Some of his paintings have perished as a result of a bad luck. For instance, his famous fresco, the Last Supper, began to deteriorate during his lifetime because the mold on the damp monastery wall in Milan destroyed the clarity of the oil pigments.
Fortunately, Leonardo’s talent and his extraordinary range of interests may also be studied in drawings and notebooks. Leonardo was an innovator, an experimenter, and never satisfied with the accepted or acceptable.
In composing The Last Supper, for instance, he departed dramatically from previous interpretations, which depicted the solemn moment of the final communion with the treachery of Judas suggested only by placing him isolation from the others, who often looked, it has been observed, as though they were sitting for a group portrait.
Leonardo divided the apostles into four groups of three men each around the central figure of Christ – an innovation that was most effective psychologically. His second departure was to choose the tense moment when Jesus announced the coming betrayal an to place
Judas among the apostles, relying on facial expression and bodily posture to convey the guilt of the one and the consternation of the others.
The Last Supper
