The Last of IT

As we wing our way home we stopped over in Milan for a couple of days. It is a city that I have always wanted to visit. This is a very modern bustling city with the vibrancy of modern life threaded together with a glorious past. This is the city of Leonardo Da Vinci who spent most of his adult life there. It is also the home of one of his most iconic paintings, “The Last Supper”. DaVinci was commissioned to do a fresco in the newly built Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie. Except that Da Vinci did not want to be confined by the limitations of fresco painting. So he sealed the wall with tar pitch and gesso, and began to paint in the same way he painted his famous canvases. By doing this, he could add more detail and more subtleties than traditional fresco painting. The results were spectacular. It was hailed a masterpiece as soon as it was done. Unfortunately the technique did not work. Water weeped into the wall and the paint began to peel off even during Da Vinci’s lifetime. By 1556 — fewer than sixty years after it was finished, the painting was already "ruined" and so deteriorated that the figures were unrecognizable. The painting began a series of disastrous restorations starting as early as 1726. Each restoration effort seemed to be a reconstruction or interpretation of this masterpiece. I was wondering if there would even be anything left that Da Vinci had actually painted. While I wanted to see this iconic painting I wasn’t expecting much. What I saw was spectacular. There was a final restoration that lasted 21 years. It was finally completed in 1999. The claim is the technicians were able to remove all of the added paint, grim and additions to the painting and getting back to the original brushstrokes of this renaissances master. It is a beautiful painting with much of the original detail still in tact. Well worth a trip to Milan to see.