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Leonardo da Vinci is a two-part PBS documentary from Ken Burns and Sarah Burns that presents Leonardo as more than the painter of the Mona Lisa. Its central argument is that his paintings, anatomical studies, maps, machines, and observations of nature all emerged from the same habit: looking closely, asking practical questions, and drawing what he discovered.
The approximately four-hour film premiered on PBS on November 18–19, 2024. Although it may still be described as “new” in some listings, it is not a newly released 2026 documentary. Its lasting value is not simply that it retells Leonardo’s biography, but that it shows how art and investigation continually reinforced each other.
The documentary’s central idea: Leonardo’s art and science were inseparable
The familiar version of Leonardo da Vinci begins and ends with genius: the mysterious smile of the Mona Lisa, the dramatic composition of The Last Supper, and a collection of astonishing drawings that seem to anticipate the modern world. Ken Burns and Sarah Burns’s documentary takes a more useful approach. It asks what kind of working method could connect a portrait, a dissection, a map, a canal design, a study of water, and a proposed flying machine.
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The answer is not that Leonardo was secretly a modern scientist or that every machine in his notebooks was a functioning invention. He was a Renaissance artist, engineer, anatomist, observer, and court designer whose investigations were shaped by workshops, patrons, military needs, religious commissions, architecture, inherited knowledge, and the political upheavals of his time.
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His distinctive achievement was the movement between fields. Anatomy helped him represent the human body. Studies of light, color, proportion, optics, and motion informed his paintings. Drawing became a common language for recording observations, testing ideas, planning works, and imagining possibilities. The documentary is therefore best understood as a biography of a method as much as a biography of a man.
What Leonardo da Vinci covers
The film draws on Leonardo’s notebooks, historical accounts, and commentary from modern scholars, artists, engineers, inventors, and admirers. That combination lets it move between the surviving evidence and the continuing fascination with Leonardo’s work.
Rather than treating the paintings as isolated miracles, the documentary places them inside a long process of study and revision. It also gives substantial attention to the material that popular accounts often reduce to a list of eccentric inventions: thousands of drawings and notes concerning anatomy, botany, water, gravity, flight, architecture, warfare, and the mechanics of movement.
This broader emphasis matters because Leonardo left relatively few surviving paintings. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that at most about fifteen extant paintings may be counted when finished, unfinished, autograph, and collaborative works are considered. By contrast, nearly four thousand sheets of drawings and notes survive. The notebooks are not supplementary curiosities; they are among the most important records of how Leonardo thought.
Leonardo’s life and career
Vinci and Florence: training through observation
Leonardo was born in 1452 near Vinci in central Italy. He was the illegitimate son of a lawyer and a peasant woman, 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 heavily on workshop practice, drawing, close study of figures, and attention to the natural world.
Florence gave Leonardo an environment in which observation was not separate from art. To draw convincingly, an artist had to understand bodies, gestures, fabrics, animals, plants, light, and space. That practical demand helped establish the habit that would define Leonardo’s later work: treating the visible world as something to investigate rather than merely imitate.
Milan: painter, court designer, engineer, and researcher
Around 1481–1483, Leonardo left Florence for Milan. There he received the commission now known as the Virgin of the Rocks and entered the service of Ludovico Sforza. Milan expanded the range of his responsibilities. He worked not only on paintings and portraits but also on theatrical design, festivals, architecture, engineering, military devices, and scientific research.
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The Royal Collection Trust describes Leonardo’s Milanese interests as extending into light, color, proportion, anatomy, and related subjects. His career there shows why the word “painter” alone is too narrow, even though painting remained one of his most important forms of expression.
Return to Florence: masterpieces, maps, and military work
When the French overthrow of Ludovico Sforza disrupted Milan in 1499, Leonardo returned to Florence. He worked on the enormous, ultimately lost Battle of Anghiari, produced maps, and created or continued works associated with this phase, including the Mona Lisa and Leda and the Swan. He also continued intensive studies of anatomy and botany.
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For a time, Leonardo served as a surveyor for the papal army. The episode underscores how Renaissance artists could be recruited for practical state work: mapping territory, assessing landscapes, designing defenses, and applying visual intelligence to military and administrative problems. His career was not a straight line from studio to museum. It was repeatedly redirected by patrons, wars, political changes, and the needs of courts.
Later Milan, Rome, and France
Leonardo later worked in Milan under French rule and moved to Rome from 1513 to 1516. Rome offered prestige and powerful patrons, but it was not the setting for a final burst of completed paintings. In 1516, Leonardo left Italy permanently for the court of Francis I of France.
In France, he served primarily as a designer of architecture, costumes, festivals, and court projects. He died there on May 2, 1519. The date and place are historical facts; the romanticized story that he died in the arms of Francis I should be treated as legend rather than established evidence.
