Ken Burns and Sarah Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci is best understood not simply as a documentary about the painter of the Mona Lisa, but as a biography of Leonardo’s way of thinking. The two-part PBS film, approximately four hours long, connects his paintings with his anatomical studies, notebooks, maps, machines, observations of water and flight, and work as a court designer. Its central idea is that Leonardo’s art and scientific investigations were not separate careers: each continually sharpened the other.
The documentary premiered on PBS on November 18 and 19, 2024. It is therefore not a new 2026 release, although it remains a useful entry point for viewers discovering Leonardo or returning to his work. Availability through the PBS App and local stations can vary by country, licensing arrangements, and date.
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Leonardo da Vinci | $12.84 | Buy on Amazon |
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Leonardo. The Complete Drawings (Bibliotheca Universalis) | $18.32 | Buy on Amazon |
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Leonardo. The Complete Paintings and Drawings (Klopper) | $36.65 | Buy on Amazon |
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Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? | $4.54 | Buy on Amazon |
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Leonardo's Notebooks: Writing and Art of the Great Master (Notebook Series) | $11.39 | Buy on Amazon |
A documentary about a method, not just a masterpiece
Leonardo da Vinci is often reduced to a familiar set of images: the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, the symmetrical body in the Vitruvian Man, and sketches of machines that seem to predict the modern world. The Burns documentary takes a broader and more historically responsible approach.
Its Leonardo is a Renaissance artist, anatomist, engineer, mapmaker, architect, designer, and court intellectual whose interests constantly overlapped. He studied muscles because he wanted to understand movement and represent the human figure more convincingly. He examined light, color, proportion, optics, and water because those subjects mattered to both painting and natural philosophy. He drew machines not only as inventions but as attempts to understand force, motion, balance, and material behavior.
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This is the film’s most valuable interpretive contribution: Leonardo’s achievement was not that he somehow possessed every modern profession at once. It was that he observed relentlessly, recorded what he saw, and moved between disciplines in ways that made each investigation more useful to the others.
What the PBS film covers
Leonardo da Vinci was directed and produced by Ken Burns and Sarah Burns, written by Sarah Burns and David McMahon, and executive produced by Ken Burns. The filmmakers draw on Leonardo’s surviving notebooks, historical accounts, and commentary from modern scholars, artists, engineers, inventors, and admirers.
The result is a wide-ranging portrait rather than a simple chronological inventory of paintings. The film follows Leonardo from his origins near Vinci through Florence, Milan, Rome, and France, while repeatedly returning to the drawings and notes that reveal how he worked. Those working documents are essential because Leonardo left a surprisingly small number of surviving paintings compared with the scale of his reputation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art estimates that at most about fifteen extant paintings can be counted when finished, unfinished, autograph, and collaborative works are considered. By contrast, nearly four thousand sheets of drawings and notes survive. That imbalance explains why a documentary about Leonardo must spend so much time with pages, diagrams, anatomical studies, and unfinished ideas.
Leonardo’s life: the historical path
From Vinci to Florence
Leonardo was born in 1452 near Vinci in central Italy. He was the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant girl, and relatively little is known about his earliest years. By the age of 20, he was working as a painter in Florence, where artistic training depended on workshop practice, drawing, close observation, and the study of figures and the natural world.
Florence gave Leonardo the environment in which painting could become an investigation. Learning to depict a body required more than copying its surface. An artist had to understand posture, joints, muscles, weight, expression, light, and the relationship between a figure and its surroundings. The habits formed in this setting would remain visible throughout Leonardo’s career.
Milan and the expansion of his ambitions
Around 1481 to 1483, Leonardo moved from Florence to Milan. There he received the commission now known as the Virgin of the Rocks and entered the service of Ludovico Sforza.
Milan transformed the range of work available to him. Leonardo was no longer occupied only with easel painting. His court responsibilities included portraiture, theatrical and festival design, engineering, architecture, military devices, and scientific research. This was also the period associated with the Last Supper, created for the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
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The Milanese years make it difficult to separate Leonardo the painter from Leonardo the designer and investigator. Court culture demanded spectacles, buildings, celebrations, weapons, and technical solutions as well as religious and secular images. His career depended on patrons, and patronage repeatedly opened new fields while also exposing his projects to political change.
Return to Florence and political disruption
When the French overthrew Ludovico Sforza in 1499, Leonardo returned to Florence. He worked on the enormous and ultimately lost Battle of Anghiari, created maps, and began or continued projects including the Mona Lisa and Leda and the Swan. He also served briefly as a surveyor for the papal army and continued intensive studies of anatomy and botany.
These years were not a quiet period between masterpieces. They show Leonardo responding to commissions, military needs, geography, natural science, and the practical demands of patrons. The lost Battle of Anghiari is especially important to the story because its disappearance illustrates a recurring feature of Leonardo’s career: many of his most ambitious projects were interrupted, abandoned, damaged, or left incomplete.
Rome, France, and the end of his career
Leonardo later worked in Milan under French rule and moved to Rome from 1513 to 1516. In 1516, he left Italy permanently to accept employment at the court of Francis I of France.
