SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
More than half a millennium after his death, Leonardo da Vinci is still one of the most well-known artists in the world, the rare artist who, when you name some of his most iconic paintings, most people will immediately picture the artwork in their minds - the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, his Vitruvian Man notebook sketches. We have a lot of labels for da Vinci - artist, scientist, polymath - but a new documentary seeks to understand da Vinci, the person.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "LEONARDO DA VINCI")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: There are certain supreme figures in the life of our civilization who fascinate us in part because they seem to belong to two worlds at once. Shakespeare's like that, Bach, and Leonardo is perhaps supreme amongst all of that kind.
DETROW: Documentary filmmakers Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon, are the co-directors of a new two-part miniseries called "Leonardo Da Vinci." Ken and Sarah Burns, join me now. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
KEN BURNS: Thank you for having...
SARAH BURNS: Thanks for having us.
DETROW: Ken, I want to start with you. You have made a career out of telling American stories. What was it about Leonardo da Vinci that made you want to step outside that lane that you have carved so well?
K BURNS: Sarah and Dave.
DETROW: Yeah.
K BURNS: I was an old dog that needed to be reminded that I could still learn a new trick. I'd have this sort of sense that I only did American topics. And Walter Isaacson, a biographer of Leonardo and Benjamin Franklin - I was working on a film on Benjamin Franklin - suggested that, and I went, no. And Sarah and Dave said, why not? They moved to Italy for a year to work on this and sort of realized that this person is one of the most extraordinary gifts to humanity that we've ever had, arguably the person of the last millennium.
DETROW: Curious, both of you - and Sarah, I'll start with you. There are so many different elements of da Vinci that I think fascinate us 500-plus years later. What, to you, is his most remarkable aspect? What, to you, is the draw that makes you go, like, I can't believe he did that?
S BURNS: I think it's really his curiosity, and that's what leads him to want to explore everything. He's obsessed with nature and knowing everything there is to know about it. And that's what leads him down all of these different paths that, to him, are entirely connected. He does not see boundaries between these disciplines that, today, we would say, art is over here, and science is over here. It's all part of this grand experiment to try to understand the world.
And so for him, it's all process. And that's the amazing thing about him is that he is looking at all of these things and, in each case, pushing it further, wanting to know more, asking more questions, rejecting authority in many cases on a subject in order to figure out what is the reality, the truth of this thing.
DETROW: What about you? What does your mind stick on when you think about all of his accomplishments?
K BURNS: I think Sarah is right that this focus on nature and relentlessly questioning everything - it makes him see that it was necessary to know everything about the human body, the circulatory system, the skeletal system, the - everything in order to paint the Mona Lisa, and vice versa for these other things. So what happens is that what Leonardo leads you to is the essential essence of the human project.
What is the nature of this universe? Why are we here? Why am I here? What is my purpose? Where am I going? These are essential questions that our daily life distracts us from. And you can stand in front of a painting. You can learn about his amazing - I mean, left us no kind of diaries of what he felt, but he left us thousands of pages of what he thought.
DETROW: I loved how the film really tied those together and really shows the idea that he's doing all of these dissections and sketches of the human body because he's kind of creating a painting from the bone structure out, right? Like, if I'm going to paint this person, I need to understand everything that's happening. So, you know, it seems like, you know, years of research might lead to just one brushstroke slightly differently. But just trying to understand, how do I make a three-dimensional body come to life in the painting?
S BURNS: Yeah, it's the amazing thing about Leonardo. It's that way that he is pushing everything further. So other painters of his time would have studied anatomy but in a much more superficial way. And he says, I'm going to not only learn the muscles of the body, I'm going to dissect cadavers to understand the functions of the circulatory system so that I can paint a body.
But he even goes further than that, and the thing that he's trying to do and what makes him - I think, sets him apart - he wants us to understand what that person is thinking and feeling, and that is completely different. He calls it the intentions of the mind or the motions of the mind. That's not something that painters did.
DETROW: Yeah.
S BURNS: He brings to life these characters, and he gives them a mind and a soul.
DETROW: One of the most interesting things about da Vinci - and Ken, I want to ask you this - is the fact that the guy was kind of a procrastinator in the end. So many of these great paintings weren't finished. So many of these commissions took a very long time. Especially you, as somebody who's delivered ambitious works of art on deadlines over a long period of time - what do you make of that aspect of him?
