Word: vinci
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...difference between The Last Supper and the greatest of modern photographs is that Da Vinci's painting is a product of the imagination. The picture came from inside Da Vinci, just as Hamlet came from inside Shakespeare. Photographs come from the outside; the camera artist sees something memorable in the world about him, and seizes it from the stream of time into a flat and shadowy sort of permanence. His picture is not so much created as caught. Photography can and often does produce great things without the intercession of genius (many of the finest World War II pictures...
Painters of the past did their masterpieces in oil from 32 to 36. Raphael did the Sistine Madonna at 35 and died at 37. Yet Da Vinci worked on The Last Supper in his 40s. And the durable Michelangelo, who lived to be 89, is best remembered for his The Last Judgment, done...
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...
...delle Grazie refectory last week, a crotchety oldster scraped with a surgeon's knife at one of the world's greatest paintings and muttered in annoyance as the tourists clustered around. To the spectators, his knife-wielding seemed the final indignity to the remains of Leonardo da Vinci's famed Last Supper, sorely damaged by 400 years of weather and bungling restorers. Professor Mauro Pelliccioli, 65, knows better. Next month Italy's No. 1 art restorer will finish up his work on the 15th century masterpiece, and one government official has already pronounced it "the greatest...