Leonardo is very insistent. There are no lines in nature.

November 26, 2024 9:13 PM

Ken Burns' most recent documentary is on Leonardo Da Vinci, exploring his life and works. 4 hours, split into 2 parts, free to stream through mid-December via PBS [US only, sorry!]. Part 1 / Part 2 (Content warning for Part 2 - Depictions of human dissection). Some neat extras from the PBS website: 3D models of Leonardo's inventions, High-res gallery of some of Leonardo's work featured in the doc, UNUM interviews with various professionals talking about Leonardo and how he relates to their field.
posted by wander (9 comments total)

Review: Ken Burns' absorbing new Leonardo da Vinci doc on PBS sidesteps one important question - "The doc acknowledges its subject's homosexuality but doesn't fully explore the implications for an artist living in a repressive milieu."

Part 2, “Painter-God,” is the more satisfying, zeroing in on the experimentation that drove his unique art and engineering, which fantasized flying machines, weapons of war and designs for urban infrastructure. What gets short shrift, however, is Leonardo’s homosexuality. That essential element of his identity is presented as merely neutral fact, rather than the alienating circumstance it no doubt was...

A small-town kid born out of wedlock, he moved from the rustic countryside of Vinci, 30 miles west of Florence, to the sophisticated city to make his way. There he acted on his same-sex attraction. Illegitimate and homosexual, he was doubly outside the era’s accepted social norms.

Leonardo, reportedly something of a looker, was arrested at 24 for sodomy with 17-year-old Jacopo Saltarelli, a male prostitute. (Charges were later dropped.) At 38 he took in as a studio assistant Gian Giacomo Caprotti, the impoverished 10-year-old child of a tenant farmer, who later became his lover and managed his business affairs for the rest of Leonardo’s life. (The pretty but unruly boy was soon nicknamed Salaì, a slang contraction of Saladin, the Kurdish Muslim sultan who famously quashed Europe’s 12th century Crusaders in Jerusalem.) And Francesco Melzi, the handsome and erudite 14-year-old son of a Milanese nobleman, became his painting apprentice and intellectual confidant when Leonardo was 53, remaining with him and compiling his voluminous papers until the artist’s death at 67.

All this is duly noted in the documentary, yet the implications for his creativity are not examined. Surely Leonardo’s erotic and emotional subjectivity within a repressive milieu was not nothing in shaping his worldly explorations — especially as a “disciple of experience” — but Burns doesn’t go there.

Penn State scholar Christopher Reed once pointed out that Dante dubbed sodomy “the vice of Florence.” Two hundred years later, around the time of Leonardo’s late-15th century arrest, fully one-quarter of the city’s male population — hundreds of men every year — had run afoul of the antisodomy laws. A stark, yawning gap separated private behavior and deep-rooted public morality...

The question is worth asking: Could Leonardo, a brilliant, innately gifted gay man denied full urban citizenship given his illegitimate birth status, have had a more powerful — and unprecedented — frame of reference for considering both art and the natural world as something radically different from what had been assigned in European culture? Given the artist’s transformative impact, I wish this otherwise engaging documentary asked it.

posted by kliuless at 10:21 PM on November 26 [7 favorites]

Wow. Today I learned something. Thanks!
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:12 AM on November 27

> It would be a mistake to assert that Leonardo made art as an expression of his identity, sexual or otherwise — a cultural concept that wouldn’t fully emerge until the modern era. (Even the codified term, homosexual, didn’t exist until 1892, although same-sex behaviors have always been with us.) [outhistory]

[newyorker:]

"recently, the sensationalizing notion at the center of Dan Brown’s mega-selling book “The Da Vinci Code”—that one of the apostles depicted in Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” is actually, and visibly, a woman—connects him with our current preoccupation with gender fluidity. And this sense of connection isn’t entirely imposed. Leonardo’s works do show a striking fixation on androgyny"

posted by HearHere at 6:27 AM on November 27

I saw only the first episode and the issue of homosexuality was presented in a contradictory way. First it mentions that Leonardo was arrested with the male prostitute. Then it goes on to say that gay relationships were widespread and generally accepted (though perhaps not technically legal?). Was he arrested because of the prostitution angle? Or because of the gay relationship? It's not explained; the arrest is a quick anecdote. I wanted the series to get into this more fully as the series says that his homosexuality influenced a huge amount of his work, thinking, life and being, -- while at the same time barely mentioning it.

It left the impression that Ken Burns and PBS knows which side its bread is buttered. Maybe this is explored more fully in the subsequent episodes. But this stood out to me as I watched the show, well before I read this post.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:26 AM on November 27

Burns tends to shy away from most societal issues other than those related to race. It’s not a surprise he offers a meager note on Leonardo’s probable homosexuality. It’s something so widely suspected, it would have been startling to leave out. But it’s not a something Burns would typically build-out into something more substantial.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:58 AM on November 27

I haven't watched this yet, though I hope to over the T'giving weekend. That said, Caroline Shaw's soundtrack is just lovely and a treat all by itself.
posted by the sobsister at 7:58 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]

I recently read an excellent book, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, which has a section about Leonardo. My favorite detail is that apparently Leonardo had terrible handwriting! Pg. 114 of the book quotes a professor Martin Kemp: "They're difficult to read, no so much because they're back to front, it's just an absolutely horrible late-medieval hand...How someone could have such wonderful control of the pen and such God-awful handwriting I never understood."

And this appears to be part of the reason the surviving notebooks went largely unread for almost 300 years.
posted by dnash at 4:19 PM on November 27 [1 favorite]

(not to open a 500-year-old can of worms, but does anyone think about how if leonardo was alive today he would be canceled on sight for his boyfriend situation? we're a strange bundle of conflicting values, humans.)
posted by mittens at 4:58 PM on November 27

[Leonardo's writings are] difficult to read, no so much because they're back to front, it's just an absolutely horrible late-medieval hand

Oddly, just today I watched a Jeopardy episode where this came up in a question. Leonardo was left-handed, and used mirror writing for his own notes, switching to regular writing for other readers. This constant switching surely contributed to the legibility of his handwriting.

My father was born left-handed, in a time and culture where that was considered unacceptable (actually sinister), was forced to write right-handed, and thus his entire life he could write with both hands equally horribly.
posted by intermod at 1:48 PM on November 28 [1 favorite]