Leonardo’s Accidental Masterpiece: The Last Supper in Historical Context

I'm going to be talking about the Last Supper for 4045 minutes or so and then hopefully there'll be some bit of time for questions at the end but I'll just begin by introducing the painting by saying that it's an image that's absolutely familiar not just to all of us but everyone out in the streets of Aspen everyone out in the streets of America has become so familiar that the great Kenneth Clark when the 20th century's leading Lane Order scholars said it's as familiar to us as the boot shape of Italy on a map it's something that through a kind of osmosis has entered into public consciousness has sort of entered into our DNA for when we look at art and so it's become an icon and like all icons has become a great part of and also like so many of the other icons it's become prey to popular culture and I'm missing a slide changer is the one my remote small table oh thank you it's become prey to popular culture and and I was spoiled for choice in terms of what what I used with this in fact that's only one of two Simpsons versions of the Last Supper that I could have shown you the one at the bottom some of you might remember comes from 2005 from the French fashion house gear bow and was actually banned in Milan in 2005 the Italian adverse advertising Authority said in its adjudication which allowed the ban it said that it and this advert elevated commercial products to the same level as religious symbols which was a no-no and but my thought to them was have you not gone to a shopping center which is of course our new cathedral on a slightly more highbrow I suppose still at a kind of pop culture level you might be aware of Andy Warhol's takes on the Last Supper the last year of his life he did more than 100 silk screens and paintings of the Last Supper he was invited to create them for an exhibition that was held at the Palazzo stellini in Milan very close to the Last Supper itself he didn't actually see the painting before he began doing his work because of course in 1986 1987 it was under reconstruction as it was being conserved in Milan and so he didn't see it and he was inspired and said instead as he frankly admitted by a print that he grew up with a print of the Last Supper a copy of a 19th century print that hung in the family kitchen of the Valhalla home in Pittsburgh because of course the as Polish Catholics they were his mother was very devout it was Andy sat eating his Campbell's soup he would be looking up and seeing an image of the Last Supper which he called Leonardo's dining scene in any case he did numerous versions of these and it's funnily enough Andy's some postmodern takes on commodification and commercial nation of art I enjoyed it first until I got the bill for using one of these images in my book and it was I had to pay and you might not realize that authors pay for the images in their books and release that's way all of my contracts seemed to have turned out and Andy's estate charged me $8,000 to use it twice I stopped laughing at his commodification jokes at that particular point in any case we all know the image then of the Last Supper but I think as I was researching and writing the book what I was all too plain to me is that the the full story of how it came to be painted why it was painted and even where it was painted was much less well known it's what I really wanted to do was to give a kind of up on the scaffold behind the studio door behind the scenes look at Leonardo painting what I'm calling today his accidental masterpiece because of the fact that if you were a betting person in 1494 you would not have bet the mortgage on Leonardo doing a great success on this painting you wouldn't bet on him finishing it let alone creating such a masterpiece out of it and one of the things that I was also confronted with is that not only the painting is an icon but of course Leonardo da Vinci himself is and he comes burdened with as many preconceptions and frankly misconceptions as the painting itself and so what I wanted to do is to sort of I wanted to reverse engineer the painting I also in some ways wanted to reverse engineer Lanyrd Leonardo da Vinci's life and look at him as an artist but also even more especially as a man and in particular a man of a pretty at a particular point in history a man of his times and of his age and therefore not look at the Last Supper as a product the finished product but rather and as the icon that has become but rather as a process that Leonardo undertook at a particular point in his life and a particular point in history as well because as I say even though people recognize the image very few people and I asked even sort of very dedicated gallery goers couldn't necessarily tell me when exact when exactly the work was painted and where it was painted I recently taught a class at University of Notre Dame and I asked the students who are wonderful students where is it painted and they guessed every city in Italy and even in some in Spain and not one of them guessed that it was done in Milan but I think one of the reasons for that is that we tend to abstract great works of art from the conditions in which they were produced under which they were produced and to forget that they weren't always going to be a masterpiece they weren't always a done deal and that there was a time when they were only half finished or that there was a time when either Leonardo da Vinci had to stand in front of one Santa Maria della Grazia or Michelangelo had to stand at the top of the scaffold and surveyed this blank canvas this blank Volta displaying a wall that they had before them and therefore as I say this was a very odd commission for Leonardo da Vinci something for which he was preneur not perhaps especially equipped to do which is why I'm calling it this morning the