K BURNS: I think procrastination isn't quite the right word, Scott. I think it's really this relentless questioning of the universe, as Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker, says in our film, is really the key to it. So you see in a great painting, like the Adoration of the Magi - that is an abandoned work - that perhaps the questions that he is asking, these relentless questions, have not been answered or won't be answered, he thinks, by this particular project. Or perhaps he's answered them. They've served their function, and he's moved away.
So he's not in the business of art. He's not in the commerce of art. He has to survive. He has to get commissions. He has to live. But he's about these higher pursuits. So he'll walk away because he's either satisfied or he's not satisfied and needs to turn his attention to something else - to study water dynamics or to study the flight of birds or to understand things about gravity or anatomy or all of these things that he's constantly pursuing. And he may not. He didn't invent the helicopter or the submarine or these things. But he, in his drawings, prefigured our own pursuits later on, and that makes him incredibly modern.
DETROW: And yet, he was still human. And I think one of the moments in the film that made us all really laugh was how da Vinci acts when he's on a commission that's deciding where to place Michelangelo's statue, David. Could one of you tell that story because it's...
S BURNS: Yeah.
DETROW: ...Just really funny.
S BURNS: Yeah, they're both - Leonardo has returned to Florence, and Michelangelo has come there as well. And he's just made the David, which, of course, is still, to this day, one of Florence's great artworks. And there is this sort of city commission to decide where this very grand statue should be placed. And Leonardo is among the sort of dissenters who suggest that it should actually be put in this sort of more out-of-the-way location, whereas it, of course, ends up in front...
DETROW: Nobody needs to see that.
S BURNS: No. It's fine just, you know, behind a wall over here. And, you know, I think it's pretty clear from that that you can see the sense of jealousy. Michelangelo is younger, and he's this sort of up-and-coming big star. And both of them are among this first of this generation of superstar artists. This is a new idea, that you could have artists who are not just craftspeople who work on commission, making things for churches and wealthy people, but they're emerging as superstars. And here they are. And Leonardo was like, well, I don't know how great this sculpture is. You know, and of course, it ends up - he's overruled, and it ends up right in front of city hall.
DETROW: I want to ask both of you, to end this interview - curious what your your favorite work of art by Leonardo is and why. What - now that this project has done and about to be shown to everybody, what are you still thinking about?
S BURNS: The one that moved me the most, I think, just standing in front of it was his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. It's larger than I had realized. And it's been restored within the last decade or so, and so the colors are vibrant in a way that we unfortunately don't always get with these paintings. And it just - I was stunned standing there, and we were lucky to get to go there and film overnight at the Louvre when it was empty and sort of just experience it on our own, which was a really...
DETROW: Wow.
S BURNS: ...Moving thing to be sort of up close and personal with that one.
K BURNS: So in the inevitable questions, you mean besides the Mona Lisa?
(LAUGHTER)
K BURNS: It's like, besides Babe Ruth, besides the Beatles.
DETROW: No one will judge if you say the Mona Lisa.
K BURNS: No, no, but for me, I have an experience where I was scouting in advance of Sarah's filming in 2019, and - in an empty Louvre with the paintings going up. And it was - I passed by this thing called the Virgin in the Rocks (ph). And, you know, I read the thing. I went, huh, you know, another great background, and whatever. And then in our film, through an interview that Sarah and Dave did with Monsignor Timothy Verdon, a Catholic priest but also an art historian - he narrates a version of this painting that is new to me.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "LEONARDO DA VINCI")
TIMOTHY VERDON: Mary's right hand, which is on the back of John the Baptist, is very tense. The fingers are pressing into John's back, but the thumb is over his shoulder, and what she's doing is holding him back. And here, he shows her preventing the profit of her own son's future death from drawing near to Christ.
K BURNS: You're seeing a mother with the natural maternal instincts, and not just the people in three dimensions but the intentions of their mind, what they're feeling, what they're thinking. And that, to me, is just what we're all here about, all of us.
DETROW: Filmmakers Ken Burns and Sarah Burns - their documentary "Leonardo Da Vinci" airs on PBS next week. Thanks to both of you.
K BURNS: Thank you.
S BURNS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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