Word: leonardo
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...refectory of Milan's Santa Maria delle Grazie. Next day Milanese climbed out of their shelters to behold what seemed almost a miracle: the two side walls of the refectory had collapsed, but the north and south walls still stood-like playing cards on edge. The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, remained intact under the sandbags protecting the north wall...
Blots & Bandages. Still, it was quite unlike the picture Leonardo was believed to have painted. Milan's cold and damp winter wind (which her opera stars survive by will alone) had been whining at the wall that held the mural for 450 seasons. In Leonardo's own lifetime the wall began to show splotches of dampness. Over the centuries, well-meaning restorers flattened out blisters and bandaged the picture's cracks with liberal applications of plaster, painted over to resemble the chilblained masterpiece beneath. Five separate times, at least, alien hands overlaid Leonardo's mural...
...that the picture was altogether dry, the possibility occurred, for the first time, of scraping it down to what Leonardo himself had painted. X rays are useless with frescoes, so no one knew quite what the result would be. but after bitter controversy, a brilliant restorer named Mauro Pelliccioli was commissioned to attack the picture with a surgeon's scalpel (TIME, May 4, 1953). The job took him three years and is now at last finished. The completely cleaned painting is reproduced, for the first time anywhere, on the following pages...
Among the first to approve the restoration was the ancient Expertizer of Renaissance Art, Bernard Berenson, 89, who climbed a scaffold to examine the picture minutely. He reported afterwards: "I felt that I had touched bottom . . . and that I was gazing on the true painting of Leonardo, spoiled, to be sure, by the centuries, but no longer smeared by incompetent hands. [At] a few yards . . . the figures emerged as if from a mist, large and imposing. Space was full of their presence...
...lime.] In the landscape some bright blue water came to light [and] now the glossy pewter utensils reflect the most subtle gradations of color in the robes of the apostles, the roseate or deep red brilliance of the wines shines transparently in the glasses. [All this] must have struck Leonardo's contemporaries as a marvel of naturalism. Even now, after a century of Impressionism, he still seems modern and revolutionary...