accidental masterpiece I'll just say a little bit about him to bring him up I was talking about his biography yesterday and we've had more of it since then but I just want to make a point about him he began the Last Supper in 1494 when he was 42 years old and the the life expectancy for someone born in 1452 if he didn't die in infancy which was of course all too common but if he didn't die in infancy 42 was probably his life expectancy in fact that's the age of which Lorenzo de'medici died and that's the a dying a little older Verdi in 1494 the exact year that Leonardo began work on the Last Supper was Domenico Ghirlandaio who died in his 40s it was the teacher of Michelangelo and so Leonardo might have expected that might he had done much of what he was going to do in the course of his life and that he was entering the twilight years at the ripe old age of 42 and at that point he was far from being the most famous painter in Italy I should say is a preface to what I'm about to say that absolutely everyone who met him it seems from the time he was a very young man recognized his inspiring brilliance but they were also I think frustrated by what they regarded as his inability to achieve what he himself called a work of Fame that would make his name for posterity a kind of work of art would be his hostage to fortune and post and and posterity so for example just looking at him at this point in his life when he's entering middle age in 1489 the cathedral fathers in Orvieto wanted to find a team of frescoes to work on the cathedral and they drew up their lists at the top of which they said the best painter in Italy is Pietro Perugino from Perugia as his name suggests roughly the same age as Leonardo da Vinci he'd done much work and fresco at that point they didn't get him instead they got someone else Lucas senior le but a couple of years later also a very established very famous painter a couple of years later in the early 49 is about the time that Leonardo was beginning work on the Last Supper a banker from Siena named Augustine okichi drew up his own list of the greatest painters in Italy and at number one still was Perugino in the the 1490s Perugino seemed to be on top and number two he listed as Pinto Rico who was a kind of protege of Perugino and Leonardo of course didn't figure on the list and in the key Jay was a very astute patron of art and ultimately in the next decade would become the patron of Raphael and in fairness to him and in fairness to the cathedral fathers in Orvieto Leonardo had a distinct lack of public accomplishments by the early 1490s there was nothing that qiji could have seen in Siena or Rome or that the fathers could have seen in Orvieto that would have made them rush out and try to engage lay in order to do especially something like a fresco and we've discussed in the last two days some of the reasons for this one of which is what simply that I would call him a helicopter artist you have the term a helicopter parents here who hover over the children leonardo hovered over his paintings and he said art is never finished only abandoned and in fact as we've heard about he did abandon various works in the course of his career but I think he never fully abandoned them he always wanted to go back to them when he had more knowledge more ability another way to tackle the problem when he could bring all of these things together but he did of course have this reputation in the mid 14 80s there was a poet named Galina very Know Who I mentioned yesterday in the context of his poem Thea Mehta from 1464 when he talks about there being a new Phidias and a new app Emily's in Florence Verena mocking Leonardo da Vinci affectionately said and this is from 1485 he said in the last 10 years he has barely managed to finish a single painting and that wasn't quite true because in those years Leonardo did work such as the Geneva at the bench II being one he would do to julia Geller any year so after that but nevertheless he did certainly have this reputation as we've been hearing and one of the problems is simply that I think in his heart of hearts Leonardo did not want to be first and foremost a painter I was saying yesterday that he didn't really want to work for wool merchants in Florence and obscure Augustinian months outside the gates of Florence he wanted to work for a prince he wanted to do larger things and and things that were going to be public and I go back to that moment and may have 814 71 when he ascends to the top of the cathedral to the top of the dome and watches and maybe assists with the placement of that two-ton copper orb and all the Florence would have been spread out beneath this would've been a great spectator sport and so he would have I think forever after wanted to have something like this to his name and create a work of architecture a great piece of public sculpture sculpture that was going to draw that kind of crowd and he also of course had the I would say Walter was mentioning him being have it being a great case of attention deficit disorder in some ways I would say that what he there is that but I would say there's also the flip side of that is he was also obsessive-compulsive and in many ways what he was doing it was yes he would get distracted but the distraction was because everything was related and so he was if you asked him for information about something or if he was doing an investigation he would dig down very he would do a very deep dive into it and then begin going out in a lateral way and so is this strange combination of ADHD and OCD I'm not sure if anyone else on on earth has this and there's a great quote when he was working on the Last Supper someone wrote to a mutual friend in Florence saying Leonardo was not going to make an end of this work because whenever he should be painting he's busying himself with architecture anatomy