‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Review: Ken Burns Steps Outside His Comfort Zone for His Latest PBS Docuseries, With Fascinating Results

PBS’ new two-part, four-hour Leonardo da Vinci probably won’t redefine the identity of Ken Burns, renowned as a documentary chronicler of all things Americana.

But it does find the director, working with frequent collaborators Sarah Burns and David McMahon, in markedly different terrain, both historically and culturally. More than that, Leonardo da Vinci (we’ll see how many times I write Leonardo DiCaprio as the title here) finds the team working with a very different visual and rhetorical approach, making a project that isn’t really enlightening about da Vinci as a person, but explores the polymath’s intellectual and artistic processes in a way that’s effectively cumulative and often fascinating.

It remains my consistent feeling that Burns and company are better the more primary source interview subjects they have. It’s why I love Baseball, why I think The Dust Bowl is underrated and why I prefer The Vietnam War and The War to The Civil War. But much moreso than recent “minor” Ken Burns docs like The American Buffalo or Benjamin Franklin or Hemingway — smart projects that still felt like they could have come from any number of PBS veterans — Leonardo da Vinci gives a clear impression, thoroughly appropriate for its subject, of intellectual wheels in motion.

Guillermo del Toro, who probably isn’t QUITE a modern da Vinci but who possesses a similarly omnivorous approach to knowledge, summarizes the artist’s work as well as the thing that Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and McMahon are attempting here.

“The way we absorb the world is all at once, and that’s the simultaneous, gluttonous impact that you get from his notebooks,” del Toro says of da Vinci.

Simultaneity is essential to Leonardo da Vinci because the filmmakers approach their subject as both a man of the past and one who existed outside of the confines of time — classical in his artistic motifs yet forward-looking in his insights.

The da Vinci notebooks, with their notorious and remarkable mirror text, are the spine of the documentary, with their explorations of nature and the human body, their mathematical theories of both artistic representation and the world around us. The directors, with editors K.A. Mille and Woody Richman, find the unity in da Vinci’s thoughts through extensive use of split screens, never a crucial aesthetic element of the Burns body of work.

This allows us to see the leaps that da Vinci was making in his designs for various ornithopters and military machines, to visualize the connections he was making in his sketches of the human body and to compare how they match with modern inventions, modern understandings of anatomy and more. It captures his wonder-filled perspective, which thinkers and visionaries have been trying to catch up to for centuries.

And the documentary then takes those notebooks and their posited realities — most of the inventions were never constructed, and most were, as he imagined them, less “possible” than “gateways to the possible” — and overlays them onto da Vinci’s more recognizable artistic endeavors. Paintings appear with geometric lines superimposed upon them, and certain aspects of his explorations of light and anatomy are paralleled with familiar frescos. It’s a synergy that’s always been literally visible in pieces like The Vitruvian Man, but here it’s applied to many of his works.

The directors carry the interdisciplinary approach through to the selection of talking heads. There’s a surgeon who relates da Vinci’s study of anatomy to what we can maybe sense beneath the surface in his portraits. There’s an engineer, eagerly critiquing da Vinci’s flying machines. And then there’s del Toro, who could be best described here as a general da Vinci enthusiast, but who unsurprisingly delivers many of the documentary’s most engaging insights.

A wide range of art historians are present as well, and at its very best, Leonardo da Vinci has the feel of being at a gallery with a very erudite guide addressing the artist’s most famous works. There are long segments dedicated to several lesser-known unfinished commissions (da Vinci’s most relatable trait is a tendency toward incompletion) alongside the expected honoring of paintings like Lady with an Ermine, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa — the latter of which is treated as the ultimate culmination in a documentary about da Vinci’s accumulation of technique and knowledge.

Speaking of technique, individual techniques — sfumato, chiaroscuro and whatnot — are explained and accompanied by reenactments of active artisanal hands engaged in those particular processes.

Somewhat inevitably, Leonardo da Vinci is least interesting and least convincing when it tries to tackle an understanding of da Vinci as a person, in biographical terms. There are a half-dozen da Vinci historians and although they’re united in some areas — his homosexuality is accepted, if details on relationships with figures like his longtime assistant and presumed lover Salaì are scarce — it’s all pretty speculative and thin. The first two hours are focused more on this angle, which made them less compelling for me. The second two are about a genius bringing the threads of his work together, and more efficiently rendered.

At least Benjamin Franklin (who seems like he probably would have gotten along well with da Vinci, based on Burns’ approaches to both men) wrote enough about himself for his own words to take precedent over the narrativizing provided by the dry biographers. Here, a lot of weight has to be carried by narrator Keith David and actor Adriano Giannini, who voices any thoughts directly attributed to da Vinci.

And why would Keith David — of Jazz, The War and more — be narrating a documentary about Leonardo da Vinci? I said this was a somewhat different film for Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and McMahon. I didn’t say it was entirely new.