How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece

in Art, History | December 23rd, 2024

When Leonardo da Vinci was 42 years old, he hadn’t yet completed any major publicly viewable work. Not that he’d been idle: in that same era, while working for the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, he “developed, organized, and directed productions for festival pageants, triumphal processions, masks, jousting tournaments, and plays, for which he choreographed performances, engineered and decorated stage sets and props, and even designed costumes.” So explains gallerist and YouTuber James Payne in the new Great Art Explained video above, by way of establishing the context in which Leonardo would go on to paint The Last Supper.

For the definitive Renaissance man, “theatre was a natural arena to blend art, mechanics and design.” He understood “not only how perspective worked on a three-dimensional stage, but how it worked from different vantage points,” and this knowledge led to “what would be the greatest theatrical staging of his life”: his painting of Jesus Christ telling the Twelve Apostles that one of them will betray him.

This view of The Last Supper makes more sense if you see it not as a decontextualized image — the way most of us do — but as the mural Leonardo actually painted on one wall of Milan’s Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, whose space it extends (and where it makes more sense for everyone to be seated on one side of the table).

Payne goes in-depth on not just the visual techniques Leonardo used to make The Last Supper’s composition so powerful, but also the untested painting techniques that ended up hastening its deterioration. If you do go to Santa Maria delle Grazie, bear in mind that at best a quarter of the mural’s paint was applied by Leonardo himself. The rest is the result of a long restoration process, made possible by the existence of several copies made after the work’s completion. And indeed, it’s only thanks to one of those copies, whose maker included labels, that we know which Apostle is which. Unlike many of the creators of religious art before him, Leonardo didn’t make anything too obvious; rather, he expressed his formidable skill through the kind of subtlety accessible only to those who take their time.

An Immaculate Copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper Digitized by Google: View It in High Resolution Online

Is the Leonardo da Vinci Painting “Salvator Mundi” (Which Sold for $450 Million in 2017) Actually Authentic?: Michael Lewis Explores the Question in His New Podcast

Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

How Did the Mona Lisa Become the World’s Most Famous Painting?: It’s Not What You Think

Why Leonardo da Vinci’s Greatest Painting is Not the Mona Lisa

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

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The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948)

in History, Photography | December 20th, 2024

With his cane, his famous waxed mustache, and his habit of taking unusual animals for walks, Salvador Dalí would appear to have cultivated his own photographability. But taking a picture of the man who stood as a living definition of popular surrealism wasn’t a task to be approached casually — especially not for Philippe Halsman, who did it more than anyone else. Originally from what’s now Latvia, he led a turbulent life that eventually (after a couple of interventions by none other than Albert Einstein, of whom Halsman later made a famous portrait) brought him to the United States. It was in New York, in 1941, that he met Dalí, having been assigned to photograph one of his exhibitions in the city.

Halsman had more opportunities to photograph Dalí, and these jobs turned into decades of collaboration. Its many fruits include a book containing 36 views of the artist’s mustache alone, but also the more ambitious — and much more surreal — image Dalí Atomicus, from 1948. Inspired by the work-in-progress that would become Leda Atomica, a portrait of Dalí’s wife Gala influenced by both mythology and science, the photograph includes not just that painting, but also an arc of water and three flying cats. Or at least they look like they’re flying; in reality, they were thrown into the frame by a team of assistants including Halsman’s wife and his young daughter Irene.

Irene Halsman recalls the experience in the BBC Time Frame video above, including the now-widely known detail that Dalí’s own initial concept for the photo involved blowing up a duck with firecrackers. “Oh, no, no, you can’t do that,” she recalls her father responding. “You’re in America now. You don’t want to be put in jail for animal cruelty.” So flying cats it was, to be visually captured in mid-air along with the contents of a bucket of water. Leda Atomica and a chair were also made to appear as if levitating, and Dalí himself was instructed to jump, in an instance of the photographic practice Halsman called “jumpology” (whose other subjects included Audrey Hepburn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Marilyn Monroe, and Richard Nixon).

Image via Library of Congress

Dalí Atomicus was published in Life magazine, to which Halsman was a prolific contributor. The same issue included a few outtakes, which revealed some of what went into the five-to-six-hour-long process of nailing the shot. You can see a few such prints at Artsy, whose labeled faults include “water splashes Dalí instead of cat,” “Dalí jumps too late,” and “secretary gets into picture.” But it wasn’t all just about timing: the picture also required a degree of pre-Photoshop editing to perfect, and the empty canvas behind the jumping Dalí had to be filled in by the rush of the man himself, who opted to fill the non-existent painting with motifs drawn from the limbs of the cats. Now there was an artist who knew how to seize inspiration when it floated by.