and geometry and of course what this person didn't understand is that as we've seen including the last hour the architecture geometry perspective Anatomy all of these things fed into his painting and so they were all related anyway to recap where he comes to with the Last Supper and how he gets the Commission I didn't talk yesterday about this Commission this dream Commission that he got to do this gigantic the colossal bronze statue where the horse alone was going to be 23 feet in height so three times over life-size it was going to put everything that the ancients had done into the shade he was very excited about it of course in 1494 after maybe eight or ten years on the job he lost it due to the fact that the war broke out and his bronze was confiscated and therefore he was given a different task instead a kind of compensation and that was to paint the wall of the refectory in santa maria delle grazie which was a Dominican convent in Milan a very recent foundation on the building had been finished in 1482 originally it had been funded by one of French Sports's captain's but after his death Lodovico sports it took over the funding of the building itself and he began turning it into a family mausoleum much in the same way that santa san lorenzo in florence was becoming it had become by this point the family mausoleum for the Medici family and what Lord of eco was planning on doing was to exhume various of his more obscure relatives and to bring them to Milan just to give his family tree his father was Duke of Milan had taken it by force in the middle part of the 1400s and 1450s and the grandfather was a woodchopper he chopped wood for a living so from one generation from woodchopper to Duke of Milan but the grandfather musio attend allo had been a great warrior he was a woodchopper who was a strapping fellow he was conscripted into service and became one of the great warlords of the age and his son Francesco the father of Lord of eco was likewise a warlord who became Duke of Milan and so what they were and Lodovico as we're describing yesterday was a usurper he deserved an odd sidelines and ultimately possibly assassinated that and then finally succeeded legitimately his nephew and therefore he was needed to have propaganda the sports a horse was going to be this great piece of propaganda as was this mausoleum that he was constructing for himself and his family the sports of family now in Milan and so in a show of piety once or twice a week he would dine with the Dominican friars in the refectory on one of these dinners he must have looked up and seeing that the wall needed some decoration because after all I say this is a new new foundation and so that was the job that Leonardo God and as I was saying it's an odd Commission for someone like Leonardo da Vinci because of the first and foremost because of the fact that he had no experience in fresco I showed the letter yesterday where he boasts of all of his talents in building bridges and all of the sort of bluster that wasn't that you could argue that there was an equal amount of bluster in what he says about painting they they couldn't paint in any style as well as any other man because he had never worked in fresco his teacher Rocio was not a fresco as those works that he did were done in tempera paint there were altar pieces he'd never worked on a wall or a vault and so Leonardo da Vinci had not consequently worked on a wall or vault in fresco either and whatsmore fresco was ill very ill suited to Leonardo's manner of working I think you probably know a little bit about fresco painting at least but that the word at fresco comes from the fresco which is the reference to how you worked with watercolors on wet plaster so when you turned up at 8 o'clock in the morning as the frescoes do you hoped you were plasterer had been there at 7 o'clock and it covered three or four square feet of the wall with some the plaster on which you then had 8 10 12 hours during the course of the day to do your painting and you had to add your paints diluted just with water onto that surface that limited area that patchwork quilt of it before it dried but the beauty of it was and why you worked in this logistically difficult manner is once the plaster dried your pigments chemically became part of the wall and that's why it was so durable your pigments were actually locked into place but it necessitated this idea of working day by day on adjacent patches and you can see 200 years earlier Giotto worked in this protect this particular fashion the I would show you the painting by Pontormo where he describes in his diary how he proceeded and it's very typical of how you had to work as a fresco as that on Thursday painted two arms on Friday painted the head with the rock below it when Saturday I did the trunk of the tree the rock in the hand etc so you broke the the field down into these discrete units and if you didn't like what you did on the Monday if on Tuesday morning realized that didn't work the only thing for it was to take out your hammer and knock it off and start again and so obviously this was not something that Leonardo was going to like to do because of the fact that you had to work extremely quickly Lodovico sport say in that 1480s was looking for frescoes to do some work for him and so he went he inquired in florence and the first name that came to him was Domenico Ghirlandaio the teacher of of Michelangelo and the agent the Scout said gilland io is a very expeditious man who gets through a lot of work in fresco Gil and I worked very quickly and was a brilliant worker in buon fresco there there's their funny stories about a painter from Bologna named amico as Frattini um who actually worked with two hands he would have his paints on a belt at his waist and he would be painting with both hands at the same time in order to get the pigment