Art, Science and the Human Experience: Ken Burns on Leonardo da Vinci

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well up next, a deep dive into the life work of prominent Renaissance genius, Leonardo da Vinci. Many will know him as the painter behind the famous Mona Lisa, but he was also influential, an inventor, scientist, and philosopher of his time. Well now, da Vinci is the subject of this new documentary, directed by the father daughter duo, Ken and Sarah Burns.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is the story of the most curious man in history. He was always interested. He never took no for an answer.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: There are certain supreme figures in the life of our civilization who fascinate us because they seem to belong to two worlds at

once.

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GOLODRYGA: It is a fascinating exploration of da Vinci’s impressive achievements through volumes of personal notebooks and a series of interviews. And the pair sat down with, who else, but Walter Isaacson to talk about the making of this film.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, welcome to the show.

KEN BURNS, DIRECTOR, “LEONARDO DA VINCI” ON PBS: Thank you, Walter.

SARAH BURNS, “LEONARDO DA VINCI” ON PBS: Thank you for having us.

ISAACSON: Ken, over the years, you’ve made almost 40 films, all set in America. Now, you’re doing Leonardo da Vinci. Why?

K. BURNS: Well, it’s all your fault, Walter. We were working together on a film about Benjamin Franklin, and you’d given us a good interview for that film, and we were having dinner in Washington, D.C., and all evening long, you were pushing me to consider Leonardo da Vinci as another great artist and scientist. You thought that maybe the 18th century, certainly in America, the greatest a scientist was Benjamin Franklin, if not the world, and certainly, he was a great artist of the word and of political artistry. The compromises that created the United States are his. But I kept saying, Walter, I don’t do non-American topics. But I came out of that dinner and was talking to Sarah Burns, my oldest daughter, and David McMahon, her husband, who we had collaborated for many years on films like “The Central Park Five” and “Jackie Robinson” and most recently “Muhammad Ali.” And they said, we love the idea of Leonardo. So, Sarah and Dave picked up family, my two oldest grandchildren moved to Italy for a year and did all the basic research, wrote the script, did most of the interviews and brought back all this raw material, which we then had the luxury, because it’s PBS, to digest over many, many months, well more than a year and create this portrait. And I’m so glad I did. Many of the themes we go for are universal in the American story. And I think here you have, you know, the guy who is speaking to the universality of the human experience in every molecule.

ISAACSON: Speaking of Benjamin Franklin, Sarah, the common theme of both of these is that they are people connect the arts to the sciences, people who connect engineering to the humanities. Tell me about developing that theme.

S. BURNS: I think it’s entirely central to who Leonardo was, that he had these interests across such a wide spectrum, and he didn’t see those things as being separate. To him, all of these things were related. And part of his larger effort to just understand the universe and everything he could about the human experience, the human body and how all of these things are connected. And so, we were inspired by Leonardo’s interest in all of those things, to find ways to tell this story in a way that showed that interconnectedness between nature, between art, between science, engineering, all of these things that fascinated Leonardo. How can we show them all as related and connected?

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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The ancients described man as the world in miniature. Because in as much as man is composed of earth, water, air, and fire, his body resembles that of the planet. And as man has in him bones, the supports and framework of his flesh, the world has its rocks, the supports of the Earth. As man has in him a pool of blood in which the lungs rise and fall in breathing, so the body of the earth as its ocean tide, which likewise rises and falls every six hours as if the world breathed.

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ISAACSON: Another thing that connects Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin is that they’re the two people and two of the people in history who most tried to learn everything you could know about every subject knowable. How does that help them figure out the patterns of nature, Ken?

K. BURNS: Well, this is the key to the whole thing. I mean, what’s so interesting with regard to Leonardo is that he’s born out of wedlock. And so, he’s not going to be able to take a kind of traditional trajectory that his father, a well-known notary in Florence would have permitted him to do, go to university. You know, he ends up at the end of his life knowing more than any scholar in any particular discipline. And as Sarah is saying, he doesn’t see the borders between the disciplines. And so, what his first teacher is nature, and he’s beginning, as the filmmaker, Guillermo del Toro, says in our film at the opening, that his great, you know, privilege, the responsibility was to, you know, interrogate the universe, ask it every essential question about what is its nature. And so, he’s studying water dynamics. He’s studying botany. He’s studying atmosphere. He’s studying rocks and geology and fossil distribution. He’s inventing, he’s looking at flight and gravity before Galileo. And he doesn’t have a telescope and he doesn’t have a microscope, but he understands a kind of fundamental thing that the solar system and the atom share a similar and one could say profound architecture. And so, I think there’s something incredibly compelling that he’s able to escape the specific gravity, no pun intended, of his upbringing to become a person who knows almost everything. So, the Mona Lisa is a great work of science and it’s — and his anatomies are great works of arts. And I can hear him talking in my ear saying, don’t make the distinction. I have to — in order to paint the Mona Lisa, I have to understand not only the bone structure and the musculature and how hair is and how things drape and what the background and the atmospheres in that background are doing, but I have to know the circulatory system. I have to know how the heart works. And all of that is so amazing that it is absolutely why this is the most famous painting on Earth. We may have encrusted it with pop symbolism, but it is — that smile is — in her smile, is the whole human experience there, and he’s able to take and not only make a three-dimensional portrait of somebody that’s different and better than anybody else had ever done, but he knows, as he said, the intentions of their mind. He wants to know what they’re thinking, what they’re feeling, what their suffering is, what their joy is. And his life is this joyous inquisitive interrogation of everything there is to know. And Franklin is in that realm, but he’s trailing way behind who I — the guy who I think is the man of the last millennium.

