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The Age Of Humanism In The Last Supper By Leonardo Da Vinci

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The Renaissance, a period of cultural and artistic change in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century often known as the Age of Humanism, began in Italy where the culture was surrounded by the remnants of a once glorious empire. The Italians rediscovered art, architecture, writings, philosophy, of ancient Romans and Greeks, and began to realize the relics as a golden age in which it inspired their society at that period of time.
Artists were granted with greater flexibility in what they were to produce, and they took advantage of it by exploring new techniques. Painters would study light and shadow and make the painting real and natural along with humanism became more idealistic where religion is not everything. How it revolutionized …show more content…

It is a fresco, which was painted on a freshly plastered wall, and it depicts the biblical scene in which Jesus Christ breaks bread with his fellow disciples on the evening before his death. It was considered revolutionary for quite a number of reasons, including its naturalism. Da Vinci chose to depict the moment when Christ reveals that one of them will betray him. The apostles gathered around the table with Jesus were shocked, St. John simply faints upon hearing the news, whereas St. Peter is angered and pulls out his knife (foreshadowing his use of the weapon when Jesus is betrayed by Judas in a later part of the biblical narrative). And for the first time in art history, Judas is shown on the table at the same side as Christ, even though he leans away, showing the viewer his guilty expression. The vanishing point starts from Christ’s head, spreading out to the entire space in the painting, the work is closed (showing that it is impossible to imagine anything outside the picture plane). The multiplicity, and the absolute clarity, where there is less room for interpretation as to meaning, light shines equally on all images in this piece. Overall, da Vinci gave his paintings an all-embracing sense of unity through the meticulous evocation of movement and expression, and by using his use of atmospheric effects achieved by means of his “trademark” sfumato, the …show more content…

Now that modernists have pushed all boundaries there are to push, I feel that we owe it to the Renaissance as it is the most defining art movement in art history. Because no artistic movement has contributed to the development of art as much as the Renaissance. Before the Renaissance, paintings were flat and lack of real depth and appropriate shading, but ever since the invention of linear perspective, it became a few found interest for artists to observe the natural world in a whole new light. Artists were divinely inspired. Examples of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, have contributed the most significant and renowned works of not only for the Italian High Renaissance, but for Italy, and the world. Their contributions are where the concepts of modern art were discovered. Our understanding of perspective and human forms in art as well as in science would be severely limited without their influences. Therefore, the discovery of Renaissance art is a new revolution in art and an eye opener for the world to its own

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