onto the plaster before it dried and so clearly for someone who liked to think his way into a painting like too appraising hour by hour day by day week by week and to smear the paint with his thumbs in paintings like to Giulia gala Ronnie or Geneva da Vinci this was not something that was going to have much of an appeal for him um and also of course then he had come to Milan with plans of reinventing himself as a civil or military engineer or an architect and now here he is ending up not blowing up castles or tunneling under moats and things like that but rather painting a wall in a room where a band of friars ate their lunch every day and it was a sacred space and Leonardo could have had no inkling in 1494 that this was going to become any kind of a public space would be seen by anyone apart from maybe a few visiting dignitaries to Milan and of course the population of Dominican friars who was there but it was one thing to reject even the city fathers in Florence whose altarpiece he didn't finish the Augustinians of san donato scopetta outside rome from outside Florence away from whose altarpiece he walked in 1481 or 1482 it was another thing to cross Lodovico Sforza and so he really had no choice but to start work and so how did he start work he would have known quite a number of last suppers there were any number of them that had been done in Florence over the course of the previous century and that he would have known about he may not have seen Castaignos Last Supper because it was done for a group of poi stirred nuns so he may have had no access to it but he certainly would have seen the one done in the Church of Anja Santi in the banks of the Arno and Florence by someone that he did know Domenico Gillan die with the expeditious man and this is his fresco there of the Last Supper and what we note about them I think is the tranquility the the calmness the contemplatively of the apostles in all of them and I think we can read them quite easily we can see Christ we can see st. John asleep on the bosom of Christ the Beloved Disciple as the Gospel of st. John says was asleep on the bosom of Christ at the Last Supper which would have been less awkward in the year 33 ad than it is made to look in the year 14 80 because of course the ancient Hebrews when they dined on sat they reclined donning chairs were a later invention they would've been reclining on their elbow like we think of ancient Romans eating grapes they propped themselves on their left elbow and ate with the right hand so it would've been very easy for John have been very close to Christ being cuddled by him nevertheless in both of these we can see John asleep in the bosom of Christ and we can see Judas on the opposite side of the table but the way in which these scenes are very calm and contemplative where we have people staring dreamily into space they be very quietly conversing together is a reflection of what you would have had in the refectory because both of these are works done in refectory zin fact that is where the Last Supper paintings the genre of the Last Supper detached itself from the cycle of The Passion of Christ where it originated in places like Ravenna you can see last suppers early last summer suppers done in the early early 6th century as part of the the passion scenes but very soon it was detached that and the scene began to appear independently voles other scenes of the passion in refectory the cause of course it seemed a suitable as suitable scene to have on the wall of a scene where the Friars where the sisters would have been have eating their gruel every day and so that's why the Last Supper really became the painting that you would have in a refectory and so this is what when Ludovico Sforza asked and it probably the documentation alas has been destroyed any contract no longer exists it was almost certainly Lodovico who asked lay in order to do it and this is what would have he would have had in mind that this is what he was asking to him to do and incidentally it would have been a similar size 30 feet across and about 15 feet high leonardo though continually said in his treatise on painting that i'll talk about in a couple of minutes line order said that you shouldn't look at other paintings if you were going to do a work just don't go five miles down the road and look at something done 10 years earlier by the man who taught you instead look at nature find out the story yourself and begin to create your work of art that way and i was talking yesterday about the way in which in November 14 94 Leonardo bought a Bible it would have been the malaria Bible which would have been the one available to him in the Italian tongue with illustrations done in woodcuts incidentally the same Edition used by Michelangelo a decade or so later when he began work in the Sistine Chapel and I think what he wanted to do was to read the he wanted to get the gospel truth he wanted to learn the story of the Last Supper not from Gil and IO or Adria del Castano but rather from the Bible itself and so I think he would have read those four stories and decided how he was going to tackle it and of course what he gets is a story that's very different from what we see represented in these two last suppers which would have sat on a wall where silence should have prevailed in the refectory because no one spoke at a refectory meal the only person the only voice you would hear would be the elector in Mensa who would be at the front reading from the Bible reading from the golden legend there was no speaking to be done as you ate and that's one of the reasons why everything looked so quiet and contemplative in these but what lay an auto fan of course the Last Supper was not a quiet and contemplative meal a lot happened there and so as he read the story of the passion the story of the Last Supper he would have read about