Leonardo Da Vinci Unavailable

Leonardo da Vinci, a two-part film by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, introduces the life and accomplishments of the fifteenth-century Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519). What works best in this production is the way in which Leonardo’s notebooks are skillfully edited into the narrative, accentuating that they are perhaps the crown jewel of his achievements. Viewing the numerous selections from the many thousands of pages he notated captures the vastness of his interests and helps to delineate the way that topics tended to recur throughout his life. For example, he repeatedly illustrated both the dynamics of water and the nature of the human body during many phases of his life. We also see how Leonardo was a hands-on thinker. Indeed, one particularly fascinating aspect of his notebooks is how they seamlessly mingled his innovative, cross-disciplinary ideas about art, invention, the body, and physical phenomena with grocery lists...