For the first time ever, Ken Burns’ Florentine Films tackles a subject not out of U.S. history, and fittingly, PBS’ Leonardo da Vinci is about a Florentine.
Born out of wedlock in the Republic of Florence, Italy, in 1452, da Vinci had advantages and disadvantages — which came together to produce a unique genius.
A First Look at Leonardo da Vinci
The four-hour documentary gives a birth-to-death look at the artist, polymath, autodidact and, apparently, great party guest.
Premiering Nov. 18-19 on PBS stations, it’s also available to stream at your leisure at PBS.org, on the PBS App, and the PBS Documentaries channel on Prime Video.
Burns took this new turn after a dinner with writer Walter Isaacson, who authored a biography of da Vinci.
Italian actor Adriano Giannini voices da Vinci; and actor Keith David narrates. There’s original music composed by Caroline Shaw and performed by Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth.
Interestingly, among the interviewees is Mexican-born filmmaker and Leonardo admirer Guillermo del Toro, who says at the beginning of the film that, “the modernity of Leonardo is that he understands that knowledge and imagination are intimately related.”
Also included is art historian and Catholic priest Monsignor Timothy Verdon, who reflects on da Vinci’s many paints of the Virgin Mary, saying of his Virgin of the Rocks, “Absolutely the most complex Madonna image of the entire Renaissance. Its complexity lies in a probing effort to understand a deep mystery.”
Talking Leonardo Briefly
From PBS:
Born out of wedlock to a notary and a peasant woman, Leonardo distinguished himself as an apprentice to a leading Florentine painter and later served as a military architect, cartographer, sculptor, and muralist for hire.
His paintings and drawings, such as the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man, are among the most celebrated works of all time and his art was often equaled by his pursuits in science and engineering.
Talking the Private Leonardo
The film also deals with the belief of many historians, for which there is some circumstantial evidence, that da Vinci was homosexual. But it’s not gone into very deeply — mostly because da Vinci seemed uninterested in recording much about his personal life.
And, if he was indeed gay, it was at a time in Florence when the lifestyle was generally tolerated, if not publicly accepted (da Vinci did have a brush with the law in this regard).
But, da Vinci was also a baptized Catholic and had a Catholic funeral. Despite this, some biographers (including, apparently, Isaacson) play down any religious sense, other than just painting religious subjects on commission.
An article at Angelus News about the 500th anniversary of da Vinci’s death in 2019 refutes this notion, saying about The Last Supper:
Leonardo used every skill at his disposal while working in the refectory of the Dominicans (a religious order that could smell a heresy a mile away, by the way) to capture the exact instant when Jesus announces his imminent betrayal. …
Leonardo’s art brought viewers into the heart of some of the greatest mysteries of faith, but the modern age has turned them into trivial titillations.
Talking Leonardo at Length
Earlier today (Nov. 18), I had a wide-ranging chat with David McMahon, who co-directed the film with wife Sarah Burns, and father-in-law Ken Burns. Here’s the full conversation, but I’ll drop in a few excerpts below.
On focusing on da Vinci’s notebooks
The focus was on getting in between his ears. We found that the notebooks were really going to help us be able to do that because he left behind many thousands of pages that capture what he was working on, all of his various subjects, whether it was geology or flight or water dynamics, preparatory studies for his various paintings.
There’s all such great detail, all his thinking about that subject, whatever it is, he poured into each of these little sketches.
And then there’s often text accompanying that explains in a form that he almost certainly meant for a reader of a published work by him, what it is he was thinking and why he was doing what he was doing.
And so he’s not a guy who left behind a lot of writing, very little writing about what he was thinking about, who he had dinner with last night. He’s not a diarist, but in those notebooks are everything that he was thinking about what he was working on.
And we just thought that could be our pole star and we’ll just use these notebooks, and we can do a personal journey across his entire life and help people understand what was going on in his head.
On da Vinci not being the stereotypical tortured artist:
It’s really only from contemporary accounts that we understand that he was a joy to be around. But this is a guy who loved to play music. He wrote jokes that he shared with the court. He staged big festivals on behalf of the duke for a niece who’s getting married.
The life of the party is what it seems. But that doesn’t emerge from those notebooks or what he left behind. But no, he does not seem to be tortured.
Michelangelo left behind poetry that suggested all of the pains that he experienced emotionally. And that may have been the case, but we don’t see it.
It’s a little bit liberating because then we can really turn our attention to the works and to the stuff that really occupied his days. And then I think when you look closely, what you can see between those lines is how much joy that he did derive from all this seeking.
On why you have to watch to the end to see the Mona Lisa:
The reason we put it towards the end is because it seems to be the culmination of a life’s work, exploring nature, trying to understand the human mind, trying to breathe an inner life into his subjects, in particular women. It wasn’t common for a painter to try to give a woman an inner life in a painting.
I mean, I love the way that Leonardo portrays Mary across all of his works. So you can just see a woman who has an ambivalence about this higher calling of her Son and also a maternal instinct to want to protect this child that is hers. That would be really complex. And Leonard seems to be fascinated by that.
But with the Mona Lisa, you get all of these studies in geology and water and atmospheric perspective in the motions of the mind poured into this one painting.
And it feels like a destination that we reach after our four hours, or should reach toward the end of our four hours of exploring Leonardo’s life. And so we’re justified in putting it there. We are not hiding the ball.
Here’s one more taste of Leonardo da Vinci, including Monsignor Verdon:
Image at top: Presumed self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci/PBS
Don’t miss a thing: Subscribe to all that I write at Authory.com/KateOHare.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In