this charismatic leader with his band of specially chosen brothers who to whom he'd given special powers to raise the dead and heal the sick etc and the way they were gathered in an occupied City whose authorities were plotting against them and of course sitting among them breaking bread with them is a traitor someone who's going to betray the leader and I think this fired lion orders imagination and he realized that what Gilliland dial and castaigne had done was not something that he was going was interested in doing so the question then is how does he tell that story that dramatic biblical story story that we might almost say anachronistically is Shakespearean how would he depict that on the wall and how would he convey the emotions the drama the narrative etc and his answer to that comes from his treatise on painting which Domenico was talking last hour about the way in which the very first of the scientific treatises was not published until 1797 the very first of his works to be published didn't appear until 1651 but in a French edition likewise and that was his treatise on painting and which had circulated in manuscript previously but Leonardo I think was his advice to young painters was seen to be much more important than his scientific investigations for the centuries after his death and what he has to say in this treatise on paintings very interesting and again and again I reiterate the main lesson of the book is look at real people and look at nature do not look at pre and other paintings he said art begins to decline when people look at other paintings the high of sort of false dawn for Italian painting in Leonardo's very brief history of art in the treatise is that Giotto who grew up in the countryside looking at rooks trees shaped things like that brought real life brought nature into his paintings but then people began simply looking at jatos paintings and trying to imitate them and art was too based and it only then began coming back under someone like Masaccio in the 15th century and so his argument was look at real life look at nature and one of the things that he advises young painters to do is to go out into the streets and look at people around and look at people interacting look at the interactions between among people he says go about and as you go constantly observe known and consider the circumstances and behavior of men talking quarreling or laughing or fighting together and he was fortunate in a way that he lived in a city Florence where there was all sorts of this kind of street action to witness one of the things that he seems to have taken advantage of was the phenomenon that was known as this Sara - Sara chanti della penc CACI V know-it-alls of the benches who were these groups of people who would sit I mean if you've been to Florence you know that in front of the plant so strode see or at the foot of the company lay in front of so many of the palazzos there are these benches and people would sit on them stone benches which were originally for commercial purposes but ultimately just became part of the architectural fabric of the city and people would sit on them and I like to think that these are drawings that Leonardo himself made as he wandered around Florence with as we've heard the notebook at his on his belt that he would make his sketches from and one of the stories we know that Maya Nardo hung out on these benches because of the fact that I don't want to preempt bill Wallace is probably going to talk about this in the next hour but Leonardo da Vinci we have an eyewitness account of him on the benches of the Palazzo Spinney meeting Michelangelo as a Dante is being discussed if you're going to tell the story bill I won't ruin the punchline for it but this is the sort of thing he advised people to do he said painting is dumb poetry and what you need to do in it is to convey your narrative and emotion through the facial gestures and physical expressions of the people in in the works of art and therefore I'm sorry the the in the work of art that you're creating and one of the things that he told people to do is look at deaf mutes because he said they learned to communicate through making gestures hand gestures facial expressions interestingly enough when he moved to Milan he met and befriended a deaf mute who is Christophe ro des Prairies the father of Giovanni Ambrogio and Evangelista the two men with whom he did the first version of the wrongs I think there's no question that Leonardo practiced what he preached and these are some of the few drawings we have for the Last Supper and they're unquestionably of real people and I won't I haven't got time to go into my argument for the the chap in the middle of the table there was Donato Bramante I would try to argue there's no question that these are either people he got to pose for him consciously or as perhaps the figure on the left who becomes James the grater someone who maybe didn't even know he was being drawn by Leonardo but then who ended up ultimately in the painting because and he was probably someone from Milanese high society because in 1517 someone wrote that when he saw the Last Supper he just didn't see Christ and the apostles he saw portraits from the life of eminent Milanese quarters and citizens of the time one of the things I try to do in the book is speculate about who some of these people might have been but the James the the greater is fascinating because it's a very beautiful sketch and I wouldn't want to cross the great Kenneth Clark and his comment about the most beautiful drawing being the one of Uriel but I think this is one of Leonardo's most remarkable drawings it almost seems to me it's an informal pose that if you look at that hand we see a left hand which almost seems to be balanced on a the neck of an instrument or perhaps the bow of an above an instrument so perhaps