Ken Burns says it ‘doesn’t get bigger’ than ‘Leonardo da Vinci’

Ken Burns and his team typically tackle expansive topics: The Civil War. National Parks. Baseball. Country music.
But sometimes he does embrace singular historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Muhammad Ali, and in his latest documentary, Burns zooms in on the one and only Leonardo. Not DiCaprio, but the fellow from the Italian town of Vinci, that Renaissance genius who more than warrants the four hours of “Leonardo da Vinci,” airing Nov. 18 and 19 on PBS (check local listings).
“Leonardo is bigger in a way than some of our past topics,” says Burns, who directed alongside his daughter and son-in-law, Saran Burns and David McMahon. “His curiosity makes this the ultimate subject: his range of knowledge and profound understanding of the human project in relation to the universe. It doesn’t get bigger than that.”
Leonardo’s passions were so varied – from painting to engineering and the natural sciences – that the documentary required thoughtful explorations by art, medicine, theater, aviation and filmmaking experts. Leonardo also was gay, and his intense personal relationships are unabashedly explored in “Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Every project of ours is a journey of discovery,” says Sarah Burns, who spent time living in Florence to better understand that fabled city’s most famous son. “We like to pick topics precisely because we don’t know much about them. But with someone like Leonardo, there was a particularly steep learning curve.”
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The Burnses shared some of their da Vinci insights with USA TODAY.
Question: There have been innumerable biographies of Leonardo, including a recent one by one of your experts, Walter Isaacson. What did you learn about the man that was new?
Ken Burns: For me, everything was new. For example, I knew what he painted, but not that there were fewer than 20 paintings total, and only half were completed. But more than that, I learned about the complexity of his painting techniques that brought out what he called the “intentions of the mind” of his subjects. That’s what made him unique among painters. What’s amazing about Leonardo is he’s the oldest subject we’ve focused on, and yet he’s the most modern. If you dropped him here tomorrow he’d say, “Oh great, you guys got to the moon, that’s terrific.”
Sarah Burns: I loved learning about his personality. With him, it’s easy to imagine a tortured solitary artist. He was not that. People loved being around him, he loved to sing and play music, he dressed flamboyantly. We’re trying to create a portrait of a real person, a complicated three-dimensional person. Not a mythical wizard who prophesied these great inventions, but a guy who had friends and relationships.
It’s amazing to be reminded that his peers were Michelangelo and Rafael. What competition!
Ken Burns: Absolutely. Right now I’m working hard on my next documentary, about the American Revolution. And honestly, it’s the same, in a sense, where you have (George) Washington, (Thomas) Jefferson, (Alexander) Hamilton, (John) Adams, (James) Monroe. These giants. And you go, “Whoa, how did that happen?” And this is even more so.
Sarah Burns: But in a way, these artists were also very much a product of their amazing time. There was a possibility to (push boundaries) in these cities, like Florence and Milan, in the Renaissance. There was an opening with humanism and with these wealthy patrons, but also there was a huge sense of (them) pushing each other and competing with each other.
But even considering the genius of folks like Michelangelo and others from the 1500s who we still revere, Leonardo comes across in your film as truly off the charts.
Ken Burns: Totally off the charts, no question. I mean, just look at the details in “The Last Supper”: it’s truly more a small film than a static painting, in terms of the drama going on everywhere. And look, Michelangelo was amazing, but he wasn’t exploring water dynamics or the flight of birds or prefiguring cardiac surgery. In the slow evolution of dull human beings, suddenly someone like him appears. If we’re using 10% of our brains, he’s using 75% or 110%. You can take away anything you want from the film, but my hope is everyone might want to try and be a bit more like Leonardo.
By that, you simply mean to be more curious about everything around you?
Sarah Burns: Exactly. Leonardo has that need to know more; he has that obsessive curiosity. He takes it all further. He says, “Not only do I want to understand how the human body works to improve my painting, but I’ll go and dissect cadavers, simply to learn more about the body in general.” That obsessive nature sets him apart even from his incredibly obsessive peers.
Leonardo was a bastard child who grew up a bit on the outside, something that you make clear shaped who he would become later in life.
Ken Burns: That’s key because being born out of wedlock back then meant he was not allowed to go to the university, and therefore he doesn’t get spoiled by academic silos. He ends up saying, “My great teacher is nature, and it is perfect.”
Sarah Burns: He questions everything. He almost has a chip on his shoulder about it.
It took you 18 months to get the OK to film “The Last Supper,” but the Louvre in Paris welcomed you to film “The Mona Lisa.” And yet “The Mona Lisa” only appears in the final minutes of the film. Why?
Sarah Burns: We wanted to put it in the context of Leonardo’s full life. Even if he started it 15 years before he died, into it he poured all the work from across his life into that one painting: what he knew about anatomy, about his studies of nature, about the relationship between the body and our earth.
Ken Burns: Shot up close like that, you can also see his extraordinary technique. There are no perceived lines, just all blending, you morph from her cheek to her nostril to her forehead, layer upon layer of paint. And as our (art) expert on this says in the film, when you see how he’s gently included the pulsing blood in her veins just below the surface of that pale skin, he’s made an inanimate thing come to life. And as she says, he has become a painter god.