The notebooks: thought in progress
Leonardo’s notebooks are the documentary’s most revealing evidence because they show ideas developing before they become conclusions. The surviving material includes anatomical studies, botanical drawings, maps, calculations, diagrams, observations of water and motion, engineering concepts, and preparatory work for paintings.
These notebooks should not be read as one finished book or as a neatly organized scientific treatise. They are working records: heterogeneous, unfinished, and often arranged through association rather than according to the structure of a modern textbook. A page may move from an observation about a mechanism to a sketch of a body, a note about a commission, or a question about natural forces.
Leonardo’s left-handed mirror writing is one of their most recognizable features. Mirror script appears in notebook material concerning subjects including celestial bodies, gravity, and hydrodynamics. In the film, this writing helps make visible the distance between the polished image of the universal genius and the actual working record of a person constantly revising, testing, and extending his thoughts.
His drawings also resist modern categories. A single sheet might be an artistic study, a scientific record, an engineering plan, and a speculative proposal at the same time. The Metropolitan Museum describes drawing as Leonardo’s primary language for invention, exploration, illustration, and scientific inquiry. That is a more accurate description than dividing his work into separate boxes labeled “art” and “science.”
Anatomy: seeing the body from the inside
Leonardo’s anatomical studies were based in significant part on direct observation and dissection. The Metropolitan Museum’s catalogue identifies anatomical drawings made approximately between 1485 and 1510–1515 and describes them as evidence of an evolving understanding of physiology.
He examined bones, muscles, organs, joints, and movement. He also tried to model structures that were difficult to observe directly, including the brain’s ventricles and the flow of blood through the heart. The catalogue describes his use of casts and other experimental techniques to reason about internal structures.
The importance of this work is both scientific and artistic. Leonardo wanted to understand how the body was built and how it moved, but that understanding also helped him draw and paint human beings more convincingly. A hand, shoulder, neck, or torso could not be represented accurately through convention alone. It had to be observed as a functioning structure.
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His anatomical and botanical studies belong to the same visual intelligence that appears in his machine drawings. In each case, Leonardo looked for relationships: how parts connect, how forces travel, how surfaces change, and how movement produces visible effects.
Machines, water, warfare, and flight
Leonardo studied or designed military machines, crossbows, shields, incendiary devices, lifting mechanisms, architectural structures, canals, water systems, and flying machines. These drawings reveal an extraordinary ability to imagine mechanisms and forces, but they require careful interpretation.
It is misleading to say that Leonardo invented the modern airplane, tank, or helicopter. Some designs were speculative, and there is no basis for claiming that every famous machine drawing was built, tested, or operational. A more accurate description is that Leonardo produced sustained and imaginative investigations into flight, warfare, mechanics, and hydraulics.
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This is one of the documentary’s strongest correctives to popular mythology. Leonardo’s value does not depend on proving that he built a working prototype centuries ahead of its time. The drawings matter because they show how he investigated forces, questioned assumptions, and translated movement into visual form.
The masterpieces seen through the method
The Last Supper
The Last Supper is more than a famous religious image. It is an example of Leonardo applying research into gesture, anatomy, perspective, composition, and emotion to a complex narrative moment. The arrangement of the apostles turns physical reactions into a visual sequence, while the room’s geometry organizes attention around Christ.
The painting also belongs to a period when Leonardo was balancing artistic commissions with portraits, entertainments, engineering, and scientific study for the Sforza court. Seeing it in that context makes the work less like a solitary act of inspiration and more like one result of a broad, demanding practice.
The Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is the work most likely to dominate any discussion of Leonardo, but the documentary uses it as a starting point rather than a final explanation. Its fame can obscure the years of observation and revision behind the image.
The painting becomes more intelligible when placed beside Leonardo’s studies of anatomy, light, color, proportion, optics, landscape, and human expression. The celebrated ambiguity of the face is not simply a mysterious trick. It belongs to a larger investigation into how small changes in light, gaze, posture, and expression alter the way a viewer perceives a person.
Other major works
Leonardo’s best-known paintings also include the Virgin of the Rocks, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, Ginevra de’ Benci, and Saint John the Baptist. The National Gallery of Art identifies the Mona Lisa, Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and the lost Battle of Anghiari as works associated with his return to Florence after 1500 and describes them as masterpieces that changed the course of Western art.
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The relatively small number of surviving paintings makes the notebooks even more important. Leonardo’s legacy is not only a gallery of finished images. It is the record of experiments, revisions, abandoned plans, lost works, and unfinished projects that reveal how those images came into being.
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Leonardo’s incomplete paintings and abandoned projects are often presented as evidence of distraction or eccentricity. They can certainly show that his curiosity pulled him in multiple directions, but incompletion has a broader historical meaning.
