Leonardo da Vinci

Magnificent.

It is ambitious, musically, visually and intellectually. Directed by Mr. Burns, daughter Sarah Burns and David McMahon, “Leonardo da Vinci” is always a feast for the eyes and often enough for the mind.

Leonardo Da Vinci breathes new life into the artist’s legend; Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon have painted a pretty complete picture of a man who was much more than the sum of his most famous works.

A project that isn’t really enlightening about da Vinci as a person, but explores the polymath’s intellectual and artistic processes in a way that’s effectively cumulative and often fascinating.

Bursting with fascinating tidbits, but it also does a good job of explaining why each of the maestro’s brushstrokes was innovative and important.

A thorough and engrossing biography that can’t help but feel incomplete, so vast and unusual is its subject.

Rather too much time is spent repeating staged close-ups of a left hand sketching in ink or applying paint, or else executing inscrutable mirror-writing on parchment — Leonardo’s secretive signature method — coupled with explanatory voice-over. .... Part 2, “Painter-God,” is the more satisfying, zeroing in on the experimentation that drove his unique art and engineering, which fantasized flying machines, weapons of war and designs for urban infrastructure.

Given such astonishing material, Ken Burns — of all people — feels the need to hype it up. The temptation is understandable. The giving in to it is not. The first rule of nonfiction, on screen no less than on the page, is you trust your material. .... To the extent “Leonardo” shows us the results of that seeing, it can be transcendently good. To the extent it distracts from those results, it’s another departure for Burns: a real disappointment.