Leonardo in Milano

Beautiful Gothic Duomo of Milan

My second to last Art History excursion was this past Friday to Milan. This trip far surpassed the first time I went to Milan three years ago. Honestly, I barely remember my first visits to many of the cities I've been going in Italy. I also feel like I'm learning a lot more about what I'm seeing this time that the things I "should" know about these places are sticking better.

We went to a few museums and the Duomo (main church) in Milan, but the main reason for our visit was to see Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper. My professor had to make reservations months in advance for our 15 minutes of seeing the glory of this fresco. No more than 30 people can enter the room at the same time, and everyone must pass through two rooms with the doors closed behind before making it into the old refectory (dining hall) of the Dominican convent where the fresco still stands today. We all stood in awed silence for the first five minutes. I love how the vanishing point of the painting is Jesus' right temple, because the viewer's eye immediately looks directly at Him, where all of our eyes should stay fixed daily (Hebrews 12:2).

It amazed me just how massive and faded the painting was. When Da Vinci painted the Last Supper in 1495, he experimented with different kinds of paints, some of which slid right off the concrete requiring immediate touch-ups. Had he stuck with traditional paints, it may be better preserved today. Yet over the past four centuries, the room was also used as a stable and barn, military barracks, and its adjacent walls were hit by a bomb during WWII. I think it's safe to say those factors also contributed to the fresco's fading appearance. Regardless, it is still arguably the greatest quality painting of all time.