Ken Burns on what we get wrong about Leonardo da Vinci

Despite his international renown, we know terribly little about Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from a couple of Florentine court records about a dropped sodomy accusation, and — of course — his own notebooks, his name survives primarily through his work, his idiosyncratic drawings, paintings, and blueprints.

Idiosyncratic, for while da Vinci apprenticed with established masters, like sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrocchio, and was, like many a Renaissance man, well-acquainted with the writings of Greek and Roman philosophers, most of his artistic and scientific insights came to him through direct observation of the natural world rather than craftsmanship or scholarship.

This, coincidentally, is one of the main messages hammered home in Leonardo da Vinci, a new documentary by Ken Burns. Set to air on PBS in November, it aims to clear up some common misconceptions about Da Vinci’s life and legacy that centuries of romanticization — from academically dubious biographies to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code — have led us to confuse for fact.  

The real da Vinci, Burns’ documentary argues, didn’t actually invent the modern-day tank or helicopter. Nor was he a religious mystic with ties to the secret origins of Christianity. He was, on the contrary, an extremely rational man whose boundless curiosity enabled him to draw conclusions others overlooked. Da Vinci also wasn’t a polymath — a jack-of-all-trades — so much as he was an interdisciplinarian, someone who saw the fields of art, mathematics, geology, physics, and chemistry not as separate but complementary, each contributing to a more complete understanding of reality.

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