ISAACSON: Sarah, your father’s talking about the interconnection for Leonardo of art and science and how he didn’t make a distinction. I remember going to see the Deluge drawings that he made at the end of his life at Windsor Castle, and I asked the curator, do you think he made these spirals as works of art or works of science? And the curator looked at me with a sort of haughty air and said, I don’t think Leonardo would have made that distinction. So, how did you see the way his experimentalism, his love of science, affects his art, and vice versa?

S. BURNS: Yes, I think that curator’s absolutely right that these things are not different for Leonardo. It’s all part of the same process of experimentation, of exploration and process. I mean, I think he’s interested in understanding all of these things and in how do we get there, how do you study them, how do you experiment with them, and where do we go? And so, I think all of that, you know, he is making these connections and he’s seeing patterns, he’s looking for patterns across nature, and he’s tying all of these things together. But for him, as I was saying, this is about putting this all together. So, the paintings are a reflection of all of what he’s learned in studying atmosphere, the circulatory system, every aspect of the human body, and he wants to combine it all into this sort of pieces of knowledge, and all of his writing reflects that. I mean, those notebooks, you know, there are more than 4,000 pages that are left behind by him. You know, very few paintings, many of them unfinished, but the notebooks are this incredible window into this mind, I think a very unique mind for that curiosity and that ability to see the interconnectedness of absolutely everything.

ISAACSON: Ken, you usually use still photographs and call it the Ken Burns effect, the Civil War, jazz, regal (ph). How do you do something in a period in which there’s no still photographs and video?

K. BURNS: I think what was so great about what Sarah and Dave were able to sort of suggest is that because, as Sarah says, of Leonardo’s lateral thinking, this ability to encompass all this stuff, it suggested that we could split the screen, which is really risky for us, because my whole project is to say that a painting is alive, that it’s three dimensional, that you can go into it and do a close up for a photograph as well, of course, and that the landscapes are themselves the painting. So, we’ve reversed it, and to do a split screen, not just two frames, maybe four, maybe six, maybe not, whatever it might be was — and to include modern footage in it and photographs and all across the 20th century was to encompass his — the capaciousness of his mind and his curiosity. And so, we risked returning those images to their plasticity, that is to say their two dimensionality, but at the same time we were honoring the sheer magnitude of his work.

ISAACSON: Sarah, this idea of split screens, you use it to connect the past to the very present sometimes. Tell me about that.

S. BURNS: Yes. I mean, I think, again, it’s about Leonardo’s lateral thinking. We want to be in his brain. Think about what he’s thinking and what he’s seeing and how he’s processing all of this information. And we’re also thinking about his imagination. He is both this incredible scientist and thinker and also has this extraordinary imagination and creativity. And so, there are all these things, inventions, things he draws, ideas he has that are, as you said, incredibly modern and that, in many ways, are sort of throwing us into the future, into the present so that no, he doesn’t invent the helicopter, but he imagines the fact that we could someday fly, that we could create these machines that would allow us to fly. And so, all of that gives us this permission, this opportunity to use material from across the centuries to reflect that modernity and to reflect his imagination, these things that we will eventually achieve that he prophesized in some way. And so, we can see a rocket ship taking off, and we can see bicycles, and we can see cars, and we can think about the way that his ideas are, whether they’re planting a seed for these things, or just imagining the possibility of them, it gives us license to really expand what we can think about and what we can show. And so, for us, that was really exciting because it was very different and it created this creative opportunity for us and for our editors to pull in all kinds of materials that we would never normally consider. Experimental films. I mean, all kinds of stuff.

ISAACSON: I mean, in some ways, what you do is you have him as the inventor of modernity.