this is a musician later I was discussing love music is perhaps that a recital and unbeknownst to the person who was playing there Lera de broch or whatever made a quick sketch of him that sketch sat around for five or ten years and ultimately he thought he would make it great James the greater for me I'm running out of time so I'll just mention one of the stories about Judas or their a couple of stories about Judas and who Judas might have been and they're revealing about leonarda's process because one of a very good source of men they've jumped Batista geraldi whose father witnessed Leonardo painting told him the story about how and later wanted to find Judas he wanted to find a face that would fit the villainy of the man he always wanted to have the facial expression matched up with the emotional or moral condition and so he said that leonardo night after night would go to the bohr ghetto which was not to be confused with the jewish ghetto it was just a place outside the walls of Milan where all the base and ignoble persons live most of them evil and wicked in the hope that I will see a face which would be fit for this villainous man there's no Eureka moment at the end of that we were not told told by Gerald E's son that there that Leonardo found someone in the doorway and grabbed him dragged him back to his Studios that you're my Judas but there's another story but I think that does tell us something about lion orders process in the way in which he wanted to find the right model for the right character the other one I think it maybe has less plausibility to it but maybe does tell us a larger truth about Leonardo and that is that we have an eyewitness account of the nephew of the prior Matteo Bundela describes her Leonor to work the way in which you would come in very quickly and on some mornings - and he'd be there at 8 o'clock sharp paint madly through the course of the day and then not appear on Tuesday come back on Wednesday starid what he'd done on Monday for a long time do a couple of changes vanish again come back and then maybe begin repainting everything like that which tells us that Leonardo was not working in fresco Walter was discussing the way in which he painted but that loan tells us you because you could not paint fresco in that particular way the story then is that the prior became very upset at Leonardo taking this amount of time because after all he wanted his refectory Bank and as someone who's having building work on his house being done as we speak I'm sympathetic to the friar at this point and so the prior it's a complaint to Ludovico Sforza when is he going to end do all of this and Lodovico said don't worry I'll take care of it coal carpeted Leonardo and brought him before him and said when are you going to make an end of all of this land Leonardo got very upset and said the the prior does not understand I'm not a laborer I'm not like a laborer hoeing in his garden I'm someone who that he said he doesn't understand that wise men often create the most when they appear to be working the least which is very good excuse to use if you get caught staring out the window but he was making a a very important point that he thought his way into his penny he didn't just work with his hands he worked with his mind as well and that he thought about his painting and he was a liberal artist he was someone who was not simply a rude mechanical a last sight I've run out of time but I think with does that does the zero mean I we're out of all time we've got time for questions ten minutes for questions do we have and if we're Stephan of Stefan's hand goes up I'm going to put my my telescope to my blind eyes so I don't get his difficult question yes hands up at the bank thanks for bringing in and Walter the ad D aspect the ad D features as a psychotherapist our inability to focus or over focus and part of the brain doesn't work so then it over compensates and there's a rebellious nature and all the other features that you sort of talked about but I hope that this book goes to the general public and it can help like Einstein with kids who are always told you're not stupid you didn't you know he didn't speak so you're really legitimizing disabilities and the beauty of them and the compensation but I wanted to ask on the last drawing the jaw is tight and it's jutting out but the stare looks sort of blank it doesn't look like an evil stare well I and I would agree with you that that person that he has done is not necessarily can we get Judas back up on the screen I would argue that that is not necessarily a villainous character and I should say that we don't know how true this story is about the geraldi tells about him going to the poor area of Milan looking for some sort of a villain one point that sometimes made about Judas in many Last Supper paintings as he looks very symmetric our dough in the book I try to there wasn't a lot of anti-semitism in Milan under the sports a family in fact there wasn't a lot in Florence during Leonardo's lifetime there and the anti-semitic references and incidences that we get in the course of the 15th century in those two cities seem to be very much a minority opinion and in fact when the Jews were going to be thrown out of Florence at one time the people objected to it because of course the Jews being in the city meant they could get credit they could get credit much more cheaply and some people like Bernardino the Siena would cut the Franciscan would come to Florence and preach about how they should throw out the Jews that did not go down well with the people with the people of Florence and so I'm I don't think that Leonardo unlike a number of later painters of last suppers specifically tried to give judas semitic features and that i would argue that leonardo was not anti-semitic oh now I've done it Stefan you know I always like to get