One of the more reassuring aspects of the Donald Trump era has been the emergence of authors and historians as accidental therapists. When some new calamity erupts, there is Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rachel Maddow or Jon Meacham sitting at the national bedside with soothing words about how we’ve been here before and always got through it.
But when the Guardian calls Ken Burns, the quintessential American documentary film-maker who earlier this year delivered a commencement address that described Trump as “the opioid of all opioids”, he is surprisingly taciturn about how last week’s presidential election result affected him.
“I was OK,” Burns, 71, says by phone from New York. “I’m obviously very disappointed my candidate didn’t win. But be careful what you wish for.”
The normally loquacious Burns stops there. Why does he think Trump won? “I have no idea. I worked very hard and I did the best I could. I left it all on the field. I’m not a pundit. I was just a worker.”
And how worried is the maker of the definitive TV history of the American civil war about the next four years? “I’m very worried. I’m going to talk about Leonardo just to get it out of my system now.”
That is a big hint Burns would prefer to discuss Leonardo da Vinci, his two-part, four-hour documentary exploring the life and work of the 15th-century Italian polymath. Nevertheless, your interviewer persisted. Can history offer Americans some solace at this moment?
“This is entirely unprecedented,” Burns says. “But there are precedents. The level of this stuff is what’s disturbing. Historians are generally a cheerful lot because we’ve seen it all before and we have seen all of this before. It’s just not been at this level of American politics.”
Washington is bracing for its second occupation by Trump and his minions. When the sound and fury become too much, denizens could do worse than head to the National Gallery to contemplate Ginevra de’ Benci, the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas. Such art long predated the first criminal president and will long outlast him. It offers the purest form of escapism.
Similarly, this film is a timely palate cleanser for Burns, best known for exploring America’s class and race divisions in a canon that includes Baseball, Country Music and Jazz as well as Mark Twain, The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson, Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin and, most recently, The American Buffalo. Leonardo is his first non-American subject.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming to it,” Burns admits, recalling how the project sprang from a dinner with old friend Walter Isaacson, a Franklin biographer whom he had interviewed for that series. “He spent the entire dinner trying to press me to do, as he called it, a twofer – that I should do Leonardo, whom I hadn’t realised till then was also the subject of a biography he’d written.
“I kept pushing back saying, I only do American topics, this is a non-American topic, and he was saying: a scientist and artist like Franklin! I remember leaving the restaurant a little perturbed that he had pushed so hard.”
Burns mentioned the proposal to his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, his partners on past documentaries including The Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. They loved the idea, moved their family to Florence for a year and served as co-directors. In the absence of photos or newsreels, the trio altered their film-making style, using animations and split screens with images, video and sound from different periods to convey Leonardo’s lateral thinking and connections.
Narrated by Keith David, the documentary features interviews not only with biographers and art historians but engineers, heart surgeons, theatre producers, writers and film-makers such as Guillermo del Toro, who remarks: “The modernity of Leonardo is that he understands that knowledge and imagination are intimately related.”
But the end product is radically old-fashioned: a celebration of a great man of history without a revisionist angle or effort to knock him off his perch. For Burns, Leonardo is sui generis, an artist, cartographer, engineer, scientist, sculptor and thinker whose work was centuries ahead of its time. “He may be the person of the last millennium,” he says.
“I would think that you would put up a big, strong vote for William Shakespeare and there are Germanic people who would argue for Bach or Mozart or Goethe; the Americans could even throw up a deeply, deeply, deeply flawed human being in Thomas Jefferson for distilling a century of Enlightenment thinking into the American catechism which, at least for 248 years, has worked pretty well. All of those are there but Leonardo’s clearly the smartest – how do you say that?”
For once he seems to run out of words before settling on the irresistible: “Genius.”
As the film recounts, life dealt Leonardo a good hand and he played it brilliantly. He was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a small town near Florence, the son of a notary and peasant woman who were not married. Burns says: “We know that he was born out of wedlock and that actually perhaps saved him and made him distinct.
“He didn’t become a notary like his dad in Florence and, because he was born out of wedlock, he could not attend university, which would have perhaps forced out of him the sense of ecumenical wonder at the oneness of the universe. Instead nature was his first and extraordinary teacher.”
His other stroke of luck was to come of age in Florence at a time when it was exploding with creativity, just as Shakespeare thrived in the theatre scene of Elizabethan London. Wealthy patrons who wanted to make a social statement would hire artists to make work for their homes, churches or public spaces.
Leonardo’s early fascination with nature and artistic expression led him to an apprenticeship with the leading painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, where he honed his skills in painting, sculpture and metalworking. Artists were pushing each other to do better while also questioning the ancient classical traditions.
Fewer than 20 paintings survive that can be definitely attributed to Leonardo and several are unfinished. But they include the Mona Lisa (a portrait of the wife of the merchant Francesco del Giocondo), The Last Supper (a mural 15 feet high and 29 feet long in Milan) and the Vitruvian Man (a drawing inspired by the Roman architect Vitruvius’s observations about the symmetry between the human body and a well-designed temple).
The second episode, entitled Painter-God, recounts how an early admirer of the Mona Lisa felt he could see the pulse in her neck and therefore sense her beating heart. Burns was moved by such revelations. “He is, of course, painting like nobody else had painted with this authenticity to three dimensions.
“But he’s also getting a sense of their interior life, what he called the intentions of the mind, the psychological, emotional, mental state of people. They seem real and touchable. Only Rembrandt, to my mind, comes close to that kind of ability to jumpstart life and dynamics. Maybe another way to say this is that he invented film.”
Leonardo wrote: “You must wander around, and constantly, as you go, observe, note and consider the circumstances and behavior of men as they talk, quarrel, laugh or fight together.”
