Loading summary
Transcript40 lines
- [00:01]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors. To get all History hit podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.
- [00:20]
Ken Burns
Stay Farming DJ Dramos from Life as a Gringo. No. Making smarter financial moves today secures your financial freedom for a successful tomorrow. Tackle these situations in stride and efq. Be annoyed when an unplanned expense comes up, but not let it be something that slows me down, right as I did with repairing my credit. You know, hiring somebody to do credit repair for me. That was a gift that I gave myself that allowed me to then, you know, get my first apartment like a good neighbor. State Farm is there. State Farm. Proud sponsor of my Kultura podcast network.
- [00:54]
Ryan Reynolds
Ryan Reynolds here for I guess my hundredth mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming. Here, give it a try@mintmobile.com switch whenever you're ready.
- [01:17]
Don Wildman
$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes. Details.
- [01:28]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we expl From Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Leonardo da vinci was a 15th century Italian polymer. His paintings are some of the most beautiful and best known of all works of art. He transfigured portraiture. He painted the first landscape in Western art. He created sketches of astonishingly forward thinking mechanical devices, including machines of war. He wrote treaties on the nature of water and a codex on the flight of birds. He dissected human anatomies and designed machines that he hoped would fly. He was an inhabitant of Renaissance Italy, and yet he was a restless visionary as focused on the future as the present. He was perhaps a man like no other to talk about Leonardo da Vinci today. My guest is an American filmmaker who has transformed the documentary into art. His acclaimed films include the American Buffalo, Benjamin Franklin, Muhammad Ali, Hemingway, Country Music, the Vietnam War, and many others. Perhaps most famously, the Civil War. His documentaries have won 17 Emmy Awards, two Grammys and two Oscar nominations. He's received more than 30 honorary degrees. He understands more than almost anyone how to match story with feeling and beauty. He is, of course, Ken Burns. And his latest film, with Sarah burns and David McMahon, explores in wonderful granular detail the singular genus of Leonardo da Vinci. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and you are listening to not just the Tudors from history hit Ken Burns. Welcome to the podcast. What a delight to talk to you.
- [03:40]
Ken Burns
Thank you so much for having me. It's my pleasure, my delight. And I want to stress from the onset that Sarah and Dave themselves moved to Italy with my grandchildren. Sarah's my oldest daughter and they are also the writers of it. So it's very much them. And so I will be an emissary. I'll try to be an emissary for their genius and their incredible creativity in helping the will to life this 15th and 16th century character.
- [04:08]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, your film collectively is an absolute triumph. It is mesmerizingly beautiful, it's innovative, it's compelling, it's so brilliantly constructed. It is, however, America that has captured your attention until now. So what drew you to work on Leonardo and how did you go about shaping this much material?
- [04:29]
Ken Burns
So the first part of your question is. My answer is rather pedestrian. A dear friend of mine, an American biographer named Walter Isaacson, who among many biographies, wrote one about Benjamin Franklin. And I was deep into a project and he was an interview, had also written a biography of Leonardo and had at dinner one night several years ago insisted that I should do this. And I pushed back, saying I do American topics. No, come on. He's the greatest genius, both artist and scientist of his age. And Franklin is certainly the great scientist of the 18th century, but also a great artist of words. And I was. Walter, stop. And I went out and after dinner talked to my daughter and son in law and they said, let's do it. So I called back Walter with sort of the good news that I was breaking my habit of doing it and then allowed Sarah and Dave to really run with it. The real difficulty is how you make a pre photographic subject come alive. I'm working on a big history of the American Revolution. That's the big dynamic. I think the solutions that we came up with, particularly Sarah and Dave, of exploding the single frame, allowing us to have two images or three or four or six or nine to see modern footage at the time we're looking at it. This is a man who in your Introduction, you're absolutely right. You could arguably say, along with maybe Shakespeare and Gutenberg and Mozart, maybe even Thomas Jefferson, for all his flaws and inadequacies, are the men, I'm sorry to say, not women, of the last millennium. And Leonardo really can hold his own in that struggle. And so it's how to understand this life of extraordinary curiosity and inquiry and that informed us. And in some ways we're fortunate because his biography is missing a lot of the quotidian details that you'd normally have and you'd fill it up, which then allows you to just acknowledge a few things. He's born out of wedlock, he is most obviously gay. And then you're really left with very few personal details. You know, where he traveled, you know who he was working for, you know what the contracts are. But the interior of