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The notebooks show Leonardo thinking in real time
Leonardo’s notebooks are the documentary’s central evidence. They contain observations, calculations, maps, botanical studies, anatomical drawings, diagrams of machines, studies of water and motion, architectural ideas, and preparatory work for paintings.
They are not a single completed scientific treatise. They are working records: heterogeneous, unfinished, and often organized through associations that do not resemble the chapter structure of a modern textbook. A page may move from a practical engineering problem to a study of an expression, a note about water, or a geometric calculation. That disorder is not a defect in the historical record. It gives viewers access to thought while it was still developing.
Drawing was Leonardo’s primary language for this process. A line could record the shape of a muscle, test the position of an arm, explain how a gear might move, describe the flow of water, or preserve an observation about nature. The same visual intelligence operated across art, anatomy, engineering, and natural philosophy.
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Leonardo’s distinctive left-handed mirror writing appears throughout his notebooks and scientific studies. It is particularly visible in material concerning subjects such as celestial bodies, gravity, and hydrodynamics.
Mirror writing is striking, but it should not be treated as a mysterious code that unlocks a hidden Leonardo. It is part of the physical evidence of how he worked. The notebooks show a left-handed writer combining text, diagrams, calculations, and images into a private working system. Their value lies less in the unusual direction of the script than in the extraordinary range of questions being pursued on the page.
Anatomy: observation serving both science and art
Leonardo’s anatomical studies were based in significant part on direct observation and dissection. Surviving sheets made approximately between 1485 and 1510–1515 document an evolving understanding of the body’s structure and physiology.
He studied bones, muscles, organs, joints, and movement. He also tried to model internal structures through casts and other experimental techniques, including investigations of the brain’s ventricles and the flow of blood through the heart. These efforts show an investigator testing ways to make invisible structures understandable rather than merely copying conventional diagrams.
Anatomy also had an immediate artistic purpose. A painter who understood how a shoulder rotates, how muscles change under tension, or how a hand is constructed could represent the human figure with greater force and credibility. Leonardo’s anatomical work therefore belongs to both the history of scientific observation and the history of painting.
The connection works in the other direction as well. Artistic training encouraged Leonardo to notice relationships of proportion, surface, movement, and perspective. His drawings do not simply illustrate conclusions reached elsewhere; they are instruments for asking questions.
The Last Supper, the Mona Lisa, and the problem of genius
The Last Supper
The Last Supper is one of the clearest examples of Leonardo’s integrated method. Its emotional power depends on gesture, anatomy, perspective, spatial organization, and the varied reactions of the figures. Leonardo’s interest in how bodies communicate emotion was inseparable from his interest in how bodies are built and move.
The work also belongs to a particular historical setting: Leonardo made it in Milan while serving Ludovico Sforza, alongside portraiture, entertainments, engineering, and research. It was not created by an isolated genius working outside society. It was a court commission produced within a workshop and a network of religious, political, and technical demands.
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The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is often presented as proof of Leonardo’s inexplicable brilliance. The documentary offers a more productive way to consider it: as the result of prolonged looking, experimentation, and revision.
Leonardo’s studies of light, color, optics, anatomy, and expression all inform the painting’s effect. The ambiguity of the face is not separate from his interest in how vision works or how subtle changes in muscles and light alter human expression. The painting’s fame can obscure the slow, investigative practice behind it.
Leonardo’s other major works—including the Virgin of the Rocks, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Ginevra de’ Benci, and Saint John the Baptist—also matter to the larger argument. His legacy cannot be adequately explained by one portrait or one smile.
Machines, water, and flight: imagination without exaggeration
Leonardo studied and designed military machines, crossbows, shields, incendiary devices, lifting mechanisms, architectural structures, canals, water systems, and flying machines. These drawings are among the most popular evidence for the claim that he anticipated the modern age.
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That claim needs qualification. Leonardo did not invent modern aircraft, tanks, or helicopters in the sense of building and successfully operating those machines. Some of his designs were speculative, and not every drawing was a tested prototype. A more accurate description is that he produced extraordinarily imaginative studies of flight, warfare, mechanics, and hydraulics while trying to understand forces and movement.
The distinction between an invention and an investigation matters. A design can be historically important even when it was never built. Leonardo’s engineering drawings reveal how he broke complex problems into parts, examined leverage and resistance, considered materials, and used visual representation to explore possibilities.
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His studies of water are especially revealing. The Codex Leicester includes investigations of the reflective properties of celestial bodies, gravity, and hydrodynamics. His late Deluge drawings combine an intense understanding of water behavior with imaginative and almost apocalyptic visualization. They are neither purely scientific diagrams nor merely poetic fantasies. They show empirical curiosity and artistic invention working together.
Why unfinished work is central to Leonardo’s story
Leonardo’s unfinished paintings and abandoned projects are not side notes to his biography. They are part of the evidence for how he worked.
He pursued difficult questions for long periods, revised ideas, changed methods, and moved between commissions and investigations. Political upheaval, patronage, technical problems, workshop collaboration, and changing interests all affected the completion of his projects. The result is a career containing both extraordinary finished works and a large body of incomplete experiments.
