Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper: techniques, meaning, and Renaissance art

¶ … Last Supper, a painting by Leonardo da Vinci; the kind of art that was used to create it as well as its meaning. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist; whose works of art are significant and unique even today. The Bible story about Jesus Christ and his disciples inspired his painting; when they had a meal together before he died. It was painted during the Milan Renaissance.

The painting of The Last Supper was also created by other artists such as Andrea Del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio; but they were slightly different from that of Leonardo. Da Vinci attempted to alter his painting a number of times, but none of the alterations was as good as the original painting.

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci

Introduction

Western paintings have existed for two millenniums, while cinema has been in existence for only 115 years. Supposedly, both of them are meant to deliver ideas by means of images and pictures. Here, our hope is that we give an indication of the way painting was done, how the painter constructed it, the techniques applied as well as the intended metaphors. We certainly hope to educate, investigate, celebrate and fascinate these unusually complex images that are our own heritage; which have made our eyes open and enhanced our visual awareness and visual literacy (Greenaway 6). Through the unparalleled polymath work, the renaissance art of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) extends the classical ideals\' boundaries with greater passion. Besides being the intermediary to the period of more fertile renaissance art, Leonardo caused its undoing, which led to the subsequent art history; Mannerism, which was somewhat short-lived (Barber 2). The renaissance artists brought back the methodical classicism from the past. In addition, they added factors that made it fresh. Clearly, Leonardo da Vinci was the accepted leader of this approach. (Barber 4)

The artist\'s life

Leonardo da Vinci\'s year of birth was 1452. He was 7 years younger than Botticelli and 23 years older than Michelangelo. He is therefore firmly within the quattrocento (15th Century). However, he stands out from his fellow artists in Florence. In 1519, during the peak of the Great Renaissance, he was already dead. His efforts back then are appreciated even today. Leonardo used his left hand, which made him different and exceptional. He writing had a backward tilt. A mirror is required to read this writing. This way, he protected his art from being easily read. He wrote thousands of notes and pages with drawings and observations of everything; including precise botanical observations, moving flood waters and complex drawings of human anatomy. When he was 60, he made a portrait of himself. Vasari, who wrote biographies of artists from his place during his era, described Leonardo as a handsome, charming and brilliant conversationalist. He also had \"an unspeakable grace in all his effortless deeds and acts. He had a talent so unique that he could master whatever subject caught his attention. He combined extraordinary power and incredible facility. His mind was regally bold and magnanimously daring... Leonardo was a jovial and generous man.\" Leonardo da Vinci was an innovative thinker; a real scientist who drew conclusions from what he observed (Rhodes 1-2).

His notebook was filled with notes and drawings. He would dissect human bodies and make drawings of their anatomy, hypothetical machines that could fly, weapons as well as water in motion, which after studying he understood the currents of air for flying. The few sketches of architecture he made, portray an organic kind of structure which had the standard plan considered ideal by architects. Although his pieces of art may have been for churches, he was not at all religious. Leonardo asked \"Why should we adore the Son, if all churches are a dedication to his Mother?\" (Rhodes3). Vasari was highly pleased with the realism of Leonardo. In the biography, he wrote in 1568, he claimed that the tablecloth had been \"depicted so cunningly that even the linen looked less real,\" the clear visual details, when he started writing, had already disappeared (Varriano 75-76).

Leonardo was appointed as a leader of the Florence painter\'s guild. Even in the artist\'s early works, there is another quality, which separates him from the other artists from the 1400s. Leonardo modelled using shade and light, as had been initially done by Masaccio. However, he did not model it as harshly as that of Masaccio. According to him, the world is filled with darkness, where light reveals its form. It acts on the darkness but it never replaces it completely. The interplay between light and dark, which is often the same as lighting on stage, is known as chiaroscuro. Caravaggio, a Baroque artist, took this idea as his style; with the dramatic lighting (Rhodes3).