his life is missing as he explores the interior of everyone else's life, both from a scientific and an artistic standpoint. And I think it's important from the get go that we realize that our categories are conveniences of our own discussions and commerce and other things like that. There is as much science in the Mona Lisa as there is art. And in his most phenomenal dissections and drawings of the womb, of legs, of arms, of the brain is as much art. And so he would not see the distinction between any of these categories that we feel compelled to put him into. And that's what's so liberating. I don't think I've ever in my life come across a human being. The cliche is that we use 10% of our brain and here's somebody who's using 75%. So I want to know more about it. Every step of this journey was inspirational for all of us because he demanded from the grave from 500 years ago that we be our best selves, that we be better than the ordinary thing that we bring to the moment. And it's exhilarating.
- [07:50]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Susanna, that's so interesting. And first of all, to talk about filmmaking because, I mean, we're mostly here to talk about the history, but I present TV documentaries and so I'm really sort of conscious of that world. And one of the extraordinary, difficult things to do is to make films about subjects where you don't have archive. And yet you did some wonderful things with close ups of the hand of somebody writing his amazing sort of mirror script and painting and drawing. And yet one thing I loved about it is that you didn't have someone being him in any other way. Yes, that was great. And Then this combination of using the artwork and using moving images of nature and the graphics, it's just such a powerful combination. It's a really compelling watch.
- [08:34]
Ken Burns
I think that all art is calibration. If you go to the Musee d'orsay and look at a room filled with Cezanne, you would from the middle say, oh, yeah, these are all Cezannes. I get it. He did the same thing over and over again. But if you go up, each individual painting presents a set of problems, not pejorative problems, as something to be overcome, friction in Leonardo's bird studies to be discarded, and you soar up into the sky. And so for us, you look at this and you realize that every film, no matter what the film is, presents a million, no exaggeration, problems to be overcome. And so in this one, what's so nice is that in Florence are many artisans practicing exactly the same way that Leonardo did. There are many artisans who are captivated by this idea. If you think about it, he's a left hander as I am, and we've always spent our lives smudging the page. And so here is somebody who decides to write backwards in a mirror script. Everything he wrote down requires three times the concentration and the energy that you or I would expend to say I love you to somebody. Remember, he has to write that backwards so that if you held it up to a mirror in Italian, it would say I love you. It's just an extraordinary thing. And he's left us with an archival motherlode of thousands of pages of drawings and observations and laundry lists and grocery store lists and how much he spent on his mother's funeral and all of these observations. And sometimes he's writing treatises on painting or as you mentioned, the flight of birds, and other times it's water dynamics. And they're interspersed with exquisite drawings. I have a foot doctor in New York, one of the more famous ones in New York. He said, I don't ever consult the textbook pictures. I use Leonardo's. There's things about how the working of the heart and the valves work that he didn't have calculus, he didn't have a microscope, he didn't have a telescope. And yet it took until the 1970s for MRIs to prove that he was right. It's an extraordinary way of thinking. Sometimes we think, oh, he invented the helicopter, he did this, he did that. These drums were as fanciful and exploratory as they were practical. But there were many practical machines as well. And he's dealing with gravity and motion and flight, all of the stuff without the benefit of calculus, which Newton and Einstein would have. It hadn't been invented yet. And he's doing things ahead of Galileo. And then when you think of him, Leonardo da Vinci, everyone says the artist. And I asked my friends, how many paintings do you think he did? Fewer than 20. How many do you think he finished? Fewer than 10. And then all of a sudden you're taken back and you go, wait a second. We complain that Vermeer, I complain, but we just feel privileged that there's only whatever 35 or 36 Vermeers that's, you know, three or four times the output of Finnish things by Leonardo. And yet he's arguably the greatest painter. He's certainly the painter of the most famous work of art in the history of the world, the Mona Lisa. Misunderstood, kind of calcified with the barnacles of sentimentality and opinion, or distraction, or a mustache painted by Marcel Duchamp, or by the enigmatic smile which we toss off and make jokes about. And yet embodied in that work of art is everything, the whole meaning of the universe, the meaning of life. It's a woman who don't get painted except in profile in the Renaissance, but there she is. And the smile represents the complexity of all of human life. Our responsibility within the universe to understanding who we are, what we're here for, where we were and where we're going. And these are all things that he is single mindedly pursuing. It's so exciting and inspirational.
