Here's the first photo of David S. Goyer's new show about the younger, sexier Leonardo da Vinci

By Austin Bernhardt | October 12, 2012 | 8:00pm

Aux Features TV

David S. Goyer has released the first production photo for Da Vinci's Demons, the previously reported new show that aims to paint a Portrait of the Artist as a Young, Sexy, Presumably Promiscuous Young Man. Despite television's recent proclivity for reinterpreting the lives of historical and literary figures to be more accessible to a modern audience (read: "filled with lots of boning"), in a note accompanying the photo on his blog titled, "So Why Da Vinci," Goyer assures that, although "there are definitely moments where we veer away from the facts," there are "not as many as you may think." For example, "Most of the characters that appear in the show really existed." Exactly! Like Leonardo Da Vinci! Totally a real guy!

The photo features Tom Riley (the British actor enlisted to help make our collective memory of the Renaissance more closely resemble Gossip Girl) sitting at his desk in his favorite deep-V, intently sketching with not one but both hands at the same time. Only one of the drawings is visible, and it looks kind of splotchy, but as Goyer puts it, "Surely, in those missing pages [of da Vinci's notebook], there were many…remarkable devices that must have been lost to time, right?" So who's to say the other drawing isn't of some kind of fantastical space suit or sex machine? (It's probably a sex machine.)