Imagine meeting a person who has a keen eye for detail or one who has a quick mind for scientific studies or a creative spirit for artistic expression.

Now imagine a person with all those abilities and more such a person actually existed.

Leonardo da Vinci.

Leonardo Da Vinci .

A four hour documentary directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon begins at 8 p.m. November 18.

Here on PBS Fort Wayne and will begin our discovery of Leonardo in conversation with a member of Purdue, Fort Wayne's Department of Art and Design.

On this week's PrimeTime.

And good evening, I'm Bruce Haines.

Our guest today is Dr. Stephen J. Cody, associate professor of art history at Purdue Fort Wayne.

Steve, thank you so much for being here.

Really appreciate it.

This is a pleasure.

Thank you for having me.

Sure.

Thrilled.

And the big canvas in which to have the chance to paint a sense of understanding regarding a man who's been described as an astonishing virtuoso, a gifted polymath, and the original Renaissance man.

That's my favorite.

So who is Leonardo da Vinci to you?

That's an interesting question.

I think it would I would answer it differently depending on when we're talking about in terms of like my history, my life and stuff like that.

So I was like a very young person, like a child, right?

I absolutely loved the Ninja Turtles, and I am 100% convinced that this is how I ended up studying Italian Renaissance painting.

It's like I just like loved the Ninja Turtles and like, Leonardo was like my favorite character.

And so he sort of stands out in some respects for that.

The more I grew up, the more I started studying art history and learning about this fascinating period we call the Italian Renaissance.

The more Leonardo came to embody so many of the key trends of this period, the key features that emerge in this moment in human history.

And it has a lot to do with his intellectual inquiry, the way he's exploring different facets of the natural world for the sake of painting.

I think very recently what he has been has been someone who thought deeply about issues of light, shadow and optics, like the science of sight and thought about ways of using that type of scientific inquiry to make paintings even more compelling.

And that radically changed the world for his contemporaries, for his followers.

And I I've done some work on one of his, like really closest followers and interlocutor is an artist named on trial.

Sato that is near and dear to my heart.

And that's that's been where Leonardo was like sort of lived in that part of my mind for a while as this, this intellectual who's interested in sight and light and things like that.

And in light of your answer, this is the unfair question of can you even give a brief overview of the life of Leonardo da Vinci?

I can certainly try.

I can certainly try.

So when we talk about Leonardo, we're talking about someone who was born in 1452.

He's born in or around a town called Vinci.

In fact, that's where we get like the Dubinsky.

And his name is not actually last name.

It's just it's a way of indicating where he was born.

He was born not to a kind of well-off family, not to a noble household.

He was born to a peasant woman.

And as the illegitimate son of an individual of note, a notary.

In fact, he's then raised in his father's household with the other legitimate children of his father and we don't know too much about his upbringing at this point.

We know that he had some education to sound what we would call probably like elementary education.

He was literate, but he didn't read Latin.

He became bookish, but maybe he didn't, like read systematically the way someone who was, like, trained in a scholarly sense would be right.

By 1467, he is apprenticed to a workshop in Florence, and this is where he learns like the real techniques of his trade.

The workshop is run by an artist named Andre Del Verrocchio, and he's an important figure in the history of Florentine art.

He's the leader of like really one of the most prestigious workshops that specializes in sculpture, but it also does painting.

And Leonardo would have learned both fields.

I mean, he really excelled in painting.

Drawing above everything else really was like where Leonardo lived and breathed.

I think he joins the workshop late.

15 is relatively late to begin your apprenticeship in Renaissance Italy.

Like usually you begin much earlier and you know, true to fact that Leonardo stayed later than we would expect to.

He stayed affiliated with Romeo's workshop for about ten years and probably became something like a junior partner.

And this brings us to like the 1470s where we have a few works by Leonardo.

It's kind of shrouded in mystery and shadow this early part of his career.

It's not until 1480 or so that he begins to really emerge in the documentary record.

This is where he's accepting more public commissions in Florence.

But one of the facts about Leonardo said even when he's accepting public commissions, he's leaving them unfinished.

1481 He leaves Florence and leaves these commissions unfinished because he gets what he sees, I think is a better opportunity.

He travels north, he travels to Milan, and he is there with the intent of becoming a court painter, which is a different type of way of existing, like you're attached to a noble household there.

And it's like frankly, a sweet gig.