A Soft Self-Portrait of Salvador Dali, Narrated by the Great Orson Welles

Take a Journey Through 933 Paintings by Salvador Dalí & Watch His Signature Surrealism Emerge

Salvador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Contributed “Nothing” to Art (1986)

Salvador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious Objects Flying Over New Jersey

in Current Affairs, History, Radio | December 18th, 2024

A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further sightings in various locations in the region have been lodged on a daily basis, and anxieties about the origin and purpose of these unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” declared the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in a joint statement. But the very lack of further information on the matter has stoked the public imagination; one New Jersey congressman spoke of the drones having come from an Iranian “mothership” off the coast.

If this real-life news story sounds familiar, consider the fact that Morris County lies only about an hour up the road from Grovers Mill, the famous site of the fictional Martian invasion dramatized in Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Presented like a genuine emergency broadcast, it “fooled many who tuned in late and believed the events were really happening,” writes Space.com’s Elizabeth Fernandez.

The unsettled nature of American life in the late nineteen-thirties surely played a part, given that, “wedged between two World Wars, the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression and mass unemployment.” Some listeners assumed that the Martians were in fact Nazis, or that “the crash landing was tied to some other environmental catastrophe.”

In the 86 years since The War of the Worlds aired, the story of the nationwide panic it caused has come in for revision: not that many people were listening in the first place, many fewer took it as reality, and even then, drastic responses were uncommon. But as Welles himself recounts in the video above, he heard for decades thereafter from listeners recounting their own panic at the suddenly believable prospect of Mars attacking Earth.“In fact, we weren’t as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast,” he admits. “We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new, magic box — the radio — was being swallowed,” and thus inclined to make “an assault on the credibility of that machine.” What a relief that we here in the 21st century are, of course, far too sophisticated to accept everything new technology conveys to us.

Edward Gorey Illustrates H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960)

Hear Orson Welles’ Radio Performances of 10 Shakespeare Plays (1936–1944)

Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds

Carl Jung’s Fascinating 1957 Letter on UFOs

The CIA Has Declassified 2,780 Pages of UFO-Related Documents, and They’re Now Free to Download

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Ingenious Engineering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Self-Supporting Bridge, Explained with Animation

in History, Technology | December 17th, 2024

The video above from Sabins Civil Engineering promises to reveal “the MAGIC behind Da Vinci’s Self Supporting Bridge.” That sounds like a typical example of YouTube hyperbole, though on first glance, it isn’t at all obvious how the fragile-looking structure can stay up, much less support the weight of a crossing army. Not only does the design use no permanent joints, says the narrator, “the more weight on the bridge, the stronger it becomes.” The key is the distinctive manner in which the pieces interlock, and how it directs force to create a “friction lock” that ensures stability.

Remove just one piece of the bridge, however, and it all comes crashing down, which is more feature than bug: designed to facilitate troop movements, the structure could be dismantled to prevent use by the enemy even more easily than it was put up in the first place.

Just one of the various tools of war Leonardo came up with, this bridge was conceived under the patronage of the famous statesman Cesare Borgia (a chief inspiration for Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince), who employed him as an architect and military engineer in the early fifteen-hundreds.

Though Leonardo’s bridge designs have proven influential in the half-millennium since his death — think of him next time you cross the Galata Bridge in Istanbul — no evidence remains that he ever built one in his lifetime. But unlike most of his inventions, realized or theoretical, you can build it yourself today without much difficulty. The video presents an example large enough to walk across, which may make it feel rather less stable than it actually is. Luckily for students looking to understand the self-supporting bridge in a hands-on manner, the same engineering principles apply just as well on the more manageable scale of popsicle sticks — a modern building material at which Leonardo himself would surely have marveled.

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imagined by Leonardo da Vinci in 1502— and Prove That It Actually Works

Leonardo da Vinci’s Inventions Come to Life as Museum-Quality, Workable Models: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Chariot, Perpetual Motion Machine & More

The Ingenious Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci Recreated with 3D Animation

Leonardo da Vinci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Built to Last: How Ancient Roman Bridges Can Still Withstand the Weight of Modern Cars & Trucks

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

in Architecture, History | December 13th, 2024

Between 711 and 1492, much of the Iberian Peninsula, including modern-day Spain, was under Muslim rule. Not that it was easy to hold on to the place for that length of time: after the fall of Toledo in 1085, Al-Andalus, as the territory was called, continued to lose cities over the subsequent centuries. Córdoba and Seville were reconquered practically one right after the other, in 1236 and 1248, respectively, and you can see the invasion of the first city animated in the opening scene of the Primal Space video above. “All over the land, Muslim cities were being conquered and taken over by the Christians,” says the companion article at Primal Nebula. “But amidst all of this, one city remained unconquered, Granada.”

“Thanks to its strategic position and the enormous Alhambra Palace, the city was protected,” and there the Alhambra remains today. A “thirteenth-century palatial complex that’s one of the world’s most iconic examples of Moorish architecture,” writes BBC.com’s Esme Fox, it’s also a landmark feat of engineering, boasting “one of the most sophisticated hydraulic networks in the world, able to defy gravity and raise water from the river nearly a kilometer below.”

