Communiqué
The finale of LEONARDO da VINCI by Ken Burns is “Painter God” as Leonardo pours his scientific and artistic knowledge into a portrait – Nov. 19 at 8 pm
< < Back toThe Finale of
LEONARDO da VINCI
A NEW FILM FROM KEN BURNS
NOVEMBER 19, 2024
SARAH BURNS AND DAVID McMAHON WRITE AND CO-DIRECT TWO-PART, FOUR-HOUR FILM, BURNS’S FIRST NON-AMERICAN SUBJECT
Original Music Composed by Caroline Shaw and Performed by Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth
LEONARDO da VINCI, a new, two-part, four-hour documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon will air Nov. 18 and 19, at 8:00-10:00 p.m. (and repeated 10:00 p.m. to midnight) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS App,
The film, which explores the life and work of the 15th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci, is Burns’s first non-American subject. It also marks a significant change in the team’s filmmaking style, which includes using split screens with images, video and sound from different periods to further contextualize Leonardo’s art and scientific explorations. LEONARDO da VINCI looks at how the artist influenced and inspired future generations, and it finds in his soaring imagination and profound intellect the foundation for a conversation we are still having today: what is our relationship with nature and what does it mean to be human.
In Part Two – “Painter-God” – Leonardo has left Milan and to travel to Venice and then back to Florence, the city where he had developed his artistic skills. It was there that Leonardo reached out to Cesare Borgia, the military strongman who led the Papal troops and was in search of an engineer and cartographer. He developed new ways to map cities and designed new technologies for invading and defending them. Always fascinated with the movement of water, he also devised a way to divert the Arno, the river that flows west from Florence to Pisa and the sea beyond. The plan, which never came to fruition, would have denied Pisa, Florence’s long-time adversary, access to the river.
The brutal battlefield scenes he likely witnessed as a military engineer and cartographer for Borgia would also inform his art. Back in Florence, he was selected to produce a battle scene for the Council Room in the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florentine government. Many of the preparatory studies for the painting – The Battle of Anghiari – still exist, though Leonardo never completed the mural itself. The work would have been Leonardo’s largest.
In the following years, Leonardo would return to his observations of nature – with studies and sketches of water, of birds in flight (and flying machines), of horses and landscapes. He would also begin a portrait of the wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo, which would become his famed Mona Lisa. The art historian Carmen Bambach explains that as Leonardo aged, he seemed to be increasingly focused on philosophy and the workings of the natural world and, once again, the human body, filling notebooks that would not be fully explored for centuries.
With access to cadavers for dissection, Leonardo depicted the blood vessels of neck, thorax and upper torso and the nerves and blood vessels of the head. He did similar studies of the abdominal organs – stomach, liver, bladder, and kidneys. He made notes on the colon and intestines, and what he believed was the heart’s importance in heating the blood. Francis Wells, a heart surgeon who has studied Leonardo’s writings and drawings, explains that he provided what amounts to the first description of coronary atherosclerosis.
Leonardo also explored science beyond the human body. “Gravity,” he wrote in one of his notebooks, “is limited to the elements of water and earth; but this force is unlimited, and it could be used to move infinite worlds if instruments could be made by which the force could be generated.” In one experiment, he used nothing more than a jar filled with sand to help him roughly calculate the earth’s gravitational constant. It would be a century before Galileo’s experiments proved gravity’s universal effect on objects and far longer before Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein would use calculus – not yet invented in Leonardo’s time – to define and explain gravity.
In 1516, now 64 years old, Leonardo received an invitation from the young King of France to move to Amboise, France, with the title Premier Painter and Engineer and Architect to the King. He relocated there with three of his unfinished paintings, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Saint John the Baptist and the Mona Lisa. He would die there three years later, in 1519.
As the biographer Serge Bramly explains, at the end of his life “there’s a sense of disillusionment, he realizes that he won’t be able to see all of his projects through to the end… But just because a project is impossible to complete does not mean that it must be abandoned. On the contrary, that’s perhaps what gives it its greatness, its nobility.”