Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns.

Leonardo Da Vinci (2024), BBC iPlayer, Written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, narrator Keith David, Director Ken Burns.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/m00264cj/leonardo-da-vinci

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026ch9/leonardo-da-vinci-series-1-2-part-two-paintergod

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardo_da_Vinci_(2024_film)

Ken Burns that heavyweight of public service films and whose documentary films have attempted to explain the American nation to itself looks to Tuscany and Florence and the genius of Leonardo da Vinci as the crowning feature of Renaissance art and science.

Leonardo da Vinci would have understood better than most, perhaps better than Ken Burns, why Amazon and Jeff Bezoz—in the pantheon of Forbes top five richest billionaires in the world—commissioned Melania and gave it the kind of advertising budget that eclipsed all of Burns’s output. Power and the rules of patronage demanded the bended knee to power.

The Mona Melania might have had an enigmatic smile. Da Vinci, the Sherlock Holmes, of natural science and art, would look to highlight the contradictions of such images and look beneath the surface—to find more surface. As an icon and iconoclast, he’d go the wrong way round to find the right sense of space. In The Last Supper, for example Judas is included in the same light as the others, not a demon, but psychologically isolated. Inner light and darkness. Inner life over political messaging and point scoring.

 

Notes.

Leonardo da Vinci grows up in a Tuscan village surrounded by nature, then he moves to Florence, where the Renaissance is in full bloom, to apprentice as an artist and craftsman. He shows extraordinary talent but at times struggles to finish commissions. Later, in Milan, he joins Duke Sforza’s court, begins writing treatises and paints a monumental fresco depicting the Last Supper. 

Leonardo works as a military engineer, designs fanciful flying machines, studies light and shadow, investigates gravity, dissects cadavers and pens treatises on a vast array of subjects, all while seeking the perfect patron.

 

In Florence, Milan, Rome and finally France, he pours the sum of his scientific and artistic knowledge into a portrait that will become the most famous painting on earth.

Leonardo disliked rigid narratives. His notebooks show a fascination with:

•           contradictions

•           human frailty

•           the gap between appearance and reality

 

clarity who painted ambiguity

•           the symbol of reason who embraced mystery

•           the symbol of mastery who left things unfinished

•           the symbol of Renaissance order who dissolved boundaries

•           the symbol of scientific progress who resisted final answers

 

Leonardo anticipated the neuroscience of perception

He understood — intuitively — how the eye and brain work:

• peripheral vs. central vision
• how shadow shapes emotion
• how ambiguity activates interpretation
• how the mind completes incomplete information

He was doing perceptual science centuries before neuroscience existed.

He also anticipated the modern hunger for scientific explanations

Today, neuroscience is fashionable because it promises clarity about ambiguous experiences.

Leonardo did the opposite:

• He used science to create ambiguity.
• He used anatomy to deepen mystery.
• He used optics to make a smile that can’t be pinned down.

Empirical science to produce uncertainty.

That’s iconoclastic.

Leonardo rarely completed his works.
Not because he was idle. He believed knowledge was always in motion. Everychanging.

This was heresy in a culture that valued completion and mastery of works paid for in advance.

“Experience is the mistress of all things.”

He dissected bodies despite religious taboo.
He questioned Aristotle.
He ignored academic tradition.

He was a one‑man secret rebellion against scholasticism.

Most painters depicted fixed expressions.
Leonardo painted transitional ones — psychological states, not poses, he took from his Notebook (which he always carried).

The Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, Vitruvian Man

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6