Review: Ken Burns’ absorbing new Leonardo da Vinci doc on PBS sidesteps one important question

Wild guess: You’ve probably heard of Leonardo da Vinci. The most fascinating is the complex compositional analysis of the figures in Leonardo’s second most famous painting, “The Last Supper,” that vast fresco in a communal dining room of a Dominican convent in Milan. Leonardo da Vinci’s 1494-98 “The Last Supper” fresco is in the Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a Dominican convent in Milan, Italy. Surely Leonardo’s erotic and emotional subjectivity within a repressive milieu was not nothing in shaping his worldly explorations — especially as a “disciple of experience” — but Burns doesn’t go there. Penn State scholar Christopher Reed once pointed out that Dante dubbed sodomy “the vice of Florence.” Two hundred years later, around the time of Leonardo’s late-15th century arrest, fully one-quarter of the city’s male population — hundreds of men every year — had run afoul of the antisodomy laws.