This record complicates the popular image of effortless genius. Leonardo’s achievements emerged from sustained attention, but sustained attention did not always produce a finished object. The notebooks preserve the detours, tests, reversals, and possibilities that a conventional gallery of completed masterpieces would hide.
It is also important to distinguish Leonardo’s own work from later attribution debates. Some works associated with him involved assistants or workshop collaboration, and certain attributions remain disputed. The documentary can illuminate the artistic culture around Leonardo without turning every uncertain object into a settled Leonardo original.
The Renaissance world behind the legend
Leonardo should not be presented as a modern scientist accidentally transported into the fifteenth century. He was a Renaissance artist and court intellectual working within workshop traditions, inherited classical and medieval knowledge, religious institutions, military conflict, and systems of patronage.
His employers wanted paintings, portraits, buildings, festivals, maps, weapons, and spectacles. Courts could give him access to money, materials, assistants, and ambitious projects, but they could also redirect or interrupt his work. The fall of Ludovico Sforza, French rule in Milan, military turmoil, and the eventual move to Francis I’s court all shaped what Leonardo could pursue.
This context does not diminish his originality. It explains how his originality operated. Leonardo’s curiosity was supported, constrained, and repeatedly redirected by the institutions around him. His notebooks preserve both individual invention and the practical demands of Renaissance life.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How to watch the documentary
Viewers will get the most from the film by treating the notebooks as a recurring thread rather than waiting only for the famous paintings.
- Watch for transitions between disciplines. When the film moves from a painting to anatomy or from a machine to a study of water, the connection is usually the point: Leonardo is applying observation across fields.
- Separate finished works from working evidence. A polished painting and a rapidly drawn diagram answer different questions. The diagram may reveal process more directly than the finished image.
- Keep the political timeline in view. Leonardo’s moves between Florence, Milan, Rome, and France were not simply personal choices. Patronage and political change repeatedly altered his opportunities.
- Be cautious with the word “invention.” A flying-machine study or military design may demonstrate remarkable conceptual thinking without proving that Leonardo built or tested a functioning machine.
- Notice the unfinished projects. Incompletion is not merely a personality anecdote. It helps explain the difference between Leonardo’s enormous intellectual output and the relatively small number of surviving paintings.
Where and when to watch
PBS made both episodes available through the PBS App beginning November 18, 2024, with compatibility announced for devices including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android, iOS, and Samsung Smart TV. Local station schedules and digital availability can change, and access may differ by territory and licensing status.
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- Leonardo s Notebooks
If the episodes do not appear in your local PBS catalog, check the current listings for your station and region rather than assuming that a device problem is responsible. A documentary available in the United States may not be available in the same form elsewhere.
What to read after watching
For a readable follow-up, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci connects Leonardo’s notebooks, scientific inquiries, and artistic achievements in a single biography. Simon & Schuster identifies the edition as a 624-page trade paperback published October 2, 2018. It is a natural companion for viewers who want more chronology and context after the film.
If the notebooks and anatomical studies are what interest you most, consider a Leonardo da Vinci notebook facsimile or a book reproducing his drawings and anatomy studies. Edition quality, language, price, and availability vary considerably, so check the specific edition before buying. Museum and art-publisher catalogues can be especially useful when high-quality reproductions and curatorial commentary matter more than a quick general biography.
Disclosure: If a retailer link appears on this page, DocumentaryTube may earn a commission from a qualifying purchase at no additional cost to you. Product availability and prices can change.
What the documentary ultimately says about Leonardo
Leonardo’s lasting importance does not depend on proving that he predicted every modern technology or possessed a supernatural level of intelligence. His notebooks show something more tangible and more instructive: a disciplined willingness to look closely, question inherited explanations, draw what he observed, and test relationships between apparently unrelated subjects.
The paintings remain extraordinary, but they become more understandable when placed beside the anatomical sheets, studies of light, maps, hydraulic diagrams, engineering plans, and unfinished experiments. Leonardo’s art was not separated from his investigations of the world. It was one of the ways he investigated it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Leonardo da Vinci documentary actually new?
No. Ken Burns and Sarah Burns’s two-part PBS documentary premiered on November 18 and 19, 2024. It may still be newly discovered by individual viewers, but it should not be described as a 2026 release.
How long is the PBS Leonardo da Vinci documentary?
The two episodes together run for approximately four hours.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsDid Leonardo da Vinci really build the flying machines and tanks shown in popular accounts?
Not in the modern sense. Leonardo produced imaginative studies of flight, warfare, mechanics, and hydraulics, but many designs were speculative rather than successfully built and tested prototypes.
Where can I watch Leonardo da Vinci?
PBS stated that both episodes were available through the PBS App beginning November 18, 2024. Current access depends on your local station, territory, licensing, and the platform’s current catalog, so check PBS listings for your region.
The Bottom Line
The documentary’s lasting insight is that Leonardo’s paintings, anatomy, engineering, and notebooks belong to one practice of sustained observation. Watch it for the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, but stay for the unfinished drawings and working notes: they provide the clearest view of how Leonardo turned curiosity into art, investigation, and invention.
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