1. Trace the humble beginnings and rise to fame of Leonardo Da Vinci.

Why did he go to Milan

Leonardo was born in a small village outside of Florence called Vinci

Leonardo was a natural at what he does. He was the son of a farmer’s daughter, Caterina, and an
illegitimate son of a young notary, Ser Piero.

A bright future awaited Ser Piero, provided he married a wife from a prestigious family.

This also states why and how Leonardo was not ever really a part of the creative circles of Florence,
around renowned artists at that time, these were primarily folks who wrote latin, sonnets, and could
hold their own in fine society.

Leonardo was never part of that, but Ser Piero never forgot his son, and was always ready to use his
connections to help Leonardo get work but the lack of a proper education left young Leonardo at a
major disadvantage.

Instead, he was apprenticed to the workshop of one of the most prolific artists of Florence, Andrea del
Verocchio.

In the workshop he learned to mix pigments, prepare panels, or transfer large fresco drawings to a
plastered wall, eventually Verocchio allowed Leonardo to paint one of the angels in his panel of the
baptism of Christ, and through this painting, we see how Leonardo really formed very distinguishable
faces.

Leonardo formed very lovely and angelic faces, the answer is by using a new invention at that time
called, Oils, Where as most of Florence still used the flat colors of tempera paint which dries quickly.
Leonardo had begun to experiment with pigments mixed with oils, a technique first developed in
northern Europe.

The main advantage oil has versus egg tempera is that, in order to create a three-dimensional object,
you pretty much have to mixed every single color that you put in there, or crosshatch it, so you get a
feeling of a dimension or depth. But with oil you didn’t have that problem, you can have a incredible
range from black to white, almost seamlessly, and so this was a huge shift for the artist in the
renaissance.

The 15th century, the Quattrocento was an exciting time to be in Florence, it was a time of rebirth, the
renaissance, the revival of the ancient world and the arts, science, literature, and in engineering. Here
for example, Filippo Brunelleschi, used roman engineering to create this vast dome over the Duomo, the
cathedral of Florence. While Brunelleschi was taking measurements of ancient temples in Rome, he had
discovered that when you draw a street or a building, all the horizontal lines seem to converge to a
common center, what today we call, ‘the vanishing point.’ Brunelleschi had discovered the laws of linear
perspective, it revolutionized renaissance art, suddenly, painters could create an illusion of three-
dimensional space, as if the image they painted was a window on another world.

For us, its almost impossible to imagine the impact of this innovation, why? Because today we are
surrounded by simulated images, in the form of bill boards, television, cinema. They have conditioned
our brain to interpret flat images as three-dimensional realities, but in the middle-ages, men and women
never had that experience before and so they must have been utterly amazed by a painting such as the
Crucifixion by Masaccio. The first fresco painting in history to use linear perspective. People in those
days must have thought it was some form of magic, to see space, where there was only a flat wall.

Leonardo was also trained in the magic of linear perspective in the workshop of his master Verocchio,
and he too was amazed by the possibilities, as he began his first major painting, Leonardo realized that
linear perspective had one major drawback.

It tended to stifle the figures and inhibit their expressive power, in many paintings the figures became
somewhat like puppets, fixed on a rigid grid, 10 years later Leonardo would write, ‘how to give your
figures of pleasing air look about you, when you see a beautiful face remember its features and fix them
in your mind.’

So what Leonardo was saying is don’t let geometry deprive your characters of feelings or emotions of
psychological drama, and the first bold attempt to do just that, is a painting called The Adoration of the
Magi.

Unfortunately, the monks who commissioned the panel weren’t interested in moving the boundaries of
Italian art. They simply wanted a pretty picture of a nativity that people could recognize and worship,
and so the work had stopped and the painting remained unfinished, it would take nearly two decades
before Leonardo could realize his great vision.

