Ship of Fools: Da Vinci's Painting is a Restoration

Thread: Da Vinci's Painting is a Restoration Board: The Da Vinci Code / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by WillOTerry (# 11366) on :

I think this is fascinating: comapare "The Last Supper" before and after restoration -- and read what art restorationists have to say about it. Then think of what this means for Brown's theory:

http://www.fisheaters.com/xdavincilastsupperphotos.html

Posted by Louise (# 30) on :

Hello WillOterry,
Welcome to the boards! It happens that there's already been a fair bit of discussion about Da Vinci and his work on the second page of this thread.

Mary Magdalene: Mrs Jesus or Apostle?

but as the subject of that thread is a meant to be Mary Magdalene rather than Da Vinci, I'm happy to have this thread, so long as people keep the two discussions separate enough.

cheers,
Louise

Da Vinci Code Board Host

PS. Do tell us what you think about it and get the discussion going.

[ 06. May 2006, 21:43: Message edited by: Louise ]

Posted by Henry Troup (# 3722) on :

Thanks for the link. I'd say that both figures look more slender and feminine in the restoration.

However, close up is not how Leonardo intended the picture to be seen. It's a fresco on the wall of a dining room - the frieze in the picture continues around the whole room. The idea was to connect the monk's dining to the Last Supper. Since it is semi-illusion painting, a certain amount of distortion of the figures would have been needed.

Posted by Gextvedde (# 11084) on :

I remember from my days as a picture framer (paintings etc not prints) that the restorers we used for older pieces were essentially trying to recreate the original as closely as possible. There was always, however, a certain amount of guess work. If the restorers here have done a proper job then what we have now is much closer to the original work. To me it does look more feminine which basically proves very little unless one has an understanding of art and culture at the time the panting was created which I must confess I don’t. Are there any art experts out there who can tell us about the style of Da Vincis’ painting and why some characters may (or may not) have looked feminine? IMHO unless we have this type of information we’re making it up as we go along.

Posted by musician (# 4873) on :

It must be my eyes, but I think the Christ figure looked better pre - restoration.

Posted by Gextvedde (# 11084) on :

I've just realised I wrote panting instead of painting in my last post. Oh well.

Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :

In the late 1960's, when young men started wearing their hair long for the first time in recent memory, lots of people complained that they "couldn't tell the girls from the boys." My father thought all my hippie boyfriends looked just like girls. John was the youngest of the apostles; put his teenaged face in a robe and long hair and he's going to look girlish to those of us who are currently used to men in short, bristly hair-cuts and stiff shirt collars.

Posted by Twilight (# 2832) on :

Youth is beauty.

Posted by jlg (# 98) on :

quote:
Originally posted by musician:
It must be my eyes, but I think the Christ figure looked better pre - restoration.

Note that the proportions of the image have been distorted in one of the Christ figure frames. The restored one is narrower (compare the width of the window opening and such).

[ 07. May 2006, 22:10: Message edited by: jlg ]

Posted by koffshun (# 11227) on :

quote:
when young men started wearing their hair long for the first time in recent memory, lots of people complained that they "couldn't tell the girls from the boys." My father thought all my hippie boyfriends looked just like girls. John was the youngest of the apostles; put his teenaged face in a robe and long hair and he's going to look girlish to those of us who are currently used to men in short, bristly hair-cuts and stiff shirt collars.

This reminds of all the bruhaha surrounding Paul's comments on appearance in 1 Corinthians, that he asks women to wear their hair long and pretty, and the men not to. Some people think it's about head-coverings and that's all well and good. I'm just surprised a lot of 'hard-core' Christians I meet don't balk at my short hair...

The point to this? That I've always wondered why people haven't claimed that figures in paintings with short hair and delicate features might actually be women. Is there a conspiracy theory doing the rounds that takes that line?

Posted by Snow (# 11374) on :

Hello, I am new to this web group but I have read Brown's book, and its sequel and I studied Art history. I admit my tour of Italy was twenty years ago but I remember my Art History professor telling us that the controversy in Da Vinci's day was whether John was the brother of Jesus. In other words, did the Virgin Mary remain a virgin all her life, or did she have sexual relations with Joseph and bear him children? That professor pointed out that John and Jesus looked alike, as siblings would. Has anyone elso run across this idea? or did I dream it?

