More than 500 years after his death, the works of Leonardo da Vinci have never been more ubiquitous. “Mona Lisa” just got her own Lego set , and recently played a central role in Rian Johnson’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.” A controversial allusion to his famed “The Last Supper” during this summer’s Paris Olympics Opening Ceremony reacquainted the masses with the iconic image’s origins, and his “Vitruvian Man” is still a staple on the walls of anatomy classrooms across the globe.
The Italian Renaissance painter and intellectual, who produced only around 20 paintings in his lifetime, was the epitome of a man ahead of his time. He also happens to be exactly the kind of posthumously appreciated figure about which Ken Burns has spent his career making seminal documentary films. Yet, more so than any of his previous subjects, the Emmy-winning filmmaker thinks da Vinci could have mastered the modern day.
“Of all the historical characters I have ever gotten involved with, he would be the least disturbed to be dropped into the present,” Burns tells Variety . “He would be curious how we figured out this or that. He would see we went to the moon and ask, ‘How did you handle the gravity thing?’” In a new two-part documentary film for PBS on da Vinci’s life, co-directed and written by Ken Burns’ daughter Sarah Burns and his son-in-law David McMahon , the trio of filmmakers leave their comfort zone of the American history canon for the first ti.