One of the more reassuring aspects of the Donald Trump era has been the emergence of authors and historians as accidental therapists. When some new calamity erupts, there is Doris Kearns Goodwin, Rachel Maddow or Jon Meacham sitting at the national bedside with soothing words about how weâve been here before and always got through it.
But when the Guardian calls Ken Burns, the quintessential American documentary film-maker who earlier this year delivered a commencement address that described Trump as âthe opioid of all opioidsâ, he is surprisingly taciturn about how last weekâs presidential election result affected him.
âI was OK,â Burns, 71, says by phone from New York. âIâm obviously very disappointed my candidate didnât win. But be careful what you wish for.â
The normally loquacious Burns stops there. Why does he think Trump won? âI have no idea. I worked very hard and I did the best I could. I left it all on the field. Iâm not a pundit. I was just a worker.â
And how worried is the maker of the definitive TV history of the American civil war about the next four years? âIâm very worried. Iâm going to talk about Leonardo just to get it out of my system now.â
That is a big hint Burns would prefer to discuss Leonardo da Vinci, his two-part, four-hour documentary exploring the life and work of the 15th-century Italian polymath. Nevertheless, your interviewer persisted. Can history offer Americans some solace at this moment?
âThis is entirely unprecedented,â Burns says. âBut there are precedents. The level of this stuff is whatâs disturbing. Historians are generally a cheerful lot because weâve seen it all before and we have seen all of this before. Itâs just not been at this level of American politics.â
Washington is bracing for its second occupation by Trump and his minions. When the sound and fury become too much, denizens could do worse than head to the National Gallery to contemplate Ginevra deâ Benci, the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas. Such art long predated the first criminal president and will long outlast him. It offers the purest form of escapism.
Similarly, this film is a timely palate cleanser for Burns, best known for exploring Americaâs class and race divisions in a canon that includes Baseball, Country Music and Jazz as well as Mark Twain, The Roosevelts, Jackie Robinson, Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin and, most recently, The American Buffalo. Leonardo is his first non-American subject.
âI was dragged kicking and screaming to it,â Burns admits, recalling how the project sprang from a dinner with old friend Walter Isaacson, a Franklin biographer whom he had interviewed for that series. âHe spent the entire dinner trying to press me to do, as he called it, a twofer â that I should do Leonardo, whom I hadnât realised till then was also the subject of a biography heâd written.
âI kept pushing back saying, I only do American topics, this is a non-American topic, and he was saying: a scientist and artist like Franklin! I remember leaving the restaurant a little perturbed that he had pushed so hard.â
Burns mentioned the proposal to his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, his partners on past documentaries including The Central Park Five, Jackie Robinson and Muhammad Ali. They loved the idea, moved their family to Florence for a year and served as co-directors. In the absence of photos or newsreels, the trio altered their film-making style, using animations and split screens with images, video and sound from different periods to convey Leonardoâs lateral thinking and connections.
Narrated by Keith David, the documentary features interviews not only with biographers and art historians but engineers, heart surgeons, theatre producers, writers and film-makers such as Guillermo del Toro, who remarks: âThe modernity of Leonardo is that he understands that knowledge and imagination are intimately related.â
But the end product is radically old-fashioned: a celebration of a great man of history without a revisionist angle or effort to knock him off his perch. For Burns, Leonardo is sui generis, an artist, cartographer, engineer, scientist, sculptor and thinker whose work was centuries ahead of its time. âHe may be the person of the last millennium,â he says.
âI would think that you would put up a big, strong vote for William Shakespeare and there are Germanic people who would argue for Bach or Mozart or Goethe; the Americans could even throw up a deeply, deeply, deeply flawed human being in Thomas Jefferson for distilling a century of Enlightenment thinking into the American catechism which, at least for 248 years, has worked pretty well. All of those are there but Leonardoâs clearly the smartest â how do you say that?â
For once he seems to run out of words before settling on the irresistible: âGenius.â
Self-portrait (blood on white paper). Circa 1515. Photograph: Musei Reali di Torino
As the film recounts, life dealt Leonardo a good hand and he played it brilliantly. He was born on 15 April 1452 in Vinci, a small town near Florence, the son of a notary and peasant woman who were not married. Burns says: âWe know that he was born out of wedlock and that actually perhaps saved him and made him distinct.