Genius has a tendency to get commoditised in marble or merchandise. Contemporary accounts suggest that Leonardo had a fun sense of humour and was good company at a party. Burns wanted to demystify his subject. “It was important for us to rip the beard off the Gandalf figure that comes down to us as this almost wizardy alchemist, when in fact he is an extraordinarily friendly person.
“He’s not tortured like Michelangelo. He’s not the striving kid that Raphael is. He’s not the murderer Caravaggio. He’s just a theatre director, wears gaudy clothes, is a musician, wants to sing, is the life of every party. It was important to try to understand that this is not going to fit into your classic cut-off-your-ear portrait of a tortured artist.”
Experts interviewed in the film believe that Leonardo was gay, although he wrote nothing about his sexuality. Burns comments: “It was forbidden by the church. He is arrested, along with some other men, for sodomy, but one of the men is the son of a very rich man and they’re released.
“After that, one of his first mechanical devices is a machine to pry bars off a window. He had very satisfying relationships and complicated relationships, it seems, with a few people in his lifetime. It was common, as it is now, and both accepted, as it is now, and not accepted, as it is now.”
Leonardo may have bristled at the emergence of Michelangelo, two decades his junior. Burns says: “He’s got a little bit of jealousy. There’s this upstart who’s doing the unthinkable thing of signing his work, which had never been done before. He signs the David [actually, the Pietà]; everybody’s enraptured by it. They ask him, among others, where it should go and he suggests putting it behind a low wall. They overrule him and it’s going to be out in the middle of the piazza.
“But there’s very little of that. He probably is as rankled by Michelangelo’s disagreeable personality as much as anything. There’s all that kind of competition going on that’s healthy until it’s not.”
The paintings alone would have guaranteed Leonardo immortality. But his relentless curiosity about nature led him to conquer other disciplines, which he would not have regarded as mutually distinct. Burns continues: “He was the greatest scientist of his age, way ahead of Galileo without the benefit of telescopes or microscopes; the best anatomist, the best drawer.”
Leonardo’s fascination with the human form led him to conduct extensive studies in anatomy, which included dissections that contributed to highly accurate drawings of muscles, bones and organs. Burns continues: “He builds a model from his dissection of human hearts and oxen hearts that proves Galen’s been wrong for 1,300 years; there are not two chambers, there are four.
“He’s interested in how the valves work and, with a piece of silk and water with grass seed, he’s pumping it into this model that he builds and he figures out and writes down the whole dynamic of blood flow within the heart. It has no practical application – nobody’s ever thought of operating on a heart. How could you? Cardiology doesn’t exist. People just died.
“But he understands from water dynamics, too, that the old man whose body he has the privilege of dissecting has got silted-up arteries and then refers to it as if they’re rivers that have themselves become gunked up. But the gobsmacking thing is that MRIs 450, 475 years later are going to prove what he said about the heart right.”
Leonardo’s notebooks were written in a backwards script, so as not to smear the ink as he wrote with his left hand, and filled with thousands of pages of sketches of water, birds in flight, horses and landscapes. They reveal visionary designs for flying machines, submarines and armoured vehicles, most of which were never built. His scientific studies extended to fields such as botany, optics, geology and hydrodynamics.
“Nobody has come close to his achievements across a wide range of disciplines, none of which he’d see as separate disciplines. We are so into focusing on the distinctions and he didn’t see any. Another way to say it is Mona Lisa is a great work of science and the embryonic studies or the other dissections are great works of art, which they are.
“But then I feel his voice chastising me for needing to make a distinction. In order to paint the Mona Lisa he had to understand everything and not just the surface of things. He had to know everything about bones and brains and the skull and all of those sorts of questions. That relentlessness is inspiring, infectious. It’s soothing, too.”
Leonardo spent his later years in France at the invitation of the young King Francis I, who admired his talent. He continued his studies, mentoring younger artists and working on various projects until his death in Amboise, France, on 2 May 1519. He did not leave behind diaries or memoirs, ensuring his biography retains a choose-your-own-adventure ambiguity.
Burns reflects: “All of these attributes are crammed in one magnificent person who does us the huge favour – it’s not conscious on his part – of not allowing too much of the biographical ticktock, the tabloid sensations that we like to fixate on, and instead leaves us 4-6,000 pages of these notebooks filled with philosophical ruminations, mathematical explorations, anatomies, drawings, observations, a couple of laundry lists, one or two complaints about something, a mention that his mother had come and then her funeral expenses a year later.
“There’s little clues but what that does is require us – as David McMahon says – to get between his ears philosophically and to focus on the work, the output, the restless curiosity. [British art historian] Kenneth Clark said he’s the most curious man who’s ever lived and that’s good enough for me. The cliche is that we’re using 10% of our brain and, if that’s the case, then he’s 75 or 85%.”
Burns appears to be using more than 10%. He currently has four or five projects on the go, including a film biography of Barack Obama and a 12-hour history of the American Revolution with a voice cast that includes Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Hugh Dancy, Tom Hanks, Samuel L Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke and Liev Schreiber.
“The older I get, the greedier I get,” he muses. “There’s some creative thing that gets me so excited.”
In 2026 America will celebrate its 250th birthday with Trump in the White House. Can we expect a Burns film about this most singular of presidents? “You need to have the perspective and the distance that comes,” he replies. “He seems to have accelerated things so that it seems not necessary to wait my usual 25 or 30 years. It would be, certainly, an interesting subject.”
Leonardo da Vinci will air on 18 and 19 November on PBS in the US with a UK date to be announced
• This article was amended on 15 November 2024 to clarify that Michelangelo signed the Pietà, not David.
