‘Leonardo Da Vinci’ Peels Away the Paint — and the Myth — on the Renaissance’s Renaissance Man

Lots of folks trace the origins of cinema to Eadweard Muybridge’s timed sequence photography or William Kennedy Dickson’s kinetoscope, but Ken Burns makes a convincing case that the true spirit of filmmaking starts with Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” 

Burns and co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon broke out every tool in their documentary belt in order to demonstrate how Da Vinci brought emotion and intention to his painting in “Leonardo Da Vinci.” And the filmmaking in this two-part PBS series really does feel akin to the dynamism of Da Vinci’s work, within a documentary framework. 

Split screens between the usual archival material and modern photography of bodies, animals, and objects in motion act as visual proof of the lateral connections Da Vinci saw between everything. “There’s a huge explosion of technique here. But the process is the same as every film I’ve ever worked on,” Ken Burns told IndieWire on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “You never stop researching, and you never stop writing, and you never stop changing.” 

There are a lot of expectations but also some exciting freedoms in tackling such a boundary-breaking figure as Da Vinci. He’s well known for certain works of art and speculative designs for flying machines, and yet not well understood. “Like, everyone knows about the ‘Mona Lisa’ and ‘The Last Supper’ and maybe that he was some kind of scientist — that’s pretty much what we knew. But it was clear there was so much more to the story as soon as we started reading about him and that this [biography] could have really fascinating, great challenges in terms of how you tell the story,” Sarah Burns said. 

The Burnses and McMahon were excited to pull in different voices to appreciate Da Vinci’s story — a brace of art historians and Leonardo biographers, of course, but also contemporary artists and filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro, all of whom could speak to the same neverending quest Da Vinci was on to understand and convey what it is to be alive. 

“Guillermo had, in preparation for films, kept these notebooks where he would draw the fantastical creatures that he was imagining populating his films, and then he would make notes about them. And if you put them against Leonardo’s, he’s clearly inspired by [Da Vinci],” McMahon said. The filmmaking team found others — heart surgeons, engineers — inspired by Da Vinci in places you’d least expect. “Their collective enthusiasm for this guy was mind-blowing,” McMahon said. 

It’s that enthusiasm McMahon and the Burnses wanted to capture with their wealth of filmmaking techniques; it required a painstaking level of detail that mirrors the care Da Vinci himself took. For tight reenactment shots of handwriting in Da Vinci’s journals or mixing paints, the filmmakers found a Florentine historian who could find and build the tools that Da Vinci and his contemporaries would use while using a different (and correctly left-handed) expert in Da Vinci’s mirror script to capture the creation of diary entries. 

Whether through visual comparison, recreation, or the excited awe of Caroline Shaw’s score, “Leonardo Da Vinci” aims to make its subject and his world as present and tactile as possible. “Someone said to us very early on that it was important to rip the beard off Leonardo,” Sarah Burns said. “We kind of only see him as this wizard figure you see in the paintings with the big beard and the hat. He becomes like a Gandalf, this sort of magical creature. An alien. And our goal was to go well beyond that.” 

‘Leonardo Da Vinci’PBS

But they go well beyond it in a very specific direction. The Burnses and McMahon tried to be as disciplined as possible about not speculating on the unknowns of Da Vinci’s life — the truths about his mother, about disputed paintings, about how he felt towards his family and friends are mysterious that won’t ever have definitive, satisfying answers. That restraint, in turn, points the documentary towards understanding how Leonardo looked at the world. 

“That’s the important thing to do. And it’s counterintuitive to the way media works today, which is like, you just guess. You throw the spaghetti at the wall, and if it sticks, you go, ‘OK, this is working’ instead of doing the kind of means testing that allows us to not subscribe to the easier versions, but somehow get something that then leaves space for him to speak to us,” Ken Burns said. “[We] let the proof of things — the drawings, the writings, the paintings, the arc of the life, just sort of back and fill, and then I think you can begin to make associations and interpretations and feel like you can know him.” 

So “Leonardo Da Vinci” uses filmmaking to try and tell a version of Da Vinci’s life that would appeal to what we can interpret about him, not the least that he would love filmmaking.

‘Leonardo Da Vinci’ PBS

“We definitely talked about this feeling like maybe if Leonardo lived today, would he be a filmmaker?” Sarah Burns said. “There is something [in filmmaking] that feels like his interest in observation and in making connections between things, the way he integrated things visually. You could just see him loving the medium of film.” 

“Except he’d never deliver a film on time,” Ken Burns joked. 

Da Vinci would hardly be alone in pushing deadlines, to be fair. And perhaps the more incomplete his projects, the more mythologized they’d become. While that is certainly the case with his paintings, “Leonardo Da Vinci” does a convincing job of peeling back the layers of what animated the man who created truly animating works of art. 

“Leonardo Da Vinci” is available on PBS.