- [12:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And one of the things your film is going to do is remind us of that. Because last time I was at the Louvre, what people were doing is that they were turning their backs to the Mona Lisa so they could get a photograph of themselves in front of it. It was like this awful thing happening in front of me. But you're saying, look and focus. Can I take you back to the beginnings of his life? You mentioned that he was born illegitimate. 1452. He was born in Tuscany. And being illegitimate, your film makes clear, is not a serious impediment in itself, but it does mean he can't go to university. And you say in the film he came to regard this as one of his greatest strengths. Why is that?
- [13:11]
Ken Burns
You're a member of the Academy and you understand the way in which many of your colleagues have educated one part of themselves and only that part. And they're deficient in so many other ways. And so you may have extraordinary brilliance in the particular subject. You may have pursued it with a kind of fanaticism. And yet there's something missing. He didn't have that. And I think he felt that he was liberated, first of all, he didn't become an accountant, a notary like his father, which is what the university would have plowed him towards. And he spends the rest of his life catching up with all of that stuff and surpassing it spectacularly, because doctors and scientists are going to the academy and not doing the kinds of things, getting to the kinds of places and understandings that Leonardo is. He's in a Western tradition, which is born of Aristotle, which is mostly observational, which is hugely great. But remember, he's in the Renaissance and so he's also connecting. They're Muslim scholars who are doing experiments. And so he mixes experimentation with observation. And you get this kind of fusion that's just not going to be present at the University of Leipzig or even the universities in the Italian peninsula, in all the city states. There's something liberating about that for him and transcendent. It allows him to pursue things outside of the strictures of the academy. So he's not a scholar, and yet his scholarship transcends that. This is no slight against the academy. It's just we've got an example of a person, because he was born out of wedlock, is not able to do that. He lives in the tiny little village west of Florence called Vinci. His mother is there, but he's raised by an uncle and shows him the beauties of nature. And so he's first exposed to this kind of observational, this insistence on seeing the world and understanding it in a microcosm and in macrocosm. To me, the analogy is that Blake says you could find the world in a grain of sand. And to me that's. That's had so much meaning that you didn't have to make your histories always top down, not just the tutors. Right. It could be bottom up. So called ordinary people. There are no ordinary people. And that we can understand that the architecture of the atom shares a profound design with the architecture of the solar system. And once you're in that kind of way, you're in some of the spectacular understandings of Eastern religion, as above. So below we get a sense of that. And Leonardo seems to have that from a very early age, has a particular, who knows where it comes from gift for drawing and as you say, may have made the first landscape in Western painting, made the first aerial drawing. And obviously those paintings that he did in the same mode as many other people, getting commissions from the church, getting commissions from rich and Monarchs and things like that, or quite often following familiar biblical scenes, which he then endows with 10 times what is needed. And I think because he's exploring all these dimensions of psychology, not just showing the person, but, as he says, the intentions of their mind, you then are deep into metaphysical and spiritual as well as artistic and philosophical things that just make him transcendent. And proves, for example, that art is even better than poetry and music at times, and that he's shown that in his work and his life. An example. And apparently, as many of the scholars said, he himself was a work of art, that he was very funny, he was very sympathetic and droll, and there was something even in his personality that attracted other people to him.