âHe didnât become a notary like his dad in Florence and, because he was born out of wedlock, he could not attend university, which would have perhaps forced out of him the sense of ecumenical wonder at the oneness of the universe. Instead nature was his first and extraordinary teacher.â
His other stroke of luck was to come of age in Florence at a time when it was exploding with creativity, just as Shakespeare thrived in the theatre scene of Elizabethan London. Wealthy patrons who wanted to make a social statement would hire artists to make work for their homes, churches or public spaces.
Leonardoâs early fascination with nature and artistic expression led him to an apprenticeship with the leading painter Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence, where he honed his skills in painting, sculpture and metalworking.
Leonardo da Vinci was truly a Renaissance man, excelling in art, science, and anatomy. His curiosity and relentless pursuit of knowledge set him apart from his contemporaries. His ability to capture the essence of his subjects in his paintings, as well as his groundbreaking anatomical studies, demonstrate his unparalleled talent and intellect. Despite the challenges he faced, both personally and professionally, Leonardo’s legacy continues to inspire and awe us to this day.
” Esa tenacidad es inspiradora, contagiosa. También es reconfortante.
Leonardo pasó sus últimos años en Francia por invitación del joven rey Francisco I, quien admiraba su talento. Continuó sus estudios, guiando a artistas más jóvenes y trabajando en varios proyectos hasta su muerte en Amboise, Francia, el 2 de mayo de 1519. No dejó diarios ni memorias, lo que asegura que su biografía mantenga una ambigüedad de elige-tu-propia-aventura.
Burns reflexiona: “Todas estas cualidades están comprimidas en una persona magnífica que nos hace el gran favor -no es consciente por su parte- de no permitir demasiado del tic-tac biográfico, las sensaciones sensacionalistas en las que nos gusta fijarnos, y en cambio nos deja 4-6,000 páginas de estos cuadernos llenos de reflexiones filosóficas, exploraciones matemáticas, anatomías, dibujos, observaciones, un par de listas de la compra, uno o dos quejas sobre algo, una mención de que su madre había venido y luego sus gastos funerarios un año después.
“Hay pequeñas pistas pero lo que eso hace es que nos requiere -como dice David McMahon- meternos filosóficamente entre sus orejas y centrarnos en el trabajo, la producción, la curiosidad incansable. [El historiador del arte británico] Kenneth Clark dijo que es el hombre más curioso que ha existido y eso es suficiente para mí. El cliché es que estamos usando el 10% de nuestro cerebro y, si eso es cierto, entonces él está usando el 75 o 85%.
Burns parece estar usando más del 10%. Actualmente tiene cuatro o cinco proyectos en marcha, incluida una película biográfica de Barack Obama y una historia de la Revolución Americana de 12 horas con un elenco de voces que incluye a Kenneth Branagh, Damian Lewis, Hugh Dancy, Tom Hanks, Samuel L Jackson, Morgan Freeman, Laura Linney, Ethan Hawke, Maya Hawke y Liev Schreiber.
“Cuanto más viejo me hago, más ávido me vuelvo”, reflexiona. “Hay algo creativo que me emociona tanto”.
En 2026, América celebrará su cumpleaños número 250 con Trump en la Casa Blanca. ¿Podemos esperar una película de Burns sobre este presidente tan singular? “Necesitas tener la perspectiva y la distancia que conlleva”, responde. “Él parece haber acelerado las cosas de tal manera que no parece necesario esperar mis habituales 25 o 30 años. Sería, ciertamente, un tema interesante.”