Lifestyle
Artist, scientist, polymath — a new documentary uncovers the real Leonardo da Vinci
People watch a hologram called “Studio di uomo barbuto” (study of bearded man) during a Leonardo da Vinci multimedia installation in Milan in 2019.
Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Miguel Medina/AFP via Getty Images
More than half a millennium after his death, Leonardo da Vinci is still one of the most well-known artists in the world. The rare artist who, when you name some of his most iconic paintings, most people will immediately picture the artwork in their minds: the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, his Vitruvian Man notebook sketches.
We have a lot of labels for da Vinci — artist, scientist, polymath — but a new documentary seeks to understand da Vinci as a person.
Documentary filmmakers Ken Burns, his daughter Sarah Burns, and her husband, David McMahon, are the co-directors of a new two-part miniseries called Leonardo da Vinci.
Ken and Sarah Burns sat down with All Things Considered host Scott Detrow to talk about what they learned about the human experience from studying da Vinci.
The trailer for the new PBS documentary, “Leonardo da Vinci.”
YouTube
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
Scott Detrow: Ken, I want to start with you. You have made a career out of telling American stories. What was it about Leonardo da Vinci that made you want to step outside that lane that you have carved so well?
Ken Burns: Sarah and Dave. I was an old dog that needed to be reminded that I could still learn a new trick. I’d had this sort of sense that I only did American topics. I think the rest sort of plows from that. They moved to Italy for a year to work on this, and sort of realize that this person is one of the most extraordinary gifts to humanity that we’ve ever had, arguably the person of the last millennium. And lots of people could make a run for that statement, but Leonardo is a hugely inspirational figure.
(From left) David McMahon, Sarah Burns and Ken Burns arrive at the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner in January 2013 after co-directing the documentary “The Central Park Five.”
Evan Agostini/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Evan Agostini/AP
Scott Detrow: There are so many different elements of da Vinci that I think fascinate us 500-plus years later. What to you is his most remarkable aspect? What to you is the draw that makes you go, like, “I can’t I can’t believe he did that”?
Sarah Burns: I think it’s really his curiosity, and that’s what leads him to want to explore everything. He’s obsessed with nature and knowing everything there is to know about it, and that’s what leads him down all of these different paths that, to him, are entirely connected. He does not see boundaries between these disciplines that today we would say, “Art is over here and science is over here.” It’s all part of this grand experiment to try to understand the world. And so for him, it’s all process. And that’s the amazing thing about him is that he is looking at all of these things, and in each case, pushing it further, wanting to know more, asking more questions, rejecting authority in many cases on a subject, in order to figure out what the reality, the truth of this thing. And it’s extraordinary to see that.
Ken Burns: I think Sarah is right that this focus on nature and relentlessly questioning everything, it makes him see that it was necessary to know everything about the human body, the circulatory system, the skeletal system — the everything — in order to paint the Mona Lisa, and vice versa for these other things. So what happens is that what Leonardo leads you to is the essential essence of the human project. What is the nature of this universe? Why are we here? Why am I here? What is my purpose? Where am I going? These are essential questions that our daily life distracts us from. I mean, left us no kind of diaries of what he felt, but he left us thousands of pages of what he thought.
The Virgin of the Rocks at the National Gallery in London in 2019.
Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Tolga Akmen/AFP via Getty Images
Scott Detrow: One of the most interesting things about da Vinci is the fact the guy was kind of a procrastinator. So many of these great paintings weren’t finished. So many of these commissions took a very long time. What do you make of that aspect of it?
Ken Burns: I think procrastination isn’t quite the right word. I think it’s really this relentless questioning of the universe, as Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker, says in our film. So you see in a great painting like the Adoration of the Magi — that is an abandoned work — that perhaps the questions that he is asking have not been answered or won’t be answered by this particular project, and he’s moved away. So he’s not in the business of art. He has to survive, he has to get commissions, he has to live — but he’s about these higher pursuits. So he’ll walk away because he’s either satisfied or he’s not satisfied and needs to turn his attention to something else; to study water dynamics or to study the flight of birds, or to understand things about gravity or anatomy, or all of these things that he’s constantly pursuing. And he didn’t invent the helicopter or the submarine or these things, but he, in his drawings, prefigured our own pursuits later on. And that makes him incredibly modern.