- [16:59]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yes, and such a contrast there with someone like Michelangelo, who's known for his great melancholy. Here we have proof that you can be fun and charismatic and also a genius. So we've got this formation in Florence. When he goes to Florence, he trains as an apprentice, and he's arriving there in a place of great public art, which must have had an influence on him. But as you say, when we see his first substantial painting, the Annunciation, when he's around 20, it's almost like he's emerged fully formed, ex utero, as an artist. I mean, is that right? What do we see here that characterizes his later work and how, in what ways were he developed?
- [17:39]
Ken Burns
It's so interesting. He's able to join, I assume, through his father's connections, the workshop of a very great artist, Verrocchio, sculptor and painter. And the workshops are these loud little artistic factories. You think, Andy Warhol and his factory. That's what a bodega is. It's the factory, the workshop, where all of this stuff is happening in his jewelry and his sculpture. And there's noises and clucking of chickens because they're using egg tempura. And so we were able to find these craftsmen and just show the glorious din, all of that going on, and he shows immediate promise. And Verrocchio has him paint part of a famous painting of his, including the feet in water of Christ and one of the angels, one of two angels. And you can see the spectacular difference. And you've got to assume that Verrocchio went, oh, where? Here? The mentor is suddenly realizing that I've got somebody who's going to far exceed me. And his Annunciation on his own. Leonardo's Annunciation is just a fantastic work of art. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. And then he goes on with each successive painting to do something dimensionally different. It's almost as we all remember the popular film Star wars, the first one, which is now apparently the fourth one, but I'm too old to count, where they go into hyperspace for the first time. And when you take a painting like the Virgin and the rocks and understand that here is Mary understanding that her son has to die. It's the Son of God, but still has maternal instincts. So she's got one hand trying to restrain the baby John the Baptist. Her son is oblivious to her concerns about that he's in fact blessing John the Baptist. And she, with her other hand, her left hand is trying to reach her son. But God has put an angel in the way. And so you have this incredible dynamic within this simple painting, right, Supposedly simple painting, which everybody does, everybody turns these things out. The Crucifixion, the Last Supper, the Annunciation. And there she is as Timothy Verdon, a Catholic priest who's an art historian and appreciates it all of the dynamics of both her humanity and her understanding that through all time she is to bear the Son of God who will die for the rest of us. And yet her maternal instinct, and this is the Renaissance in a nutshell in which we are going to center or re center humanity, humanism at the heart of even the most dramatic of our spiritual stories. And what could be more dramatic in Western culture than this Messiah? I've seen this scene, Susanna, like 300 times, I don't know how many. And we were just at a film festival in the United States a couple of days ago. And I just wept. Sat in the back of the theater and wept when the Last Supper was painted and wept again when the Mona Lisa at the very end of our film. You'll see this film and you will never make a joke about her smile again. Because it's that nervous laughter that you do when you don't understand and when you realize that in her is the whole universe like you, just the window to all of human questions. It's mesmerizing. And we're dwarf. We have to submit to our own atomic insignificance, as he did, and at the same time be and spirited by that. Just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self regard. I like the people who flip off the switch and permit us a kind of direct access. All the subjects are getting at it. And I described on my very first film nearly 50 years ago that I said that I was an emotional archeologist, not concerned so much with the dry dates and facts. And events of the past, but this larger. I don't mean sentimentality or nostalgia, that's our base form of emotion, but the higher emotions that art, that faith, that love, that relationship can bring out. And that's what I wish to excavate.
- [21:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's so beautifully put.
- [21:52]
Ryan Reynolds
In case you haven't heard, in the US It's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong.
- [22:01]
Ken Burns
This is America.
