Ken Burns Talks ‘Leonardo da Vinci’

By Lauren Daley Ken Burns has told me time and again, in various interviews about his various films, that all his films are about the same thing: “us” lowercase and “U.S.” capitalized.

But his latest film, for the first time, looks “at just the two lowercase letters,” the 17-time Emmy winner told me from his Walpole, New Hampshire, home this week. “Just us.” And how.

I was gripped watching “ Leonardo da Vinci, ” a two-part four-hour documentary directed by Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon. It airs Monday and Tuesday on PBS. Stream it via PBS.

org , the PBS App, and PBS Passport. This is what Burns and company do best. They take a subject most of us think we know something about — from country music to baseball — and blow your mind.

We all know the 15th-century Italian Renaissance man. Heck, there’s a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him. But if you remember only school-days key terms — Mona Lisa, flying machine, Vitruvian Man, Last Supper — “Leonardo” is jaw-dropping.

This is us. This is what it means to be human, to wonder about this world, to understand the intertwined relationship between the macro and the micro. He saw the human body relating directly to how the earth works.

Human veins like tree branches. A river flowing from the ocean blood to the head. He theorized why the sky was blue.

He saw marine fossils and concluded the earth was ancient and must’ve been underwater at some point — not create.