Leonardo da Vinci discovered how to capture life in his paintings. And he found a new way to beat the castle. But what he never came up with was a good recipe for shampoo.
At least, that’s the main message I picked up from eight episodes of “Leonardo,” a biographical series that premieres Tuesday on The CW. And the makers of “Game of Thrones” and “Leonardo” It seems that the heroes of old decided they needed greasy locks.
But “Leonardo” It seemed that “Game of Thrones” was very indebted to me, and I could hardly take care of my appearance. Its music is a “GoT” riff, complete with drum beats and shimmering harps, and contains needless nudity and nonsensical decapitation. Think “CSI”-style spin-off, “GoT: Florence.” It shows that our sense of history is inherently aesthetic, even pictorial. Our understanding of the past is based not on actual historical thinking, but on the fantasies and images our own culture has already constructed of that past. And that means we reject the true alienness of history in favor of the comforting stories told about it.All grounded in today’s reality.
Despite debts to ‘Game of Thrones’ A fantasy, “Leonardo” has the backbone of 21st century police procedures. The first episode, and each subsequent episode, begins with the protagonist in prison on a murder charge. When the artist (played by Aidan Turner) is interrogated by a Renaissance policeman named Stefano Girardi (Freddie Highmore is happy to be allowed to wash his hair), flashbacks show how the artist Spoiler alert: In the final episode, when Leonardo is about to be hanged for his crimes, we and Girardi find out that he didn’t do the deed. We’ll find out. Viewers who haven’t seen that twist coming should disable their Wi-Fi.
Most viewers are probably watching “Leonardo”, so the series will probably do well with its invented plot banality. More than storytelling, it’s a glimpse into a certain Renaissance genius who, despite dying 5,000 years ago, has become one of today’s artistic stars. (His “Salvator Mundi” helps. Sold for $450 million in 2017. ) but even if “Leonardo” It is set in Italy around the year 1500 and aims to tell stories about real people. The show’s grasp of history is as weak as any other dragon drama.
The murder plot is pure fiction, but it’s forgivable. Today’s biography isn’t expected to stick to facts.When I saw “Rocketman,” I didn’t expect Elton John to really hover over the piano. Unforgivable is the virtual image “Leonardo” Leonardo painting. The artist played by Turner (“The Hobbit,” “Poldark”) seems to be a neurotic heartthrob with attention deficit disorder. In fact, Leonardo’s genius was extremely methodical. He took his time understanding and describing every hair on the woman’s head, every twig and leaf of the tree.
Giorgio Vasari, the great Renaissance biographer, described Leonardo as a charming conversationalist, saying, “His personal beauty cannot be overstated, and his every move was a grace.” , described him as a man “high and full of a delicate spirit”. In “Leonardo” we approach Kurt Cobain. It’s as if he has a single model of what creativity looks like here in the 21st century, with the creators of “Leonardo”. Do not dare to ask me to imagine another. I think they may be right: we may be so utterly stuck in our own time that we cannot live in the deeply disparate realities of the past. may provide examples of progress you might want to see.
This biographical series could have gone in that direction when it came to the artist’s sexuality. I was most attracted to women. Sure, the series shows him kissing a man or two, but the whole plot is about an invented character named Caterina da Cremona, played by Matilda de Angelis. (She’s the one we keep seeing naked for no reason. “She was love,” Leonardo invents. He’s talking about his girlfriend, would you like to hear this gay artist say, “Him?”
When it comes to capturing the heterogeneity of the past, the show misses even details that could easily get right. Rather than drawing with a goose quill, Leonardo uses a metal nib. Candles, an expensive commodity in the Renaissance, burn by the dozen in every room, as if Leonardo had a sideline job in aromatherapy. (Perhaps his vanilla his cinnamon pillars made the Mona Lisa smile.) When he paints “The Last Supper,” Shaw uses a computer-generated image showing how perspective works in a painting. It turns into an animation, but its perspective is wrong.
About halfway through the series, I take off my art critic hat, abandon any interest in seeing a different yesterday, and pretend the show isn’t about real artists, let alone gay Renaissance artists. What happens if you change the title from “Leonardo” To “Tony”? Will it help me enjoy it?
not much.
Since the plot of “Tony” — Excuse me, “Leonardo” — Writers Frank Spotnitz, Steve Thompson, and Gaby Usher are just an excuse to tell the life story of a great artist. I try to cram all the “great artist” clichés I can. Dialogue line. “And that pain drives people to do terrible things.” Leonardo van Gogh, you might call him, reflects the thoughts and actions of real artists today, let alone the Renaissance. Not a hybrid creature. It’s a screenwriter’s fantasy of what an old artist should be like.
In “Leonardo”, the Renaissance master tells his pupil:you have to learn to draw what you felt.This is a bromide that came a few centuries after Leonardo’s time, and painting “only what you see” was actually one of Leonardo’s most radical inventions.
To understand how and why art was made in the past, we may have to forget our current idea of artists.And you can’t blame “Leonardo” Because I haven’t tried it. We are all addicted to dirty hair.