- [22:02]
Ryan Reynolds
But on American History hit We're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me Don Wildman, twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests.
- [22:14]
Ken Burns
Let us introduce you to the Founding.
- [22:16]
Ryan Reynolds
Fathers, guide you through the West Wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by.
- [22:22]
Ken Burns
To find out just how we got.
- [22:24]
Ryan Reynolds
Here, American History hit A podcast from History hit Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the are you talking about, you insane Hollywood? So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront.
- [22:57]
Don Wildman
Payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees extra speed slower above 40 gigabytes of details it took a lifetime to find the person you want to marry. Finding the perfect engagement ring is a lot easier. @bluenile.com you can find or design the ring you've always dreamed of with help from Blue Nile's jewelry experts who are on hand 247 to answer questions and.
- [23:18]
Ken Burns
The ease and convenience of shopping online.
- [23:20]
Don Wildman
For a limited time, get $50 off your purchase of $500 or more with code listen@blue Nile.com that's $50 off with code listenile.com A little self care can go a long way, especially amidst the hustle and bustle of the holidays. That's where Vegamore comes in. Trusted by millions, Vegamore is all about giving your hair the love and care it deserves. With their vegan and cruelty free formulas, you can nourish and revitalize your strands while indulging in some much needed pampering. Because let's face it, who couldn't use a bit more me time this time of year? Go to vegamore.com acast code acast. That's v e g a m o u r.com acast code acasta absolutely is.
- [24:16]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
For me what history should be about. It's about the recognition that other people in the past were as real as we are.
- [24:24]
Ken Burns
Exactly. Period, full stop. That's the only thing that is that somehow we put things on them, that we take things away from them. They couldn't be as sophisticated as us. There couldn't have ever been a conversation this similar to ours. And in fact, 10,000 years ago, human beings were having much more critical conversations, as much as I am enjoying this than you and I are having, and it's our job as people who are trying to resurrect. Wake the dead. A psychologist told me after my early death of my mother, that's what I did for a living, I wake the dead. If we're going to do that, then it's only in the service of waking ourselves up to the real possibilities. The Old Testament says what has been will be again. What has been done will be done again. There's nothing new under the sun that suggests that human nature never changes and that human nature superimposes itself on the seemingly random chaos of events. I say seemingly because we're such poor instruments, not using all of our parts to perceive larger patterns, and that history repeats itself. It never does. Mark Twain is supposed to have said, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. And I've never finished a project, 40 films over the last 50 years where I haven't gone, oh, my God, this is rhyming, precisely in the present. And whatever it might be, the Vietnam War, the American Revolution, Leonardo da Vinci, whatever it is, because human nature doesn't change. And so I think when we study the past, if we can extend, as you suggest, the idea that these people lived as full lives as we do in every moment, that they're not just frozen in a cartoonish painting or in an old daguerreotype photograph or even in some talkie with imperfect sound. They live just as we lived, loved, suffered, and did bad things, just as we do. That's a liberating thing. And then the past becomes as, and I'm preaching to the converted, the greatest teacher I know.
- [26:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
One of the things that you do explore about his personal life is that question of loving. In the film, you adduce evidence that Leonardo in Florence had been named in a charge of sodomy, although thankfully the charges were suppressed. Can you imagine? And that his companion Solai, who joined him as an apprentice and never left his side, was really his lover, the partner of his life. And there's been a real. A reluctance to say Leonardo was gay, I think, in some of the commentary about him. But this is a bold, clear assertion about the nature of his love. And I just wanted to ask you about making that decision.