He spends the next 20 years in Milan, and when he's there he's engaged in a variety of different endeavors.

We're talking paintings, of course, sculptural projects, architectural studies, studies of human anatomy, things like hydraulics, you know, the study of love, like water systems and machinery, because he's got to do a number of different things as a court painter, not just paint like he's he's a really official of this part.

He leaves Milan right around the year 1500, and it's not his choice.

The French invade and the situation becomes precarious.

Milan And he's kind of like, Well, it's let's go.

At this point he becomes kind of itinerant.

He bounces around the main centers of Italy.

He spends time in like a city called Mantua.

He spends time in Venice.

He goes to Rome, he's in and out of Florence.

He joins the retinue of the Armani of Cesare Borgia, who is the son of the pope at this point, which is an interesting kind of thing to think about.

Right.

He's there as the architect and general engineer of the Borgia army.

So he's in charge of like maintaining like weaponry and thinking about how you move forces from one area to the next, maybe studying He's he's creating paintings, but he's studying, studying things like human anatomy, optics, you know, again, like mechanics, all these different forms of knowledge that he's really like investigating.

He does this bouncing around until about 1515.

And there we start to get indications that his health is failing.

Whispers appear in the documentary record.

By 1516, he accepts the invitation of the King of France to join the French court.

And so he relocates to France.

He brings a couple of unfinished paintings with him, notably like the Mona Lisa.

Right.

But he doesn't really paint much at this point.

And here we have more evidence that his health is declining like we see here.

I think in the letter they talk about like paralysis of a hand, which imagine what that does to a painter.

There's thought that maybe he suffered a stroke and he's there at the French court really is like a sage on a stage.

He's there as an intellectual, as someone who can converse in a variety of different fields of inquiry and learning and do so very compellingly.

And this is something that really works well at a courtly environment.

He does this until he dies at 15, 19 or in 1519, and there he stands until he becomes again a ninja Turtle inspires me.

But yeah, and from 1519 to 2024, it seems we can't escape that kind of time travel.

The Renaissance enthralled us, Rafael and Michelangelo and Galileo, and then Leonardo da Vinci.

And there's there's this Mount Rushmore quality of of these individuals alone, if not more.

What is it about that time that still attracts us modern day audiences who So we're talking about the Renaissance as a whole and what makes it compelling from the standpoint of modern audiences?

I think we look at this moment as like the beginning, and this is something that goes back to like the 19th century, the beginning of modernity as a whole, beginning of when we think the traditional old view and I'm not sure that this is the correct view.

This is just one of those things that's like baked into Western consciousness.

We look at this as the beginning of when, like, you know, humanity acquired a shape and a character that we might call modern that seems and feels like it exists today.

And they start to maybe like question received wisdoms and dogmas and embrace maybe some form of like, say, scientific method of inquiry.

And Leonardo is certainly like someone who does that and he has that scientific impulse in spades.

I think also, you know, when we talk about the Italian renaissance, like I think and especially the art, right, like we are talking about some of the most remarkable famous creations in human history.

We're talking about creations that really like, you know, kind of figure prominently in what we would call the classical tradition broadly received, broadly conceived for a long time.

You had people living who are looking back to ancient Rome in ancient Greece as the very pinnacle of what humanity could achieve as like, you know, they did it better.

It's it's a new idea to think about like the future as this infinite possibility.

Right?

It's as like, you know, something better than the past.

But so little exists in the world of things like ancient painting.

And so the Renaissance substitutes for that by recovering so many of those cultural traditions of ancient Greece and Rome.

And so they've always held a certain sheen, these figures this time.

And that hasn't completely evaporated in today's world, I don't think.

Yeah, I hope not.

But I am noticing additional attention being paid to sort of an unofficial work of art, which would be Leonardo's notebooks.

We were seeing some images of those as you were sharing about the importance of this time frame.

These pages seemed to be the artist talking out loud to himself, but boy, his illustrations are are nobody's able to capture.

You really feel like you're right there.

And he is truly to detail reflecting what he's seeing.

Yeah that's very astute observation.

I think like his his notebooks, they were largely unknown until about the 19th century.

Like they weren't like, completely unknown.

They just have a very weird and kind of shady history around them in terms of like what happened after, like Leonardo died there, passed at the hands of one of his principal pupils who kind of edits them and publishes them, and then they kind of circulate, but in a form that maybe Leonardo wasn't necessarily the author of.