Also I got to say that I enjoyed the Da Vinci Code, although I know that a lot of what the albino character was doing was nigh impossible. My younger daughter has albinism, or as I tell my students, born without pigment and Dan Brown seems to have completely missed the fact in the book that there are some rather serious visual impairments there. I also read Angels and Demons and can't recommend it. Not because of anything controversial, but because he uses almost exactly the same plot. I hate "least-likely-character-did-it-and-oh!-conveniently-he's-insane".

snow

Posted by Mousethief (# 953) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Snow:
Hello, I am new to this web group but I have read Brown's book, and its sequel and I studied Art history. I admit my tour of Italy was twenty years ago but I remember my Art History professor telling us that the controversy in Da Vinci's day was whether John was the brother of Jesus. In other words, did the Virgin Mary remain a virgin all her life, or did she have sexual relations with Joseph and bear him children? That professor pointed out that John and Jesus looked alike, as siblings would. Has anyone elso run across this idea? or did I dream it?

There are at least 2 things wrong with this theory. First, there is no indication that Italian Catholics at the time of daVinci believed this, and second, daVinci wasn't painting from the real Jesus and John, because the real Jesus and John lived some 1500 years before daVinci's day.

Posted by Pre-cambrian (# 2055) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Twilight:
In the late 1960's, when young men started wearing their hair long for the first time in recent memory, lots of people complained that they "couldn't tell the girls from the boys." My father thought all my hippie boyfriends looked just like girls. John was the youngest of the apostles; put his teenaged face in a robe and long hair and he's going to look girlish to those of us who are currently used to men in short, bristly hair-cuts and stiff shirt collars.

And the John in the Last Supper is also not the only time that Leonardo painted a distinctly feminine looking man. Have a look at this painting of John the Baptist.

Posted by A Feminine Force (# 7812) on :

Not to mention La Gioconda (which some speculate is a visual joke with an esoteric punchline).

FF

Posted by Cymruambyth (# 10887) on :

Hi, Snow - and welcome to the Ship. Obviously, while your art professor may have been knowledgeable about art, he had never read the gospels - John was the brother of James, and they were both the sons of Zebedee. That makes it highly improbable that John was the brother of Jesus, unless Mary did a little larking around, which I doubt.

Someone - sorry, I forget who - also mentioned that "John was the youngest disciple". What makes you think so? As I recall, we're not told the ages of any of the disciples, so what's the basis for that theory?

I agree with the critics who decry the restoration - the painting looked better before the restorer had his way with it!

Posted by WillOTerry (# 11366) on :

Thanks for the welcome, Louise!

Cymruambyth, it is known that St. John was the youngest because of when he died. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

"The Christian writers of the second and third centuries testify to us as a tradition universally recognized and doubted by no one that the Apostle and Evangelist John lived in Asia Minor in the last decades of the first century and from Ephesus had guided the Churches of that province. In his "Dialogue with Tryphon" (Chapter 81) St. Justin Martyr refers to "John, one of the Apostles of Christ" as a witness who had lived "with us", that is, at Ephesus. St. Irenæus speaks in very many places of the Apostle John and his residence in Asia and expressly declares that he wrote his Gospel at Ephesus (Adv. haer., III, i, 1), and that he had lived there until the reign of Trajan (loc. cit., II, xxii, 5). With Eusebius (Hist. eccl., III, xiii, 1) and others we are obliged to place the Apostle's banishment to Patmos in the reign of the Emperor Domitian (81-96). Previous to this, according to Tertullian's testimony (De praescript., xxxvi), John had been thrown into a cauldron of boiling oil before the Porta Latina at Rome without suffering injury. After Domitian's death the Apostle returned to Ephesus during the reign of Trajan, and at Ephesus he died about A.D. 100 at a great age."