into the weeds you know that guy's super smart the oil-based paints were used he could have used it on canvas and lightened the wall in canvas so he tried to paint directly without use fresco we have evidence that the Romans knew how to do it in Pompeii in the last 2,000 years and what what was he missing there well what they were using in Pompeii was fresco they were using a fresco technique what I would discuss the Leonardo didn't a fresco didn't appeal to him because he could not have worked the way he wanted to work if he if he chose that particular technique which needed a lot of training and he had no training in and when I write about Michelangelo I also discussed the way he had very limited experience of fresco he did however have a very good teacher in Gilliland IO and he probably did work on the torn of bony chapel frescoes in Santa Maria Novella in Florence so he had a little bit of a basis in it Leonardo da Vinci none whatsoever so what Leonardo did was did you say were you speculating he could have had a canvas and put it on the wall because they simply did not have looms you don't see large canvases huge canvases really until the 19th century the first half of the 19th century when it's possible to have looms to do these enormous growing machines as the French called them because they actually needed you needed a kind of machinery to lift them up to move them in and out of your studio and to take them to the salons and so forth so that wasn't really you couldn't he could not have had a 30 foot wide canvas and in any case canvas was very very rarely used in the course of the 15th century generally if you were doing an altarpiece almost exclusively worked on wood and so that was not really a possibility what he did was however to treat his 30 feet of wall as a an altarpiece and he painted in tempera grasa which is this combination of he suspended his pigments in oil and in in the tempura in the egg white and so he therefore worked on it the way in which people in the 1480s and 1490s were working on much smaller works that were maybe six feet across as altarpieces so and his and so he say how did it work and the answer of course not very well because of course every I'm sorry yes the paint the paintings in Pompeii a wet plaster that's right classic way well that's right and which is one of the reasons why they have survived and that was only rediscovered in Western Europe in the middle part of the 13th century in the 12 40s and 1250s one of the first practitioners is Chinna Bui the the painter who was the generation just before Giotto and traditionally is said to Ben Giotto his teacher and so it by the time John so is painting that in around about in the 12 90s 13 early 1300s that it's a very new technique in Western Europe but by the time Leonardo could have been working on it they'd known about it for some two centuries and really refined the technique but if someone says to you the Last Supper is a fresco the fresco of the Last Supper they say correct them be pedantic and say technically it's not it's a mural it's not a fresco Martin this is not specifically about the Last Supper but it's in a right typically grumpy way picking up what is seem to be coming a consensus that there now who has got attention deficit disorder which we then turn into an acronym and we think it explains something this is a trendy modern idea which stops us thinking and stops us approaching what they're not Oh actually did along the way I should say I'm the founder member of sack and so far the only member of sack which is Society for the abolition of acronyms but what what I look at if I see there now do there's no deficit and attention there's almost an over intensity as you said of it of attention for somebody's to do what is the greatest set of deceptions of the human heart the ox hearts which Francis Welles has written so much so brilliantly about you can't do that with attention deficit disorder and what you described and ello is describing this looking and looking and looking and thinking and thinking and thinking it's not attention deficit disorder it's very peculiar it almost is pathological but I'm taking one of our modern psychological commonplaces and an acronym and then dumping it on Leonardo stops us looking at what learn are do is actually doing and thinking on our own behalf and I think the key to understanding me is their quote when he's painting the Last Supper and someone perhaps thinks he has the 15th century version of ADHD and says he is crashing back and forth from geometry architecture anatomy to painting and what that person doesn't understand is that all of those things for him are related and so he's not fragmenting his efforts he's concentrating his efforts and trying to dig down because each one is related to the other and all of them function in his painting in some particular way nothing just briefly absolutely don't want to dominate this is what we classify our taxonomy of knowledge and professions is not rigidly applicable there were scientists as I said before is a 19th century invention William Huell is the first person who called somebody a science they weren't the sciences as some kind of collective thing the label over an academic door in a university somewhere there are no artists as such there are painters that's the profession sculpture as profession architecture profession engineer as a profession but could we do a thought experiment of actually not discussing Leonardo and use the term artists scientist or art and science and see what we get it we've got interesting to try that sorry we've that I've just seen the zero placard come up so well thank you [Applause]

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 12,748

Keywords: Leonardo

Id: 1teIdC7CHLs

Length: 45min 52sec (2752 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2017