them but I don't think all is lost.

(Adebanji) Hiding his brushstrokes helped Leonardo build up the delicate shading of the sfumato effect, making his painting much more lifelike than most artists of his time.

Another way Leonardo created sfumato was using what's called scumbling, adding layers of opaque paint, one on top of another, over the umber layer.

(Mary) So I'm going to just spread this paint very thinly and now this is where I might start to even use my finger.

(Adebanji) Yeah.

(Mary) To spread it in a smooth way.

So that's why the sketch is so important underneath because it's going to show.

We are getting here some kind of sfumato effect where you can see it's kind of going a bit misty.

(Adebanji) Almost like you have to caress this whole thing as you go along.

(Mary) Yes, you're kind of building the 3D effect and the light and the shade and the colors.

It's a very gradual technique.

(soft orchestral music) (Adebanji) Then, to add depth, Leonardo added thin coats of a semi-translucent glaze which allowed the colors below to interact with the new colors above, creating a whole new color.

(Mary) It's like putting a bit of stained glass on something.

And you see the light goes through it and changes the color, usually enhancing it so that it's more intense.

You may find you can get it quite quickly or you may find actually you have to do quite a number of layers.

♪ (sirens wailing) (dramatic music) ♪ (Adebanji) I'm just trying my best at the moment to make sure that I'm faithful to what I know he did and the way he did it.

And hopefully that will pay off in the end.

♪ I don't know how many layers this is gonna take, no clue.

Don't know.

♪ Twenty, forty, who knows?

Anyone guess?

(sighs) ♪ I've decided I want my version of the Mona Lisa to look like she did 500 years ago when she was first painted, before yellowing varnish spoiled her looks, so I'm using the Prado copy as a template for my color scheme.

♪ It's tricky.

I know the pigments Leonardo used but not how he mixed them.

♪ I'm gonna have to improvise with the colors that were recommended and I can't go far from it.

Something has to work.

I've got the ingredients, it's just the proportions in which they were used.

So it's going to work, you know.

Leonardo used these colors, get on with it.

♪ So I'm gonna work in some ochre into those lights that I took out.

Constantly referring to everything, the references.

It'll all come together, you know?

Layers.

Thin, translucent layers.

(he laughs) ♪ I thought this would be something, "Yeah, I can do this!"

But now, boy, laying the first layer and seeing how thin it is, there's hardly any difference.

The difference is there but it's just an incremental, just these very tiny shifts.

It's a labor of time.

Time needs to be spent on this and there is no shortcut to that.

♪ I realize now my plan to paint the Mona Lisa in four weeks can't be done.

It's completely unrealistic.

♪ It's like a ghost coming out into real life, just appearing.

That's how I see this process.

♪ Now it makes sense to me.

You know, I've been hearing, "Oh, he used thin layers," and all that, but now I know.

Now I know.

(dramatic orchestral music) ♪ I've been spending so much time trying to paint this fascinating, enigmatic sitter.

I'm curious to find out more about who she actually was.

So I've come to Woodstock near Oxford to meet art historian Martin Kemp.

He's spent over 50 years studying Leonardo and has had privileged access to the painting itself.

-Adebanji!

-Oh, nice to meet you, Martin.

-All right.

-Do come in.

(Adebanji) Thank you.

(Martin) It's a pleasure to meet the new Leonardo.

(laughter) (Adebanji) Well, in no way am I saying I'm close.

♪ (Martin) Twice I've been with Lisa in person.

That's to say the picture out of its frame, out of its glass.

We've turned this thing into this enormous public icon but it's very intimate.

You know, she looks at you and she smiles and everything moves.

The landscape moves, she moves.

This sounds very pretentious but it actually happens.

(Adebanji) Coming to meet you, I just feel it will give me more insight into this sitter.

(Martin) She was a bourgeois Florentine woman from a very good family who married Francesco del Giocondo.

She was Lisa.

Her family name was Gherardini who were a traditional Florentine family.

He was new money.

So I think it began as a portrait, probably fairly routine.

He thought, "Oh, it's a small portrait, I can get that done and get it off my hands fairly quickly."

Of course, Francesco never gets the picture and it remains with Leonardo during the whole of Leonardo's lifetime.

(Adebanji) Why was he so attached to it?

(Martin) Because I think he knew it was special.

Up to Leonardo's time, women were shown in profile.

Because it wasn't proper for a woman to indulge in direct eye contact.

So for a woman to look at you, even as a painted version, to look at you and smile, that is naughty.

It's ceased to do the job of a normal Renaissance portrait which is to be a flattering mugshot, and it's become a picture into which he pours enormous amounts of knowledge.

(Adebanji) Martin studied thousands of pages of Leonardo's notebooks.

They reveal an extraordinary mind.

(soft music) First, Leonardo's greatest scientific manuscript.

It's one called The Codex Leicester.

(Adebanji) Inside are drawings and notes that show Leonardo's drive to understand the world.

And you can see how he applied this learning in his painting.

He talks about optics and not seeing edges.

He writes books about geology, he writes about astronomy.

It's an amazing body of knowledge, all of which arrives in the picture.