S. BURNS: Yes.

K. BURNS: That’s exactly right. Yes.

S. BURNS: Yes. Right. He didn’t have to invent the helicopter exactly to be the inventor of modernity.

K. BURNS: Right. He’s inventing an attitude and a relationship to life, to creation, to all of history, to possibility. And in so doing, it keeps his moment and his viewpoint utterly alive for us. And it’s within his space, within his purview, that all of this stuff has taken place. And I think that’s really wonderful. It’s not saying that there’s a direct line between, you know, Leonardo and Sikorsky, whoever invented the helicopter, but there is, and there is in the spirit of the time, the opening up the spaces. And I think there’s a couple of things, not having that classical education, the formal university education is great, being liberated from that, but I think it’s also that he’s — he doesn’t leave us much personal, you know, tabloid information about what he’s feeling. We don’t have diaries. These 4,000 plus pages, as Sarah said, are basically his philosophy. So, we get inside his head. We try to figure out his relationship. You know, when he’s finally imported by the king of France to be his Aristotle, you go to the presumption that the king of France is Alexander. Aristotle is a great philosopher and thinker and writer. But so’s — you know, so’s Leonardo, he’s just not published in his day, and so it accretes out. And also, he’s the botanist, and the anatomist, and the greatest artist, and, you know, the painter of the most famous painting in the world. So, I think that —

ISAACSON: Two most famous paintings. Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

K. BURNS: And The Last Supper. And for me who grew up knowing — you know, we had a Last Supper in our house. We had a — you know, the Mona Lisa, of course, is in everyone’s imagination, to be able to sort of reset, to take off the layers of kind of popular consideration and rebuild a Mona Lisa or a Virgin and the Rocks or a Lady with an Ermine or, you know, The Last Supper and to do it in a way that just adds value in a way that I think he would have appreciated, that after a while, these views of things, we make jokes about her smile, Marcel Duchamp paints a mustache, that we can go back to a time when this is a stunning revelation of all of humanity embodied in the 24-year-old wife of a well to do silk merchant from Florence.

ISAACSON: Sarah, he paints only maybe 14 or 15 totally finished paintings. He leaves most of his art unfinished. Likewise, he designs helicopters that don’t fly, weapons of war that are never built. As you look at his unfinished work, what do you learn? And I know you probably stood in front of the Adoration of the Magi, my favorite unfinished painting of all time.

K. BURNS: Of all time. Yes.

S. BURNS: Yes. We — you know, I think for him, I think a lot of people look at the fact that he left all this work unfinished and see that as a failure of some kind, and I don’t see it that way at all. I think that he was interested in process, and he saw those works as experiments, scientific experiments, even if you want to think about it that way. And so, I think for him, it was about what he could learn from that process and how all of what he’s learned could be depicted in this way. And I think we’re actually very lucky sometimes, as with the Adoration that he didn’t finish it because it is still spectacularly beautiful, even in its partially finished state. And it gives us this sense of what his process was, how he layered these works, and these, you know, under drawings and under paintings, and also how he saw the work, the painting itself, as an experiment, and that he was making changes on the panel as he went, rearranging where this thing was, moving something around, trying to figure out exactly the way he wanted to tell the story. Because ultimately, that — the paintings, and that one in particular, are telling a story and they’re reflecting all of these different expressions and ideas and thinking about how all these people would have reacted in that scene and it’s incredibly ambitious, maybe too ambitious to finish, but it also —

ISAACSON: It’s a narrative. Just like the Last Supper, is a narrative, emotional movement.

S. BURNS: Yes, it’s extraordinary.

ISAACSON: It unfolds.

S. BURNS: It unfolds over time. It’s extraordinary. And so, it’s — the fact that it’s unfinished is this wonderful opportunity to see everything that he put into a painting. And that’s sort of unique.

ISAACSON: Ken, what would it be like, since you call him the inventor of modernity, if he came back today?

K. BURNS: You know, we talk about this, Sarah, Dave, and I talk about this a lot. I think of all the people, over the last 50 or so years that I’ve touched, you know, tried to wake up, he’d be the person least sort of perturbed by arriving in the present moment. I think he’d go, oh, yes, you did this. Fantastic. You got that done. Oh, you got to the moon? Tell me what — how did you handle the gravity thing? You know. And I think he’d be there. I don’t think he’d be a filmmaker and put us all out of business. You know what I mean? I think he’d just do it better than anybody else. And so, I sort of feel he’d do it. And because he’s rooted clearly in this time, he’s looking back to the ancients and he seems to be prophesizing, as Sarah said, really accurately what we’re going to become, there’s a kind of automatic modernity and a meaningfulness that he will always have.

ISAACSON: Sarah Burns, Ken Burns, thank you for joining us.

S. BURNS: Thanks for having us, Walter.

K. BURNS: Thank you.