Documentarian Ken Burns conducts a question and answer session in June in College Park.
John McDonnell/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
John McDonnell/AP
Scott Detrow: I want to pause from the Renaissance for a moment and talk about current events. Because, Ken, we talked about the fact that this is a non-American subject that you tackle, but you have been telling the story of America throughout your career. And I have to ask, a week after this presidential election, what do you think the story of America over the past decade is? What is the story that’s happening right now, in the middle of the moment, at least? How are you thinking about the currents that we’re seeing and the choices the American people are making?
Ken Burns: The first thing is that you want to make sure that you don’t superimpose a story. You don’t want to tell people what it is. You have to let the story emerge. The other thing is that human nature never changes. So these are not unfamiliar events. Historians are, for the most part, happy because we know that there is existing precedent, and we know that people get through things and that there are challenging times and there’s unexpected parts. This is why documentary, to me, is so much more fruitful than making stuff up. And so I have to wait and give some distance. And so I think that what you have to do is exhale a little bit, and we cannot look away. We have to dedicate ourselves to telling complicated stories. And when you do that, then you’ve got the tools. I mean, there’s no greater teacher than the history you don’t know, and that allows you to meet a moment with a little bit more courage and a little bit more purpose and determination.
Scott Detrow: Let’s end on Renaissance Italy. And I want to end this interview by asking what your favorite work of art by Leonardo is, and why? Now this project is done and about to be shown to everybody, what are you still thinking about?
Sarah Burns: The one that moved me the most, I think just standing in front of it, was his Virgin and Child with Saint Anne. It’s larger than I had realized, and it’s been restored within the last decade or so, and so the colors are vibrant in a way that we unfortunately don’t always get with these paintings. I was stunned standing there. And we were lucky to get to go there and film overnight at the Louvre when it was empty, and sort of just experience it on our own, which was a really moving thing to be sort of up close and personal with that one.
A visitor takes a picture of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre in 2012.
Philippe Huguen/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Philippe Huguen/AFP via Getty Images
Ken Burns: For me, I have an experience where I was scouting in advance of Sarah’s filming in 2019 and in an empty Louvre with the paintings going up, and I passed by this thing called the Virgin of the Rocks. And, you know, I read the thing, I went, “Huh.” You know, “Another great background and whatever.” And then, in our film, through an interview that Sarah and Dave did with Monsignor Timothy Verdon, a Catholic priest but also an art historian, he narrates a version of this painting that is new to me. And it woke me up from the person who saw it, that basically this woman who knows through all time that she is to bear the son of God who must die. Her maternal instincts in this painting, she’s trying to restrain John the Baptist. She’s trying to reach her son, but an angel isn’t there. And so you have, as he says, this larger purpose of drawing. You’re seeing a mother with the natural maternal instincts. And not just the people in three dimensions, but the intentions of their mind — what they’re feeling, what they’re thinking. And that, to me, is just what we’re all here about, all of us.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
-
News5 minutes agoTrump, Netanyahu at odds / Elusive Iran deal : Sources & Methods
-
Los Angeles, Ca1 hour ago'Top Gun: Maverick' actor identified as victim stabbed to death in Tarzana
-
Detroit, MI2 hours agoStorm chances return, which could impact Motor City Pride, graduations this weekend across Metro Detroit
-
San Francisco, CA2 hours agoHilton campaigns in San Francisco as California primary votes still being counted
-
Dallas, TX2 hours agoCrews cover up AT&T branding as stadium becomes
-
Miami, FL2 hours agoMiami leaders gather for FIFA World Cup Host Committee Gala
-
Boston, MA2 hours agoPackage fire outside Boston’s Museum of African American History under investigation
-
Denver, CO2 hours agoRockies beat reporter Patrick Saunders to leave Denver Post