Leonardo talked about wanting to create his work of fame, he could see Brunelleschi’s works of fame, he
could see Donatello’s work of fame, and he wanted to create his own, and so his destiny, he felt lay,
with a large court with a grand patron, and a single person who is going to be writing the checks and
that happened to be the most powerful man in Italy in the 1480s and 1490s, the duke of Milan, Lodovico
Sforza, and so that’s why he went north in 1482 to begin working for some who was an ineffective
prince not just a group of monks.

That’s why Leonardo decided to turn his back on Florence and that’s why he came to Milan, filled with
ambition, not as an artist, but as an engineer, a military engineer.

He even prepared an impressive pitch to the duke, that catalogued all his military talents. ‘’ I have
methods of destroying every fortress or stronghold unless built on a rock, I can also design different
types of cannons which can hurl stones and ball like a hailstorm.” Leonardo’s hopes came to not, they
took several years for duke Lodovico to finally notice the Florentine artist, but the project he gave him, A
huge equestrian statue ended in failure, the only remains of this massive project are his studies.

Leonardo was ready to tackle his greatest most ambitious composition of his young career. A series of
14 life size portraits of men seated at a table for a wall in Milan.

How did the last supper project come about and who asked Leonardo to paint it, and this may come as
a surprise, because we really don’t know. What we do know is that the duke Sforza tended to favor
homegrown artists, they may have not been particularly imaginative but they delivered their work on
time and on budget. The duke favored a church to be the pantheon of his dynasty, which was also part
of a Dominican convent and the abbot right away saw his opportunity, so he asked the duke If he would
build him a new refectory, a place to have meals for the monks, complete with frescoes. The refectory
was usually decorated with two paintings, A last supper, and, a Crucifixion of Christ. The Last Supper
illustrated the institution of the eucharist or as the crucifixion depicted the redemption of mankind
through the suffering of Jesus, the two counterpoints of Christian theology. The most important Fresco
destined for the south wall was the crucifixion of christ, this the duke gave to Giovanni Donato
Montorfano, whose family had been working on the cathedral of Milan for many decades, but who was
going to paint the north wall?

Leonardo da Vinci, up to this point had done other than the failed questioned project and two small
portraits was the production of plays and masks for the entertainment of the Duke in his court, was he
truly going to be given this monumental fresco?

Leonardo was in effect a special effects man for the duke and so I guess we would think of him as a
combination of a set designer, costume designer, and special effects person for these spectaculars that
Duke Lodovico would have stage maybe a couple of times a year in Milan. That is why Leonardo was
determined that this fresco, he was going to astonish them all.

The duke and the other people would have been expecting that Leonardo would have done a Last
Supper akin to all those that have been done primarily in Florence, in Tuscany, Siena, for the previous
two hundred years, but of course he did something quite different. That archetype showed christ
breaking bread thus establishing the Eucharist but like a skilled film director, Leonardo picked a far more
dramatic scene, the moment when Jesus declares that one of the men in the room is a traitor, that news
literally explodes from the center and hits the apostles in various poses of shock, disbelief, sorrow, even
anger, the full panoply of human emotions is laid bare, the same idea that had galvanized his adoration
of the Magi, some 25 years earlier.

Leonardo wanted action and he also wanted emotion and the dramatic intensity of what happened in
those seconds in Jerusalem, and that of course is one of the magnificent things about the painting, that
he brings that to life and we see that and instantly, I think we can understand whats happening in the
whole scene, it’s a whole vortex of drama, where everyone is reacting differently theyre asking each
other, theres incredulity, theres disbelief, theres anger, in the case of Saint. John, he appears to be
coming awake and is being interrogated by Saint Peter and so he does, he takes each of these 12 and
gives them some characteristic, some facial expression, hand gestures, in order to take us to the
character, but here is the great tragedy, most of these beautiful expression are not visible today.

2. Why was Leonardo’s “The Last Supper,” revolutionary for its time? Discuss the role of visual
depth and techniques presented through drawings and paintings in order to create dimensions
and depth?
3. How is depth perception applied in today’s visual perception and visual communication? Cite
some examples