Vinci\'s style

Leonardo\'s Last Supper painting was done in 1498, during the Renaissance peak in Milan, the middle point of the North of Italy. This was almost exactly 1500 years following the event in the Bible that it portrays. The art is considered the most important depiction of the highly portrayed story in the bible, where Christ had a meal with the disciples. They were in a certain suburban restaurant in Jerusalem on one Thursday evening. Christ declared that he would soon be given up to authorities, after which he would be arrested and tortured. He would then die on Friday, and resurrect that Sunday. A simple evening in Jerusalem turns into a supercharged incident affecting the many hundred million human lives for two millenniums. The image by Leonardo is a respected painted symbol of solidarity, weight, symmetry and space. Generally, it is seen to illustrate the peak of a Last Supper arts tradition, an event that took place 1200 years ago. The image remains unequalled in the ability to represent the gravity and significance of that event visually. With the complex modern technology of image and light projection, we have attempted to do many things with regard to this image, to acknowledge its importance. We certainly address how powerfully it was made. Leonardo was concerned with the symbolic importance of the digit 3, resounding the concept of God as a Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost. This energized the composition of the painting and centred on the common view, which dominates our perspective and suits the view lines on the painting\'s hall (Greenaway 7). In addition, Judas on Leonardo\'s painting is not sitting as he normally should. His back faces the viewer, and he is within a shadow, unlike the rest of the Apostles, who are well-lit. Judas also has a purse in his hand. Even though he has not yet been given the 30 coins of silver, he acted as the Apostle\'s treasurer. Until the discovery of The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci in the 1800s, only Judas, John Peter, and Christ were positively identifiable (Gordan 50).

The main feature of da Vinci\'s approach was through technical and logical preparation of the projects for his paintings. First, he was almost obsessed with observing the human body. His notebooks show how he was amazed by the shape, movement and scope of the bodies of human beings. He was also greatly fascinated by anatomy. He focused on studying it in order to understand the make and function of the human body. Technically, Leonardo\'s painting was innovative, since he introduced the chiaroscuro (shade and light) approach and new methods of composition (Dominiczak960). Leonardo\'s completion of his painting did not incorporate the usual \"buon fresco\" approach. Instead, he attempted to use dry wall, through an approach that was like the one usually applied for canvas paintings, in order to get the best chiaroscuro and lighting effects (Napoleone 9). This great understanding may be Leonardo\'s genius\' secret. This may also explain the reason for Leonardo\'s success in making himself a creator and intellectual painter, and new for artists, not merely a craftsman (Dominiczak 961). Regrettably, the choice was ill-fated since the micro-climate conditions were unfavourable. Shortly after the painting was completed, it began to deteriorate uncontrollably (Napoleone 9).

How he influenced others artists during the renaissance

The Great Renaissance is a high point of everything that took place before and during the 1400s. The artists, among whom the best known are Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo, were reliant upon the arts of every artist that had preceded them. However, they worked on that to an extent that they nearly exhausted every possibility that was intrinsic in it. The works of art they created mark an absolute divide. It however also created transition between the past art and that of the following century, as well as the period of Baroque. It has both anti-classical and classical features. It applies classical aspects but also incorporates a depiction of individuality, that no artist attempted before. It is with the effort of the three artists that the artists\' status changed from labourer scientist, philosopher, thinker and intellectual man (this is where \'Renaissance Man\' was derived from) (Rhodes 1). Even though Leonardo is usually referred to as universal, he was mainly known for his art, and mostly due to some of his works such as the paintings of The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. Drawings at Windsor Castle by Kenneth Clark (1937) brought to being a first comprehensive peek into the huge complexity of the figurative world of Leonardo. With lucid and terse English, he focused on myriad details. In the 1965-second edition, which was jointly produced with Pedretti, there emerged a serious shot at chronological succession and development. In the 1970s, came a sequence of studies that demonstrated those which appeared to be admired drawings. In actual sense, they were precise visuals of the landscapes of Italy. Progressively, Leonardo\'s image as an idealized artist led to the introduction of a Renaissance edition of him, which showed that he recorded nature (cited in Veltman 383).

Two eras of historians of art gave deeper meaning to the upcoming image of the artistic world of da Vinci, notably Anna Brizio, Ludwig Heydenreich, Ernst Gombrich, Corrado Maltese and Andre Chastel. In 1974, Hans Ost studied the relationship between da Vinci\'s sculpture and paintings. Michael Kwakkelstein (1994) and Johannes Nathan (1992) have explored the work of Gombrich on da Vinci\'s caricatures and drawings further. With regard to Leonardo\'s influence, Summers and Shearman\'s work explained the significance of Leonardo\'s paintings in the posaserpentinata (serpentine pose), which was made a symbol of the Mannerism (la maniera) and High Rennaissance (cited in Veltman 383).