He is someone who recorded so much in these notebooks over the course of his life.

And I think there's one very famous Leonardo scholar who refers to them as a chaos of intelligence.

And I love that description because it describes perfectly what it's doing.

You have these really detailed anatomical studies where he is interested in the bone structure of the human body and the way muscles overlay the bone and the sinews that connect them, but then also the nerves that do this.

And he's prioritizing real natural, like physical observation, like, can you see it with the naked eye before the microscope?

Like he's observing the world in this capacity and he's thinking about that from the same standpoint as he's thinking about plant life and he's thinking about like the way water flows if you think about the flights of birds.

And so his you get the sense of the notebooks.

The more they that comes to light, the better we understand how they're ordered and what they were.

You really sense that mind at work as you what you're describing some passages in there are definitely drafts for publications that he was intending almost you can imagine him speaking to a reader.

Some are, I think, more private and reflective, but like always there is that active, agile, deep thinking mind that is such an important part of who he was.

And when we are exposed to his works, of which there were not as many in volume, but they were certainly significant in terms of one to another.

Beyond Mona Lisa, probably the party question is quick name at least one other work by Leonardo da Vinci.

You'd like to draw us to that one work.

And that's the Last Supper.

Yeah, I like the Last Supper, Leonardo's Last Supper, because I think it captures a lot of what our who Leonardo was as an artist.

Right?

Like, you know, the good, the bad, and the kind of the the technically shady, as is the way we might describe it.

So when we talk about the Last Supper, I think we need to begin thinking about this from the standpoint of subject matter and setting.

This is a painting he paints on a wall and it's in a wall, in a monastery.

It's in a religious space meant primarily for a religious community to view.

And this is in a space where they are going to take their meals.

This is what we call a refractory, basically like their cafeteria.

So the subject of the Last Supper of Jesus and his apostles makes a great deal of sense for where we are.

Right.

And the way Leonardo paints it, you could see that like Jesus and his disciples sit on one side of a table as if they're at the very head of the room.

Believe it or not, this is actually pretty fitting for the way tables would be laid out in the space, like you would have a head table that would look out of the rest of the hall.

It's not like Jesus and his friends came in and said, Excuse me, we'd like a table for 26 over there, 13 of you then.

And we're going to sit on one side, right?

This is this fits.

This works.

And then, like, it's a moment that comes right from the Bible that we have Christ's gathering with his principal followers, his 12 apostles for the very final meal he's going to have before he's crucified.

And he does a couple of important things at these moments.

And the thing that like Leonardo seizes upon is he announces that one of those apostles is going to betray him.

And like this is the moment Leonardo chooses to represent.

And like you can see, what he's doing here is he's exploring the capacity for human drama and dynamism in the work.

And this is something Leonardo really contributed to the history of Renaissance painting.

It's energy, it's drama, it's like you can see the figures move and the way they band, and it reveals the inner workings of the soul.

So you have Christ stable in the very center of the painting.

He forms this perfect triangular shape.

He's calm, collected.

He's like the eye around which the storm swirls because you have the rest of the apostles, and immediately close to them you have the scattershot where you have people like kind of bending forward or leaning back and gesturing wildly.

Do you see what he heard?

And the outer groups, they're kind of gesturing back in like, Oh my God, did you hear him?

One of us is going to betray him.

Who's it going to be right now?

Leonardo was thinking about how do you create that type of figural energy, that drama, and then how do you control it?

Because it has to be clear as much as that it has to be compelling.

A painting and true to his form because he was someone who had this very agile mind.

He invests his compositions with mathematical values.

So Christ in the center takes this perfect triangular shape.

The 12 figures around him, four groups of three, and you can see how like they form these groups and you get the energy, but then also like the kind of regularity and the harmony of the whole composition, and you even get the mathematical system of the perspective that's there.

Because this is, again, what Leonardo know so well.

It all leads the lines of the perspectival system leader directly back to Christ.

And so it's a way of focusing our attention and the energy of the image where it needs to be focused.

That's what he does compositionally.

In terms of the figure, I could talk about this more in terms of like, say, light, shadow color and then technique if we have time.