Posted by cygnus (# 3294) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Gextvedde:
To me it does look more feminine which basically proves very little unless one has an understanding of art and culture at the time the panting was created which I must confess I don’t. Are there any art experts out there who can tell us about the style of Da Vincis’ painting and why some characters may (or may not) have looked feminine? IMHO unless we have this type of information we’re making it up as we go along.

I posted this link in another thread, but I think it fits here too- an interesting article about the portrayal of young men in Renaissance art, by an art historian- (the link at the beginning to a previous article is intersting too)

http://arthistory.about.com/od/renaissanceart/a/altheyoungdudes.htm

Posted by JillieRose (# 9588) on :

Isn't the John/Mary Mags/whoever it is beside Jesus basically a portrait of da Vinci's toyboy?

art history thingy

(And he's definitely of the male persuasion as da Vinci also did some drawings of him wearing not a lot: Angel in the Flesh looks practically identical to John, but...wearing rather less.)

ETA: The link is from the same site as the one above, but is a different article.

And yeah, I did think the first Jesus looked a bit better than the restored one. Even taking the stretching into account.

[ 09. May 2006, 18:23: Message edited by: JillieRose ]

Posted by Teufelchen (# 10158) on :

It's worth noting that the Catholic Encyclopedia's conflation of St John the Apostle, St John the Evangelist, and St John the Divine is far from universally accepted. None of them is supposed to have been Jesus' brother, but the assumption that they are all the same person is as likely as not to be a rationalisation of the somewhat confusing world of NT authorship.

T.

Posted by Amethyst (# 11068) on :

quote:
Originally posted by JillieRose:
Isn't the John/Mary Mags/whoever it is beside Jesus basically a portrait of da Vinci's toyboy?

art history thingy
<snip>

Thanks for the link, JillieRose, but it doesn’t exactly help the cause of proper historical (or even Biblical) research when the writer says things like:

quote:
Fact: Mary Magdalene wasn't listed among those at the table in any of the four Gospels. Yes, she was present during the Last Supper, according to Biblical accounts. Her role, however, was a minor supporting one. She wiped feet.

Oh, well, accuracy just ain’t what it used to be.

[ 10. May 2006, 09:57: Message edited by: Amethyst ]

Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Cymruambyth:

I agree with the critics who decry the restoration - the painting looked better before the restorer had his way with it!

Yes, but some of those critics decry the soft watercolor used to fill in the removed, old restoration work. Twenty or thirty years ago there was a fad for leaving the damaged places in a fresco plaster-of-paris white. Ugh! Those monstrosities totally destroyed the flow of any design they were applied to.

We've got to face it: da Vinci made the mistake of combining a painting materials experiment with a magnificently designed picture. It was deteriorating badly before da Vinci even left this earth. We're just lucky we have as much of it surviving as we do.

Posted by Stumbling Pilgrim (# 7637) on :

Does anybody have any information about when the speculation about 'John' being female first started? Is it a fairly recent thing based on ignorance of art history, or does it have a pedigree?

I've just come from a [brick wall]

discussion with someone who, having seen the evidence and listened to what I said, complete with references, announced that she respects my point of view but still thinks it might be a woman because she always questions what 'authority' says. [Disappointed]

It would be interesting to know whether she's part of a long-standing tradition or has just got sucked into the latest fad.

[ 24. May 2006, 20:44: Message edited by: Stumbling Pilgrim ]

Posted by Teufelchen (# 10158) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Stumbling Pilgrim:
I've just come from a discussion with someone who, having seen the evidence and listened to what I said, complete with references, announced that she respects my point of view but still thinks it might be a woman because she always questions what 'authority' says.

Does she doubt the sex/gender of the other figures in the painting for the same reason? If not, why not?

T. (and Angel in the Flesh is a fairly striking and non-authority-based argument, by the by)

Posted by Stumbling Pilgrim (# 7637) on :

Well, I suppose as she can see they've got beards she's satisfied that they're men, but otherwise don't ask me about her 'logic'. Actually given her background I can kind of see her problem with 'authority', but it seems to have extended to anyone who has any actual knowledge of the subject under discussion [Frown]

. I don't know if it's worth the effort of pursuing it really.

(off for a couple of days now -don't want anyone to think I've started something and ducked out)

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