The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci compared with other The last Supper paintings during the renaissance, for example Andrea del Castagno\'s Last Supper (1447)

The Last Supper

Da Vinci painted his renowned depiction for the last supper in Milan at the dining room or refractory of Santa Maria Della Grazie monastery. He was not comfortable with fresco as a medium, so he tried with it. Leonardo wanted a medium that he could alter, which could bring out the artfulness of shade, light, and emotion that he desired. Conventionally, the chief elements were generated to scale through a drawing known as a cartoon, after which it was moved to a plaster wall. Leonardo, in his Last Supper, initially attempted to make the plaster wall waterproof. Afterwards, he painted in mixtures of tempera and oil. The paint started to disintegrate as soon as he was done. (Rhodes4-5)

The painting underwent numerous alterations. The first being a doorway cut across the bottom area. It was painted over numerous times; however, the restorers were unable to emulate the original artfulness of light, shade and colour. (Rhodes5)

The theme is the assembling of Jesus and his disciples before the Passover. da Vinci stages the table at the anterior of the room and across the portrait plane with Jesus and his disciples facing towards the observer. Here Leonardo applies a key compositional device used in early Renaissance, that is, one-point perspective. However, instead of attempting to fashion it to work with the room\'s space, which would require a very low horizon stripe, he created a perfect space with a waning point precisely at the centre of the portrait behind Jesus\' head. The orthogonality in the portrait points to the spot. Above Jesus\' head, there is the lone arched line in the entire room, a curved window, replacing a halo. The central window is flanked by two windows, signifying the Holy Trinity. (Rhodes5)

The Others

Leonardo knew the previous Last Suppers drawn in Florence by other artists such as Andrea del Castagno and Domenico Ghirlandaio, who depicted the precise instant of Judas\'s identification as the traitor. In Leonardo\'s Last Supper, he creates the old iconography picking exactly the prior moment, whereby the identity of the person to betray Christ has not been known. This moment is extremely theatrical and stimulates extreme emotions, which deeply unnerves the apostles. Leonardo is also inventive with regard to picturesque composition, since an extraordinary application of perspective gives a sense of continuousness between the painting and the actual space. (Napoleone 9)

Castagno

While other portraits of the Last Supper display the consecration, and breaking of wine and bread respectively, or Jesus inaugurating the Holy Eucharist and the Mass, the main ceremony for the Catholic Church, Da Vinci picked another instant in that same story. Here Leonardo presents the instant at which Jesus declares that a disciple will go ahead to betray him. The declaration leads to shock waves in the meeting. The disciples assemble in sets of three. Each character is a separate personality and responds in a particular way. It was normal to denote Judas secluded on the opposite side of the table, as depicted by Castagno. Leonardo applies more subtlety. Judas is the character with his hand on the table, holding a bag of money. He has his face in the shadow. The disciples from the right to left are Phillip, Mathew, Thomas, John, Peter, Judas, Andrew and Bartholomew, all recorded on sketches made by Leonard, then possibly Simon, Thaddeus and James. (Rhodes5-6)

Driven by the Last Supper by Taddeo Gaddi for Croce, Florence nunneries and monasteries after 1350 highly commissioned frescoed paintings for the Last Supper in their dining spaces. By 1500, ten well-known versions appeared; the frequent recurrence of this sight prompted Florence to be nicknamed \"the city of refectory Last Suppers.\" Despite considerable competition, the art historians approve the Last Supper painted in 1447 by Castagno at Benedictine nunnery in Sant\' Apollonia, to be the first Renaissance Florentine dining-room painting. It stood out because of its creative perspective planes and classicizing figural flair. (Hoerr 6-16) Castagno was among the first to apply sharp light contrasts to dramatize big events, therefore everything is shaped by a Tuscan gold light. It is the greatest stylized Last Supper in Florence; it appears like a stage-set set to rattle down at the end of the scene. However, the work is among Castagno\'s few obtainable ones and a masterwork of scientific practicality -- note the adroit transparency of bottles and glasses on that table. (Inturrisi 3).