- [27:10]
Ken Burns
As historians, we're really limited in the way that sometimes journalists or other folks can just presume that's the case. We have to say, as our scholar Serge Bramley says, most probably gay. Just there's that he's arrested on this charge of sodomy. He gets off because one of the others arrested is from a wealthy family, thank goodness. He designs, you know, One of the earliest designs is removing bars from a window. I think that's just perfect. He does take into this child as an apprentice, who later on, as he grows and mature, most obviously becomes a companion, as do other people. And yet there's so little doubt. Nobody said, we made love last night and it was great. So you have to then say, most probably this is the historian's, I think, honest dodge. And we're doing that in all sorts of films when we don't know precisely what everybody assumes we know. And all these other things that get said in the course of human events didn't often get said. I have in my editing room, I think you'll appreciate this. A neon sign in cursive, and it says, it's complicated. And the reason I put it there is I wanted to remind the people I work with, who I adore, that every filmmaker, when a scene is working, doesn't want to touch it. It's just like when you're writing. The axiom in our world is kill all the darlings, meaning the sentence that you like the best is the one that has to go. And so when a scene is working and you find contradictory information, this is not a moment of tragedy. It will change that scene, and it will maybe make it lesser, it might make it more. It will change it in a way. And the reluctance to change is a difficult impediment, an inertia that has to be overcome. One of those problems, million problems. And so I just wanted to say we've tried to, over the last 50 years, revel in that. Okay, if that's also true, that makes something. We made a series on the history of jazz, and the great jazz composer and trumpeter, who I count among my closest friends, Whit Marsalis, said on camera, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. Now we can hold that in our personal lives, in our relationships with our children, with just the stuff of life. But we don't. In a kind of abstract and theoretical way, we everything, we're dialectically preoccupied. Everything has to be male or female, black or white, rich or poor, gay or straight, and then we know and we don't know. Nothing's binary in nature. And that I think this undertow is wonderful. It disrupts the kind of normal dichotomies that we just thrill to present. Everybody's so many different things. And the fact that we're absent a lot of particulars about Leonardo's life is liberating for us because then you can turn it around saying, yeah, seems to be a gay man definitely born out of wedlock. Here is the mother, here is the father. Here's a few things that we know, the arrest, but the rest becomes just a focus on the evolution of this mind. And he is the most curious person on earth, sir Kenneth Clark said about him, I do not disagree. And we have the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who says in the film that his thing was to interrogate the universe. That was his gift to us. So he was asking every sort of question relentlessly about how things work from an ant to the cosmos, and the fact that we are the beneficiaries of his study, both in the artistic legacy that he's left in the thousands of pages of his various codexes, in his wildly experimental mind that makes him most modern of anybody born in that period. Except maybe you could argue, Shakespeare has a kind of transcendent sense of how the human dynamic works. So that our own wonderfully mongrel English language is punctuated with so many of his phrases that we employ sometimes without even knowing that we're citing Shakespeare. That you have these geniuses, these men of the last millennium, I'm postulating continually to wake us up every generation. There's no canceling, no matter what flaws they might have of these people.
- [31:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors. To get all History hit podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe and you can sign up on Apple Podcasts with just one click.
- [32:01]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said, what the F are you talking about, you insane Hollywood? So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mint mobile.com Switch $45.
- [32:26]
Don Wildman
Upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month new customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. Details.
- [32:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And I suppose it's because. Because they can't be boiled down to one thing. We can't let our cognitive dissonance reduce them to just one thing so that we can carry on with our lives and not pay attention. They demand our attention. And it does feel, as you've been saying, that Leonardo was trying to solve everything. I mean, he's trying to solve questions of physics and engineering and geometry and anatomy. And these are really innovative at the time. And maybe we can talk a bit about why they're so innovative. But the other thing I was struck by in your film is, you know, he's also designing military machines. But does this sense, from what your contributors say, that he's interested in imagining them, doesn't really care about creating them. That part almost seems incidental to them. Like it is it that he considers them fully realized by the time he's drawn them and dissected them on the page.
