Documentary reveals Leonardo da Vinci's 'relentless curiosity'
A new documentary series on Leonardo da Vinci is among the most complex projects filmmaker Ken Burns and his team have taken on and is the first on a non-American theme, Burns said at a Nov. 12 National Press Club Headliners event.
Ken Burns and co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon described the conceptualization and production of the four-film series that PBS plans to air on Nov. 18 and 19.
Ken Burns calls da Vinci -- an Italian Renaissance artist, inventor, scientist, engineer, and visionary -- "the person of the last millennium." The film grew out of his team's work on Benjamin Franklin, also an inventor and visionary, as recommended by historian Walter Isaacson, the author of a Benjamin Franklin biography.
Sarah Burns, Ken Burns’ daughter, said the filmmakers saw the project as an opportunity to "scrape away the stuff of that mythology" that builds up around famous figures like da Vinci, "and get at a three-dimensional, complicated person."
The team faced several challenges in making a film about da Vinci, notably very old source materials in a different language, which is not often a concern with their other projects.
A key source for the series were da Vinci's notebooks, said McMahon, Ken Burns’ son-in-law. He called the notebooks, "an incredible trove of studies in geology, anatomy, and physiology." Da Vinci did not keep diaries, but the notebooks offered an opportunity "to get in between his ears, and that would be fun to share with an audience."
Their investigations, Ken Burns said, unveiled da Vinci's personality and revealed "this incredibly interesting person” who was a painter, a prolific drawer, a musician who sings, a theatrical producer, a flamboyant dresser, and "someone you wanted at dinner.”
What drove da Vinci was a “relentless curiosity, his interest in the central questions of everything,” Ken Burns said. “He's saying, 'What is the nature of the universe? How does this work? Why am I here? Where do they come from? What is my purpose?' These are elemental questions that our own daily lives keep us from, and he's asking every single day."
As an example of that visionary nature, Ken Burns described results of da Vinci's review of a human dissection, which led to da Vinci making a model of a human heart that also reflected his knowledge of physics.
The model had four chambers, not two chambers as believed at the time, as well as "valves from little pieces of silk and because he knows water dynamics, takes grass seed and water and pumps it around," Ken Burns said.
The polymath also was way ahead of his time when it came to heart disease. When dissecting human arteries, da Vinci noticed silt-like deposits that we now know as arteriosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.
None of this knowledge had any value at the time, said Ken Burns, "but 450 or 475 years later, MRIs proved that this man working without calculus or microscopes designed exactly how heart valves worked. And he did it because he's curious. That's it."
Sarah Burns said da Vinci was well known in his lifetime mainly as a painter.
"He was early in this era where painters could become superstars," Sarah Burns said. Michaelangelo and da Vinci were contemporaries and among the first to develop followings as intellectual artists or "princes of the mind."
The da Vinci series portrays scenes from regions where the action takes place, in this case throughout the Italian peninusula, McMahon said. But unlike their earlier projects, the new film does not use period music from the Italian Renaissance. Instead, the filmmakers commissioned original music from contemporary classical composers to reflect the joy with which da Vinci described his explorations and findings.