But I notice that those elements are not only found in the Last Supper, but also in some of the other paintings you bring, particularly with the notion that it isn't just painting one color in one space and we're moving on that there is this layering effect of of peeling paints that are somewhat translucent and providing depth that hadn't necessarily been seen in art at that time until then.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

I think there might be like two images of like the figure of Gabriel somewhere is circulating that those are around.

But yeah, let's say we have the adoration of the Magi in the Annunciation, which would of Let's start with the adoration of the Magi.

That's a good one.

And so when we're looking at the Adoration of the Magi, again, we're talking about a very complex pictorial composition with a lot of figures gesturing emphatically.

But what I want to point to is the fact that this is one of those images, like so many of Leonardo's, that is unfinished.

And so we get him doing here as he's prepared a panel, a wooden panel, he's established a type of tonal ground so that you see that he's working on a field of like browns and neutrals.

And what that does is that allows him to play with highlights and shadows so that you can build out the highlights and then push down to shadow gives you greater range and flexibility.

He then lays his drawing his design on the on the panel and he begins painting.

And the first strokes of his brush.

They're not articulating color.

They're beginning to kind of like apply these deep swatches of inky shadow across the composition to lay in the shadows so that his figures are going to materialize, emerge from them fully illuminated as he applies later.

Coats of painting, coats of painting, one on top of the next, adding more information, more values, more color.

And then if we were to say Transition to the Annunciation, you look at the figure of Gabriel there, okay, you can see sort of something like maybe a finished result, because if you look at the figure of Gabriel, that's the angel off to the left side of the Annunciation.

He's kneeling forward and you can see that like in his like chest, in his lap, he has those deep, inky shadows that are so familiar from Leonardo's works.

But then as you move into, like, say, around that red skirt that he's wearing, the deep saturated reds exist in the middle tones.

It's light reveals color.

And prior to Leonardo, artists were really using color as a way of articulating light so that it was actually in the shadows where you would have the reddest areas, the most saturated, deepest colors were in the shadows.

Leonardo was like, That's not how reality works.

Light reveals color, and this method of painting that he develops, it's called chiaroscuro.

He's applying oil paints, so that allows him to layer colors.

This allows him to treat color very differently, allows him to treat light very differently than what his predecessors were doing.

And it gives you that greater sense of three dimensionality that frankly, like it was a game changer for artists at this point in history.

Like after Leonardo, you have to reckon with these innovations.

Even if you reject them, you have to reject them from the standpoint of understanding like you can't ignore them.

Basically, of course, the one for which we all have the image in some part of our mind is, is that of Mona Lisa.

I was surprised to learn that this was a work over 16 years, and while some have described it as the perfect painting, which I'm sure is a topic of debate among art historians everywhere, what is that magnetic quality for us?

Is she smiling?

Is she not smiling?

She looks dimensional.

She doesn't look dimensional.

What time has done to the the colors of the the the work.

But we all show up with our cell phones and we're determined to prove that we made it to the blue and we are they're surrounded by all the crowds.

We've got our 15 seconds and we got our picture.

So, you know, the Mona Lisa is fascinating.

I think it really rose to prominence by the fact that it was like stolen.

And then returned and recovered.

And so there's a whole mystique around that.

Right.

But the more you look in the history of it, the more it becomes itself a type of enigma, a mystery that is almost almost aligns with the figure of Leonardo himself.

Right.

Like so it begins in a very traditional sense, probably as a portrait.

And what we have is, you know, near contemporaries saying that it was a portrait of a noble man's wife in Florence.

You know, they call the Lodge a condo, which means like, you know, like Joe play.

And that idea of like her smile, the coy smile, there is a play on the kind of name that we would have associated with this.

But then Leonardo never delivers the painting.

And he made have beginning it as early as 1503.

And then he'd just like, you know, get sidetracked and then pulled in these many different directions, as Leonardo does.

And it keeps it with him and he keeps working on it.

And so he has it with him when he goes to France and he's working, returning to it again and again consistently.

And the idea is that perhaps this is the way it was like taught to me, for example, is that as he continues to work on it, it becomes less of a portrait, more of a study of his particular ideal for art and painting all the values that he's the most interested in.

And so you get that sense of like, you know, figure sitting in that very nice triangular shape, balanced, stable, harmonious.

You have her sitting on a kind of darkened balcony like you could just make out.

The columns have been cut down on the side.

And then what would have been a bright environment behind her, We shouldn't be able to see her so clearly.

