Tortured genius? No, Leo was the life of the party

The world keeps showing us geniuses with tortured souls. We get a grumpy Beethoven, a dreary Poe, a troubled Michelangelo.
But then there was Leonardo da Vinci, resisting stereotypes.
“The sense we get … is that he was more-or-less a happy person,” said Sarah Burns, whose epic profile of him starts Monday (Nov. 18) on PBS. “That he was the life of the party, even, in some ways.”
He was a gifted painter (an example is shown here), in a vibrant time for eager thinkers.
“They’re in these bodegas, where they are learning math,” said David McMahon, Burns’ husband and filmmaking partner. “They’re reciting poetry. They’re playing music. It feels a little bit like Warhol’s Factory, without the (drugs).”
That joy is reflected only briefly in “Leonardo da Vinci,” from 8-10 p.m. Monday and Tuesday. The film focuses mostly on the art, not the man.
That’s unusual for a project produced by Ken Burns, Sarah’s dad. But this time, he had a hands-off approach. “It is their film in every respect,” he told the Television Critics Association.
Besides, there wasn’t much personal information to find.
“Leonardo left behind many thousands of pages of his notebook entries,” Sarah Burns said. “(But) he very rarely wrote about his personal life.”
The notebooks mentions paying funeral expenses for a woman who lived with him. Scholars assume she was his mother, but aren’t sure.
He was accused of “sodomy” and possibly arrested, she said.. “Those charges were dismissed. Florence at that time was a relatively safe place to be gay; there were many other artists and figures who were known to be gay.”
Mostly, she said, he was a fun guy. “People loved him. He liked to sing and play music. He was a person you would want to be around.”
His mind stayed in overdrive, creating fresh concepts in painting, sculpting, science and engineering. Alas, she said, “the process was more important to him than the completed work.”
He ignored obstacles, McMahon said. “There’s the church that’s condemning things that he and others are doing, He doesn’t seem too concerned.”
The church kept hiring him, even when he failed to complete projects. So did wealthy patrons. When he did finish something, the results – Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, etc. — were quite splendid.