Word: leonardo
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With the Renaissance, artists returned to anatomy and, after Pollaiuolo, went in for it in a big way. Leonardo Da Vinci learned through dissection (by the end of the 15th century the church had approved the practice), did countless sketches and cross sections, working to get just the right swell of a bicep, the right organ in the right place. The Metropolitan shows a precise study by Leonardo of a baby in a womb. Raphael spent long hours dissecting; Curator Mayor shows how his later figures lose their smooth look and take on bone structure and strong, adult muscles...
...defense, that great artists have frequently defied the rule; after all, Michelangelo was said to favor a figure "pyramidal, serpentine, and multiplied by one, two, and three," which is at least as peculiar as 2.66 to 1. Yet only by a master stroke of organization was Leonardo da Vinci able, in The Annunciation, to connect in one esthetic whole a frame that is only slightly more extreme than Zanuck's. But Zanuck of course has a bigger budget. One moviemaker summed up the problem this way: "Marilyn Monroe will have to lie down before the audience...
...damned from time to time as a Communist (for his $5-a-day wage), an anarchist, an anti-Semite, a Fascist; he was praised as the greatest living American, whose diverse interests (e.g., planes, rubber growing, synthetics, early American furniture) made him seem a kind of machine-age Leonardo. Now the archives reveal for the first time what manner of man he really...
Scraping one tiny area at a time, Pelliccioli started his monumental job on the 13¼-by-29¼-ft.surface almost two years ago. His main guide was a faithful copy of the Last Supper painted by a follower named Andrea Solario in 1520, only 22 years after Leonardo had finished the mural. Solario's copy was destroyed during World War II, but Pelliccioli has a photograph of it and a vivid memory. First he took minute samplings of the surface where past restorers had painted on overlapping layers, then painstakingly scraped down to the original, finally swabbed over...
Professor Pelliccioli knows that no restoration can bring Leonardo's Last Supper back to its original brilliance. It is too far gone for that. But Italy's experts think that the restoration job has brought the Last Supper closer to the original than it has been within the memory of living man. And what's more, says Restorer Pelliccioli, his special shellac skin ought to keep it that way as long as the wall stands...