Medium
Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper on a dry wall rather than on wet plaster, so it is not a true fresco. Because a fresco cannot be modified as the artist works, Leonardo instead chose to seal the stone wall with a layer of pitch, gesso and mastic, then paint onto the sealing layer with tempera. Because of the method used, the piece began to deteriorate a few years after Leonardo finished it.
Two early copies of The Last Supper are known to exist, presumed to be work by Leonardo's assistants. The copies are almost the size of the original, and have survived with a wealth of original detail still intact. One accurate copy, by Giampietrino, is in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and the other, with some alterations to the background design, by Cesare da Sesto, is installed at the Church of St. Ambrogio in Ponte Capriasca, Switzerland.
Read more about this topic: The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci)
Famous quotes containing the word medium:
“Jealousy is indeed a poor medium to secure love, but it is a secure medium to destroy one’s self-respect. For jealous people, like dope-fiends, stoop to the lowest level and in the end inspire only disgust and loathing.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“In the one instance, the dreamer ... loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions ... until ... he finds the incitamentum, or first cause of his musings,... forgotten. In my case, the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“Computer mediation seems to bathe action in a more conditional light: perhaps it happened; perhaps it didn’t. Without the layered richness of direct sensory engagement, the symbolic medium seems thin, flat, and fragile.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)