- [33:32]
Ken Burns
I think it's so interesting that how few paintings he has and how few are finished that he's abandoning works because whatever that arena, whatever that canvas, whatever that poplar panel that he's working on, he's just explored all the questions he want to. And the thing is great, it's so interesting that the French king finally imports him and says, do whatever you want. We don't care if you finish anything. We just want to have you around because we think you are singular in the world. And so you have this sense that he is pursuing all of this stuff and we all get distracted. We want to say, ah, Leonardo, he invented the helicopter. No he didn't. He invented the flying machine. He had ideas and that never would have worked and he understood that they wouldn't. But he left us this space for our own imagination. And so we filled it like 450 years after he designed something, materials were found that were light enough that man powered flight was possible. That's great. Or I think even more spectacular, as I described earlier, the working of the valves of the heart he'd inherited from Galen the 1300 years before. The sense that we're two chambers, he realizes there are four. He understands how the valves work and he's experimenting with grass seed and water and cows hearts. And it's not that he's hiding his light under a Barrel but he's not publishing anything in his lifetime. So the world doesn't know either the paintings really or the treatises until centuries later. And then when science begins to catch up with him. And we've interviewed surgeons in our film, a British surgeon, we've interviewed an engineer, a Muslim engineer, we've interviewed theater directors and filmmakers as well as Italian and French historians, American biographers, two extraordinary British biographers of Leonardo, just to center him, to triangulate, to try to figure out from all these points of view what more we can glean. And there is a sense of singularity and awe about him that all express, that suggest that this is an omnivorous curiosity, that doesn't make the distinctions the way the academy does, say between certain fields. He's a botanist, he's an anatomist, he's a physicist, he's a mathematician, he is trying to square the circle all the time. He is a great artist, he's a writer, he's a sculptor, he's got just this amazing dimension to him. And then I think, as I've been trying to say, it sets up something in front of you to move towards. This is intimate productions that we make. And there are 10 people at the heart of it, Sarah and Dave, particularly myself, the editors, the assistant editors, the co producers, all of them working together. And then there's a second family that may number maybe 50 of people that we've hired, cinematographers, Buddy Squires, who I've worked with for more than 50 years, who did extraordinary cinematography, both the close ups of the workers in the factories, the workshops, but also the human beings showing us their bodies and their movements of their bodies, whether it's the foot or the eye or the back muscles and things like that, all of which contribute, as well as going out into Italy and seeing the things that Leonardo would have seen. Florence, the Arno river valley, the Apennines, the Alps, to go over to France, which is why he took this unfinished painting of this young 24 year old wife of the silk merchant. It's an unfinished work that if you ever wonder why the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre and not in Italy, it's because the French king got all this stuff and he brought it and died in France. And so just the Mona Lisa alone becomes a kind of Rosetta Stone for human existence. And that knows no distinction between science and art. You just have to let it go. And as I said before, I think the Mona Lisa is a great work of science. Some of the rapturous comments about it have to do with Somebody looking at the face and the inscrutable smile that represents the human mystery, but it goes down to the throat. An early critic looking at it and said, I can see the blood moving, I can see the pulse on her neck. And if he's done that as a painter, or the Last Supper, which is maybe the invention of cinema, it isn't just a frozen moment in time, it's many moments. And he's anticipating the idea that there could be in a two dimensional plastic, we would say image, the possibility of time, as well as all of the emotions and all of the extraordinary content that is in this moment where the Last Supper takes place. As Ross Ginga, one of the historians, says, this is in an occupied city. This is a band of brothers. It's a leader, a charismatic leader, and the authorities are after him and one of the group is going to betray him. This is already a dynamic situation to which he pours in all of his genius. And genius feels like a overused word, pours in whatever that humanity that he has. And we end up with just this thing that is amazing. And that thing is never seen, right? It's in a dining room of a monastery still. People go to it and they're restoring it. But it's a big deal to get to Milan. It's a big deal to get a ticket to go see this thing.
- [39:03]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, you have done a wonderful job today in whetting the appetite of my listeners. But the film, everybody listening, you've got to see it, because it is the most astonishing achievement about a man of almost superhuman achievements. Ken, do you think Leonardo was unique in human history?