If you read Leonardo about drapery, he talks about different thicknesses of cloth, how thin cloth bunches up, how thick cloth will bunch up, and he's interested in the pressures and the torsions and the twists and that's what I call the physics of drapery.

So you're going into something with an immense amount of background in it.

Well, it's nice to know that there's more to it than just folds.

(laughing) ♪ (dramatic music) ♪ It's five days since my last painting session.

I'm just starting to build up thin layers of paint.

I'm back in my studio, ready to get on with it.

Three days later and we're still wet.

Four days later, it's still wet.

Five days later, this thing ain't drying!

Even today.

Look at that.

That is exactly what I do not want in this piece.

To work on something seven days ago and still be picking color from it, that would not happen in Adebanji's world.

It makes sense now why he probably needed all those years for these successive layers to materialize and mature to the level he wanted them but I don't have the luxury of that time at my disposal.

I've gotta get this thing done.

♪ It's taken me eight weeks to get this far but I feel I'm finally starting to become a pupil worthy of this great master.

(dramatic music) Sfumato is the key word here.

Making sure that the transition from the dark to the light is as smooth as possible with no lines, just no lines.

Just almost smoke, creating this three-dimensional effect.

♪ There you go.

♪ Because there are just thin layers of paint on this, it's easy if you want to get back some of the light.

It's almost like you can see under the fold, there's this transparent layer and you can get back at some of these.

So there's a fold here, you can see folds from the cloth underneath.

♪ For me, it's been a serious, serious experience.

It's definitely gonna change the way I see my own painting and the way I approach my painting.

There's no way I'm going to leave this knowledge, no.

♪ Because I've been painting-- this is no joke-- I've been painting for close to 25-30 years.

Next year, I'm gonna be 50, now look at that?

But this guy just throws everything out and shows me a new way of doing this craft that I've been used to for half of my life.

♪ I now have adopted a curious mind.

You know, if I'm sketching someone now, I'm paying more attention to little things, you know.

If I'm sketching someone with glasses, I'm checking out, does it have a little bit of reflection in there?

Because he had that sort of mind, he had a curious mind.

Every little thing fascinated him.

♪ Even as I'm working on it now, if I'm really to give this thing my best shot, I don't even think I'd finish it in a year because there's so much more you wanna get and I'm trying to get it and it's almost like I haven't got enough skill to get the effects that he's getting on the face or some areas.

It's just I'm limited, you know?

To see if I have come anywhere near reproducing the greatest painting in the world, I'm going to show my work to the experts who have advised me along the way.

And I've invited my family as well.

♪ (soft dramatic music) ♪ This evening, at a gallery in Pall Mall, Central London, I'm unveiling my version of the Mona Lisa.

Come on, baby.

♪ I'm feeling a bit nervous because, you know, for the laypeople, they don't see anything, they'll be okay with it, but the specialists, man, they're gonna pick every little mistake in there.

They know.

They know the score.

I just hope it passes their tests.

I'm nervous about what Larry Keith from the National Gallery and art historian Martin Kemp will make of my work.

But the verdict I fear most is that of technique expert Mary Kempski.

Queen of the Scots, Queen Mary.

She's the one.

Even though she hasn't seen the painting up live, she knew everything that was wrong.

So...whatever she says is it.

(laughing) ♪ (Mary) I hope that Adebanji has done everything I recommended.

It's no easy task for anybody.

The most skilled painter would find it incredibly difficult.

♪ (Adebanji) Okay, so... now is the moment.

Just bear with me because I know Martin came with a magnifying glass, that doesn't help.

So here we go.

(crowd reacts, claps) So this is what has taken me two months.

I've dreamt of her, lived with her, frowned with her, got angry with her, smiled at her, and now here she is, trying to be Lisa.

(laughing) (regal orchestral music) ♪ (Larry) He's painted thinly, he's got the luminosity coming from below, and you can see that it's a mixture of glazing and scumbling.

I'm personally quite pleased he's gone for thinking about how it would have looked when it was new.

♪ (Martin) He's done a fantastic job.

I see this as a collaboration with Leonardo as a recreation rather than a literal copy.

I think Leonardo would have been pleased.

♪ (Mary) I think that's a really, really good result, honestly, for someone who had never painted like this before.

I mean, I can see sfumato, it's there.

And to judge what it looked like really without the sort of yellow varnish is really difficult but it's so believable.

♪ I mean, it looks as if it's just come out of Leonardo's studio.

♪ I think it's brilliant.

Yup.

Top marks.

♪ (Adebanji) I'm now realizing that this style of painting, this technique of building up glazes is something that I'm definitely gonna try out in my work because I can't get this with the direct painting.

-No.

-It doesn't read this way.

That's Leonardo's secret.

His secret tool, yeah.

♪ (Adebanji) I think my quest with Leonardo has just begun.

This whole process has changed me in a way.

I'll never see things the same way again.

There is beauty all around us and it's seeing the beauty in the things that we take for granted.

So, for me, it's just enriched my whole artistic experience with Leonardo and I don't think it will end very soon.

♪ (upbeat music) ♪ (bright music)