Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519) trained in Florence, worked for the duke of Milan, and ended his life in France. He was a painter, engineer, inventor and student of nature, and his notebooks, about 7,000 pages survive, are full of studies of water, plants, machines, light and flight. Yet only some fifteen to twenty paintings are generally accepted as his, and several of those were left unfinished.
Looking closely: The Last Supper. Leonardo painted it for the dining hall of a monastery in Milan, for the duke Ludovico Sforza, so the monks ate below Christ and his apostles at their own long table. The moment is Christ's words, "One of you will betray me." The apostles recoil, question and argue in four groups of three, a wave of motion, while Christ sits still at the center, his body a calm triangle. Leonardo used the room's architecture: all the lines of the painted room lead to Christ's head, and the window behind him makes a natural halo. He painted slowly on a dry wall, and the paint began to flake within decades.
Looking closely: The Mona Lisa. A woman sits half-length, turned three-quarters toward us, her hands folded on the arm of a chair, in front of a wild landscape of rocks, water and a winding road. There are no hard outlines anywhere: edges dissolve in soft shadow. Leonardo called this blending "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke"; we call it sfumato, from the Italian fumo, "smoke." She is usually identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant. Leonardo kept working on it for years and never delivered it; the Louvre dates it 1503 to 1519.
Key idea
Why it works
Worked example: Why did it decay?
- Leonardo did not paint the Last Supper in true fresco.
- He used tempera and oil on a dry wall, so the paint did not bond with the plaster.
- Damp in the wall lifted the paint.
Answer: It was painted on dry plaster, not in true fresco.
Common mistake