But Leonardo is someone who has studied like the science of sight and optics is thinking like I could describe something naturalistically that breaks the rules of nature, that gives us more information in painting, but feels right that we would get in the natural world.

And that makes painting more impactful, more forceful.

And then you get this like rich, deep landscape behind her, filled with a heavy weighted atmosphere that is so like a plane or a thought of air or something that was like tactile and humid.

And so that again, he's thinking through some of those preoccupations that are so defining for him.

And then, you know, again, shrouded in mystery, like, what is she thinking?

There is that coy smile.

It is one of those paintings that I think isn't as close to the original condition as it could be, that, you know, in the love that the French have a different philosophy of cleaning paintings than, say, Americans or Italians or the British.

And so, like, there's still some discoloration from the varnish that really obscures our ability to understand the full chromatic complexity of the painting and that, again, is just like another layer of sort of a veil that kind of we want to look through, but we can't see through completely.

That's and that's Leonardo in some respects, I think.

Right.

But yeah, yeah.

The creative expression, the freedom to carry, to canvas, to wood, to the walls of churches, the concepts he can express through painting, I understand, also went against the norm of what tends to be where a painter will sketch its subjects and actually, you know, start with a drawing on campus, on camera canvas, and then go back and essentially do their own paint by number and fill in the fill in the sections.

And there you have it.

And that he, Leonardo did not do that.

Well, I'm not sure how accurate that is.

I would have to, like really get into some of the technical examinations because he did use a process like often called like cartoons.

And this is where you have a two scale drawing that is going to be transferred to a type of support, like a panel.

And it would use panel more than canvas.

In fact, one of the things that's pretty fantastic and wonderful about Leonardo is that when he returns to Florence in about 1501, so after he leaves Milan, he's sort of welcomed as this like, you know, famous conquering hero, like, great, like the government of Florence is like, hey, welcome back or celebrated son.

And they grant him something like the equivalent of the first one man exhibition in the history of art.

What he displays is not a finished work, but a cartoon.

He has as part of a process that he's going to unveil and a final painting.

Then, of course, maybe he doesn't do that.

But it was like this thing that like, you know, the people of Florence, like they flocked to see this cartoon, this drawing that he does that is like part of the preparatory process for creating paintings.

And he comes from the Florentine tradition where drawing is prioritized as privileged as a and he really sees drawing as a form of knowledge.

And so now he he worked his things, his compositions up in pretty complex stages of drawing from initial quick studies of figural gestures like almost like line drawings that are better than anything I could do.

There's a reason that I'm talking about Leonardo rather than trying to paint right them, but then these far more polished, finished drawings that were appreciated then and now as these celebrated achievements, artistic value.

Of course he is in rarefied company all on his own.

But Albert Einstein apparently was quite a follower of Leonardo and as an artist and as a scientist, and that Einstein apparently spoke about the connection between science and art, believing that creativity and imagination were essential components of both fields.

I imagine Leonardo would agree.

I think, like, you know, his lived experience would kind of like testify to that proclamation.

And sure, like, yeah, him and Einstein seem to be cut from the same cloth.

Yeah, it certainly seemed.

And we get a chance to examine that whole cloth coming up very soon here on PBS Fort Wayne.

Here's more about the upcoming Ken Burns document on Leonardo Da Vinci.

He shows us something between what you see and what you don't see.

But this is the story, the most curious man in history.

He was always interested.

He never took no for an answer.

There are certain supreme figures in the life of our civilization who fascinates because they seem to belong to two worlds at once.

And Leonardo is supreme amongst all of that kind.

The influence of his vision was enormous.

We have an artist leading the scientific discoveries.

He wants to do the impossible.

He's posing questions and looking for answers.

He's doing things no one had ever done before, and that is simply astounding.

November 18th or 19th at 8:00, November 18th at eight, that starts at all.

But you can get a preview of this special Ken Burns documentary coming up at Purdue Fort Wayne on November 6.

And you know all about that.

Doctor Steven Cody will be there with you to answer some questions and see where things go.

Yeah, should be fun.

Looking forward to going there just like today.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

This was great.

Appreciate Dr. Steven Cody, Associate Professor of Art History, Purdue Fort Wayne.

I'm Bruce Haines with PrimeTime for all of us here at the station.

Thanks for watching.

Take care.

And we'll see you again next week.

And.