The da Vinci ode: Ken Burns turns the documentary lens towards the Renaissance master

Ken Burns is a curious man.

For decades, the director has revolutionized documentary filmmaking with his own take on a subject.

While he and his team have brought the Vietnam War, jazz, country music, among many others, his latest project is focused on a non-American. The documentary explores the life and work of the 15th century polymath Leonardo da Vinci.

The da Vinci ode: Ken Burns turns the documentary lens towards the Renaissance master

“Leonardo da Vinci may be the person of the last millennium,” Burns says. “This guy was the most curious man on earth. When you think about it, he is the greatest painter of the Renaissance. He’s also an engineer and an inventor. He built a model of a working human heart and during his lifetime, there was no use for it. He had this amazing life of curiosity.”

Burns worked alongside his daughter, Sarah Burns and her husband, David McMahon on the project.

The two-part, four-hour documentary will air at 7 p.m. Monday, Nov. 18, and Tuesday, Nov. 19, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. The documentary will also be available to stream on the PBS app.

Burns says the project 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 da Vinci’s art and scientific explorations.

He says it 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?

The musician and composer Caroline Shaw recorded original music for the film performed by Attacca Quartet, So Percussion and Roomful of Teeth.

The voice of da Vinci is read by the Italian actor Adriano Giannini.

Keith David serves as the film’s narrator.

The documentary is set against the rich and dynamic backdrop of Renaissance Italy, at a time of skepticism and freethinking, regional war and religious upheaval.

Da Vinci brings the artist’s towering achievements to life through his prolific personal notebooks, primary and secondary accounts of his life, and on-camera interviews with modern scholars, artists, engineers, inventors and admirers.

“No single person can speak to our collective effort to understand the world and ourselves,” Burns says. “But Leonardo had a unique genius for inquiry, aided by his extraordinary skills as an artist and scientist, that helps us better understand the natural world that we are part of and to appreciate more fully what it means to be alive and human.”

Burns says the team worked together on the film as it weaves an international group of experts, as well as others influenced by da Vinci, who continue to find a connection between his artistic and scientific explorations and life today.

“As we set out to explore Leonardo’s life, we realized that while he was very much a man of his time, he was also interested in something more universal,” says Sarah Burns. “Leonardo was uniquely focused on finding connections throughout nature, something that strikes us as very modern today, but which of course has a long history.”

The team wanted to follow da Vinci’s personal journey throughout the four hours.

“(We were) also really focused on what went on in his mind and on understanding the depths of his curiosity,” says McMahon. “To do this we use material from his notebooks mixed with archival film, photos and sound, along with our cinematography and visual effects, and we’re not afraid to stray from the timeline. Leonardo’s thinking was so unique, and in many ways timeless, that our traditional approach alone would have been insufficient.”

Born out of wedlock to a notary and a peasant woman, da Vinci distinguished himself as an apprentice to a leading Florentine painter and later served as a military architect, cartographer, sculptor and muralist for hire.

His paintings and drawings, such as the “Mona Lisa,” “The Last Supper” and the “Vitruvian Man,” are among the most celebrated works of all time and his art was often equaled by his pursuits in science and engineering.

Burns says da Vinci’s personal story is told within the larger context of the Italian Renaissance, a blossoming of art and architecture informed by mathematics and science, and an awareness of the natural world, but also steeped in a renewed interest in classical ideals.

In part one, “The Disciple of Experience,” the film takes viewers into the world of the bottega, the studio or workshop where Leonardo apprenticed and learned how to prepare paints but would also have discussed math and poetry with his master – the artist Verrocchio – and fellow apprentices.

By the age of 20 – in 1472 – he had joined a painter’s guild, whose members were among the most talented artists in Florence, including Filippino Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro Perugino and Sandro Botticelli.

“Leonardo’s paintings and notebooks tell us much about how he saw the world, as well as the energy and passion he brought to trying to understand it,” Burn says. “But we know surprisingly little about his inner life or what he thought about himself and others.”

Experts believe he was gay, but he wrote nothing about his sexuality, though homosexuality was for the most part tolerated in Florence at the time.

In part two – “Painter-God” – da Vinci has left Milan and travelled to Venice and then back to Florence, the city where he had developed his artistic skills.

It was there that da Vinci 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.

In the following years, da Vinci 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.”

Burns says art historian Carmen Bambach explains that as da Vinci 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.

Burns says after years of working on the project, he’s ready for the world to see it because da Vinci’s life is like no other.

“Imagine if he would have gone to college, he would have been a notary like his father,” Burns says. “His life is filled with amazing things. I found it really interesting to know that he began many paintings, but only finished a few dozen. Many of his art is unfinished. That was an amazing nugget of information to me.”