His career depended on patrons and courts. Commissions could be interrupted by war, regime change, changing priorities, technical problems, or the death or displacement of a patron. His projects also grew more ambitious as his questions multiplied. A painting might lead to investigations of anatomy, optics, geology, water, or movement, each of which could open another line of inquiry.
For that reason, unfinished work is not merely a defect in the story. It is part of the evidence. The surviving studies show a mind at work rather than only a sequence of completed products. The documentary is most persuasive when it treats that incompletion as a feature of Leonardo’s process without turning it into a romantic excuse for every failure.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Leonardo in his historical world
Leonardo should not be presented as an isolated modern scientist transported into the fifteenth century. He was a Renaissance artist and court intellectual working amid political competition, religious upheaval, military conflict, workshop traditions, classical and medieval learning, and intense patronage networks.
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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteHis moves were often connected to those conditions. The fall of Ludovico Sforza disrupted his Milanese career. French rule changed the environment in which he worked. Military and surveying assignments reflected the practical demands of states and armies. His final move to France placed him within the world of court spectacle, architecture, costume, and royal display.
The Louvre’s curatorial approach similarly emphasizes biography, historical documentation, and the relationship between Leonardo’s works and the intellectual world of his period. That context does not diminish his originality. It explains the institutions, commissions, materials, and problems that gave his originality somewhere to operate.
How to watch and what to expect
The documentary consists of two episodes with a combined running time of approximately four hours. PBS announced that both episodes were available through the PBS App beginning November 18, 2024, with compatibility across devices including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android, iOS, and Samsung Smart TV.
That launch information should not be confused with a guarantee of current access. PBS availability can vary by station, territory, licensing arrangements, and platform. Viewers should check their local PBS station and the current PBS App listing for their location.
The film is a good choice for viewers who want biography connected to visual analysis. It is less useful if the expectation is a catalogue of futuristic inventions or a simple ranking of Leonardo’s greatest paintings. Its emphasis is on relationships: how observing a body could improve a figure, how studying water could shape a drawing, and how a sketch could serve both art and engineering.
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Further reading after the documentary
If you want a readable follow-up, Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci is a strong choice. Simon & Schuster lists the book as a 624-page trade paperback published October 2, 2018; its premise connects Leonardo’s notebooks, scientific inquiries, and artistic achievements—the same bridge this documentary makes. It works best as a companion biography, not as a substitute for the film’s visual access to drawings and paintings.
Because the notebooks are central to the film’s argument, a Leonardo da Vinci drawings book, notebook facsimile, or anatomy-focused art book can be an especially useful companion. Edition, language, price, and availability vary, so check the specific listing and prefer a reputable museum or art publisher when visual reproduction quality matters.
For readers who want more visual depth, a museum-quality Leonardo art book or exhibition catalogue can turn the film’s quick views of studies into sustained looking. Museum shops and established art publishers are sensible places to check, but a specific affiliate relationship or current stock should not be assumed.
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Final assessment
Leonardo da Vinci succeeds when it replaces the vague label of “genius” with a more concrete picture of practice. Leonardo observed directly, drew relentlessly, moved between disciplines, and repeatedly returned to questions of structure, movement, light, and perception.
That approach also makes room for limits. Not every design worked. Not every project was completed. Not every attribution is settled, and some works associated with Leonardo involved assistants or workshop collaboration. The historical Leonardo is more complicated than the legend, but he is no less compelling for that reason.
The documentary’s most durable lesson is that Leonardo’s art was not separate from his investigations of the world. His paintings and notebooks belong to one continuing experiment in seeing.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Ken Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci documentary premiere?
The two-part PBS documentary premiered on November 18–19, 2024. It should not be described as a newly released 2026 documentary.
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How long is the documentary?
The two episodes run for approximately four hours in total.
Does the film claim that Leonardo invented the airplane or helicopter?
Its subject includes Leonardo’s studies of flight and machines, but the historically careful interpretation is that many designs were speculative. They should not be described as tested modern aircraft or operational helicopters.
Where can I watch Leonardo da Vinci?
PBS made both episodes available through the PBS App at launch, with support for devices including Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android, iOS, and Samsung Smart TV. Current availability varies by station, territory, licensing, and platform, so check the PBS App and your local PBS station.
What is a good book to read after the documentary?
Walter Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci is a readable companion because it connects Leonardo’s notebooks, scientific investigations, and artistic achievements. Readers seeking visual detail can also look for a reputable drawings book, notebook facsimile, anatomy art book, or museum catalogue.
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Bottom line: Ken Burns and Sarah Burns’s Leonardo da Vinci is most valuable not as another celebration of the “Mona Lisa genius,” but as a portrait of an observational method. It shows how Leonardo’s art, anatomy, engineering, maps, and studies of nature grew from the same disciplined curiosity—and why his unfinished notebooks may tell us as much about him as his celebrated paintings.
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