Amazon’s Leonardo: portrait of the genius as a young man
The creators of a new screen drama about the young Leonardo da Vinci — and its star, Aidan Turner — talk about seeking to portray the artist’s humanity
Shortly before Aidan Turner began shooting Leonardo, Amazon’s atmospheric new drama about the early career of Leonardo da Vinci, he visited the artist’s retrospective at the Louvre in Paris. The Irish actor had already read a handful of books on Leonardo, including Charles Nicholl’s biography The Flights of the Mind, but nothing, he says, compared to standing in front of the work. “I was one of a dozen people at a private view, and I got to spend some time alone with these paintings . . . It was profound and strange. I was a week away from playing him and I’m staring at his masterpieces. Up close, they were like high-definition photographs.”
Leonardo attempts to put flesh on the bones of what is known about the artist: that he was the illegitimate son of a peasant girl and a legal notary, and was sent as a boy to live with his grandparents; that he had no formal education; that he was arrested for sodomy in his early twenties after an anonymous tip-off, though avoided jail. The series shows the young Leonardo suffering the after-effects of a loveless childhood and taking refuge in art and science. As an apprentice in the workshop of the painter, sculptor and goldsmith Andrea del Verrocchio, his restlessness and hunger to learn isolate him from his peers, who become envious of his talent.
Each episode is also loosely built around a landmark Leonardo work — early instalments feature “The Baptism of Christ”, a Verrocchio painting in which one of the angels is attributed to his star pupil, and “Adoration of the Magi”, which was commissioned in 1481 by the monastery of San Donato a Scopeto but was never finished.
Turner says the series’ objective is to provide a more three-dimensional portrait of the artist. “We know some of his famous works, his inventions, his philosophies, but we’re trying to get to the core of what was driving him emotionally.” He adds that the word “genius”, which is routinely applied to Leonardo, can make us forget his humanity — “You’re playing a person, ultimately, and we’re all human.”
For the show’s American co-creator Frank Spotnitz (whose previous credits include The X-Files and The Man in the High Castle), the challenge lay in finding a clear narrative. “It’s hard to do a series about an artist, as the dramatic stakes are not obvious. It was a challenge to think about what we had to say about him and why people would care 500 years later, as great as Leonardo is. What does he mean to a modern audience?”
When Spotnitz was initially approached in 2017 by the Italian production company Lux Vide about a series on Leonardo, he declined. He had just finished work on Medici, about the Italian dynasty that rose to prominence in the 15th century, and was suffering from Renaissance fatigue. But a year later they asked him again. “They wouldn’t give up,” he recalls. “By this time, they also had Steve Thompson, a wonderful writer who has done Sherlock and Doctor Who, and I said, ‘Ah, maybe if I’m working with Steve . . . ’”
To plug the historical gaps and give the show some structure, Spotnitz and Thompson came up with various fictional strands, including one involving Caterina de Cremona (played by The Undoing’s Matilda De Angelis), the model who appears in the drawing “Leda and the Swan” and who, in the series, becomes close friend and muse to Leonardo. There’s also Leonardo’s fictitious arrest for suspected murder, prompting Freddie Highmore’s police detective, Stefano Giraldi, to cross-examine him in prison and tell his story in flashback.
“This can only be an approximation of Leonardo,” says Highmore, who, as well as playing Giraldi, is also executive producer on the show. “But I do feel like the version that we present is closer to him than [has] been done before, or hasn’t been discussed, and perhaps purposely so. He feels like a very modern man. In this show he’s an outsider, he’s an illegitimate child [and] he’s a gay man.”
Da Vinci’s sexuality has long been the subject of debate, variously from Giorgio Vasari, the 16th-century author of Lives of the Artists, to Sigmund Freud, who speculated that his homosexuality was never acted upon, to Charles Nicholl, whose biography is unequivocal about the artist’s lust for his young assistant, Salaì. Nonetheless, Leonardo is the first screen rendering of the artist that attempts to examine his attraction to men — in the early episodes we see him rejecting the advances of Caterina and later going home with a young male model, which leads to his arrest on sodomy charges.
Spotnitz notes that the series is “entertainment, not a documentary, but having said that [it provides] a lot of real history and insight into his art, what made it great and the struggles he encountered. The fictional elements of Freddie’s character and the character of Caterina — who is actually a real person, we just don’t know anything about her — are there to get to the human truth of Leonardo. There’s a method to this. By using fiction, I think you get closer to the truth than you would if you stuck to the documentary approach.”
Along with the challenge of creating a convincing protagonist, Leonardo’s creators encountered more practical problems. Shooting began in Italy in December 2019 but, because of Covid-19, the production shut down in March 2020 when they still had nine weeks’ filming left. Location work had been planned in Milan and Mantua, but was abandoned. Instead, the backlot — the location for the exterior sets — was expanded and the numbers of extras reduced when filming resumed in June. Spotnitz says he rewrote some of the dialogue to allow for fewer actors in single scenes, “but I don’t think the audience would suspect. It’s pretty seamless.”
For Turner and Highmore, this meant rethinking how they worked. “Something we might have shot in half a day was now a two-day shoot,” Turner says. “And just the social element of talking to other actors about a scene, that’s all gone. Instead, you’re in a green room on your own with a mask on and a visor. You want to compare notes and talk about the thing you’re doing, and just relate to the person before you get into the character. You don’t realise that’s so important until it’s not there.”
Nonetheless, Turner — whose previous roles have included the dwarf Kíli in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Desperate Romantics and, most famously, the eponymous lead in the hit BBC drama Poldark — is proud of the series which was produced in extraordinary circumstances and through which they all had a crash course in problem-solving. I note that Leonardo sees him once again in period costume, swathed in an array of muslin shirts. Does he ever want to play a modern-day police detective or a drug dealer, just so he can wear normal clothes?
“That’s got to be next, right?” he laughs. “I’m hoping something more contemporary will be in the pipeline where I can wear a pair of jeans. But you get an offer to play someone like Leonardo da Vinci and, well, there are some things you can’t say no to.”
‘Leonardo’ launches on Amazon Prime Video on April 16