Da Vinci show starring Aidan Turner derided as a ‘Renaissance Monty Python’

Television

"I watched 15 minutes of it and it was enough," said one scholar. Pictured, Aidan Turner in Leonardo. Photo: Angelo Turetta/PA.

Anita Singh

April 05 2021 02:30 AM

It is billed as the “untold story” of Leonardo da Vinci, a lavish drama shedding light on the artist’s private life.

But Leonardo, which arrives on Amazon Prime next week and stars Irish actor Aidan Turner, has been derided as a “Monty Python version of the Renaissance”.

The drama is built around a storyline in which Leonardo is arrested for the murder of his female muse, Caterina da Cremona. In fact, there was no such arrest and there remains no firm evidence that Caterina existed.

The show suggests Leonardo was infatuated with the courtesan, although it does portray him as homosexual.

The producers said the eight-part series would draw on a description of the artist by one of his biographers, Walter Isaacson, as an “illegitimate, gay, vegetarian and left-handed” outsider.

As with Netflix’s The Crown, the programme does not make clear to viewers what is fact and what is fiction.

Martin Kemp, professor emeritus of the history of art at Oxford University, and one of the world’s foremost Leonardo scholars, was not impressed.

“I watched 15 minutes, which was enough,” he said, describing the drama as “beautifully filmed nonsense”.

“Like Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, this is not historical fiction but fictional history. It drowns in modern clichés.

“The artist’s studio is like a rugby club booze night – the Monty Python of the Renaissance.

“Fiction about artists is fine in itself. When it pretends to be ‘true’ it is profoundly dishonest.”

Prof Kemp is not the only critic. The drama has already aired in Italy, where Roberta Barsanti, director of the Leonardo museum in Vinci, said: “Leonardo could be accused of many things, except murder.”

The show’s creator, Frank Spotnitz, whose credits include The Man in the High Castle and The X-Files, said Leonardo had relationships with men “but perhaps the most significant relationship in his life was with a friend who was a woman”.

Turner said it was important to show the artist’s gay relationships. “He was a homosexual man, and to not show that would have been really strange, given what we know.” (© Telegraph Media Group Ltd 2021)