Director: David McMahon, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns
Painter, engineer, anatomist, dreamer of flying machines: this two-part documentary tries to fit all five centuries of Leonardo's afterlife into four packed hours.
What is Leonardo Da Vinci about?
Built from notebooks, letters, and surviving artworks, the film reconstructs a life that jumped constantly between disciplines most people never combine. It opens on the illegitimate son of a Florentine notary who trained as an apprentice painter before turning his curiosity toward hydraulics, human anatomy, weaponry, and eventually flight. Voice work from Keith David and Adriano Giannini carries long stretches of Leonardo's own writing, letting his private observations sit next to the finished paintings that made him famous. The two parts move chronologically through his workshops in Florence and Milan, his patronage battles, his notoriously slow pace on commissions, and the unfinished projects that piled up around him. Rather than treating him as a myth, the documentary keeps returning to the physical evidence: sketches, mirror-written notes, and half-built inventions that show a mind working faster than his hands could keep up.
Cast & crew
Keith David and Adriano Giannini split narration duties, one grounding the historical framing and the other voicing passages drawn directly from Leonardo's own notebooks, giving the film two distinct registers instead of a single flat narrator.
Context & significance
Rather than isolating the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper as standalone masterpieces, the documentary situates them inside the chaos of Leonardo's actual working life, where dissection studies, canal designs, and stage machinery for court festivals competed for his attention alongside painting, which helps explain why he finished so few commissioned works.
Where & how to watch
This documentary is available on K-Time with a Farsi-language interface designed for Persian-speaking viewers, and both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles are included. Anyone can read this page; watching the film requires signing into a free K-Time account.