- [39:25]
Ken Burns
Let me preface it by saying, you are, and I am as well. And that's the beauty of this whole human project, right? We have within us all of that possibility. And he stands there as somebody farther along the path saying, you can do it. Come along. Keep watching, keep observing, keep experimenting, keep loving. We live in a political state, battleground state, in little tiny New Hampshire. And I have on my yard a political sign that I think Leonardo would appreciate. It says, love multiplies, which is the only equation, I think, in the whole universe that actually is true all the time. It transcends even quantum mechanics, which tells you that things are not so perfectly organized. And I think Leonardo got that his whole life. You can stand in front of a painting or an anatomical drawing, or listen to his words from the codex and realize this is somebody exploring at a level, I think he's so generous that he is saying, come along. So in that regard, it's singular. And at the same time, all the stuff that happens to him, step siblings that are interested in disinheriting them, although he leaves a significant part of his estate to them, just filled with amazing stuff. Arguments with Salai, who's this when he arrives? A kind of impish kid who steals stuff and drives Leonardo crazy and he's finally got no more war, who ends up being later on in his life with a couple of other people, just lifelong companions of whatever we can presume happens. And spectacular theatrical productions that he puts on, massive stuff that never got made, that if they got made, they'd be like Michelangelo's David, his horse that he was making for Ludwigo Sforza, the Duke of Milan, that are amazing. And so you look at him as just pure possibility, pure questioning, pure understanding that there's so much more to this relatively short existence that we have, that maybe by seeing him you are yourself excited to be more and to live up to the possibilities of our species. These are fundamental questions he's asking every single day. And I think to the extent to which we hear his words and see his art, then we are ourselves given the possibility to grow in a way that he would want us. And I think deep down inside we all would want to be in order to vivify our own lives.
- [42:11]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, it is my great hope that having tasted the renaissance in your filmmaking, you're now thinking, oh, I shall do something on Holbein because for purely selfish reasons, because I have enjoyed this conversation so much and it would be wonderful to talk to you again. Thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful film and I encourage everybody to watch it because it is glorious. Ken Burns, it's been such a pleasure.
- [42:39]
Ken Burns
It's been my pleasure. Susanna, thank you for having me.
- [42:45]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, and also thanks to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. If you enjoyed this episode, do go back and check out a wonderful episode we did on Michelangelo and a more recent look at Lorenzo de Medici the Magnificent. The links are in the show notes for this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjustthetudorshistoryhit.com or on X, formerly Twitter otjusttutors. Remember that you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it's well worth it. And as a special gift. You can also get 50% off your first three months when you use the Code TUDORS at checkout. That's historyhit.com subscribe with the code Tudors and if you'd be so good as to follow not just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [44:07]
Don Wildman
If there's one thing that my family and friends know me for, it's being an amazing gift giver. I owe it all to celebrations passport from 1-800-flowers.com, my one stop shopping site that has amazing gifts for every occasion. With Celebrations Passport, I get free shipping on thousands of amazing gifts and the more gifts I give, the more perks and rewards I earn. To learn more and take your gift giving to the next level, visit 1-800-flowers.com acast that's 1-800-Flowers.com acast Osea's limited edition Super Glow Body Set is a surefire hit for everyone on your list, even the pickiest to please. This set includes three of osea's best selling body care products at an incredible value, packed in a box so beautiful you can skip the wrapping paper. Featuring osea's best selling Andaria Algae Body Oil, Andaria Algae Body Wash and Hyaluronic Body Serum. It's so luxurious you'll want to grab an extra one for yourself too. But hurry before this set sells out. Every product OSEA makes is clean, vegan, cruelty free and climate neutral, so you never have to choose between your values and your best skin. Give the Gift of Glow this holiday season with clean, clinically tested skincare from osea. Right now you can get the Super Glow Body set valued at $106 for $72 plus an additional 10% off when you use code holiday@oseamalibu.com that's O S E a Malibu.com code holiday.