The jewel in the crown of these elaborate waterworks is a white marble fountain that “consists of a large dish held up by twelve white mythical lions. Each beast spurts water from its mouth, feeding four channels in the patio’s marble floor that represent the four rivers of paradise, and then running throughout the palace to cool the rooms.”

The fuente de los Leones also tells time: the number of lions currently indicates the hour. This works thanks to an ingenious design explained both verbally and visually in the video. Anyone visiting the Alhambra today can admire this and other examples of medieval opulence, but travelers with an engineer’s cast of mind will appreciate even more how the palace’s builders got the water there at all. “The hill was around 200 meters above Granada’s main river,” says the narrator, which entailed an ambitious project of damming and redirection, to say nothing of the pool above the palace designed to keep the whole hydraulic system pressurized. The Alhambra’s heated baths and well-irrigated gardens represent the luxurious height of Moorish civilization, but they also remind us that, then as now, beneath every luxury lies an impressive feat of technology.

The Brilliant Engineering That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

How Toilets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval England

The Amazing Engineering of Roman Baths

A 13th-Century Cookbook Featuring 475 Recipes from Moorish Spain Gets Published in a New Translated Edition

Historic Spain in Time Lapse Film

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

in History | December 13th, 2024

We all know about the Titanic. Less often do we hear about the Britannic—the sister passenger liner that the British turned into a hospital ship during World War I. Launched in 1914, two years after the Titanic sank in the North Atlantic Ocean, the Britannic featured a number of safety improvements. It had enhanced watertight compartments, an increased number of lifeboats, and improved ventilation and escape routes. Those refinements paid dividends when the Britannic struck a German naval mine in 1916, then sank near the Greek island of Kea. Of the 1,066 people on board, most managed to escape on lifeboats and only 30 people ultimately lost their lives. (An estimated 1,500 people died on the Titanic.) The animation above tells the tale of the Britannic in an hour, roughly the same time that the ship took to slip into the sea.

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The First Full 3D Scan of the Titanic, Made of More Than 700,000 Images Capturing the Wreck’s Every Detail

Watch the Sinking of the Lusitania Animated in Real Time (1915)

See the First 8K Footage of the Titanic, the Highest-Quality Video of the Shipwreck Yet

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

in Animation, History | December 11th, 2024

The Soviet Union’s repressive state censorship went to absurd lengths to control what its citizens read, viewed, and listened to, such as the almost comical removal of purged former comrades from photographs during Stalin’s reign. When it came to aesthetics, Stalinism mostly purged more avant-garde tendencies from the arts and literature in favor of didactic Socialist Realism. Even during the relatively loose period of the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Thaw in the 60s, several artists were subject to “severe censorship” by the Party, writes Keti Chukhrov at Red Thread, for their “’abuse’ of modernist, abstract and formalist methods.”

But one oft-experimental art form thrived throughout the existence of the Soviet Union and its varying degrees of state control: animation. “Despite censorship and pressure from the Communist government to adhere to certain Socialist ideals,” writes Polly Dela Rosa in a short history, “Russian animation is incredibly diverse and eloquent.”

Many animated Soviet films were expressly made for propaganda purposes—such as the very first Soviet animation, Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys, below, from 1924. But even these display a range of technical virtuosity combined with daring stylistic experiments, as you can see in this io9 compilation. Animated films also served “as a powerful tool for entertainment,” notes film scholar Birgit Beumers, with animators, “largely trained as designers and illustrators… drawn upon to compete with the Disney output.”

Throughout the 20th century, a wide range of films made it past the censors and reached large audiences on cinema and television screens, including many based on Western literature. All of them did so, in fact, but one, the only animated film in Soviet history to face a ban: Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s The Glass Harmonica, at the top, a 1968 “satire on bureaucracy.” At the time of its release, the Thaw had encouraged “a creative renaissance” in Russian animation, writes Dangerous Minds, and the film’s surrealist aesthetic—drawn from the paintings of De Chirico, Magritte, Grosz, Bruegel, and Bosch (and reaching “proto-Python-esque heights towards the end”)—testifies to that.

At first glance, one would think The Glass Harmonica would fit right into the long tradition of Soviet propaganda films begun by Vertov. As the opening titles state, it aims to show the “boundless greed, police terror, [and] the isolation and brutalization of humans in modern bourgeois society.” And yet, the film offended censors due to what the European Film Philharmonic Institute calls “its controversial portrayal of the relationship between governmental authority and the artist.” There’s more than a little irony in the fact that the only fully censored Soviet animation is a film itself about censorship.

The central character is a musician who incurs the displeasure of an expressionless man in black, ruler of the cold, gray world of the film. In addition to its “collage of various styles and a tribute to European painting”—which itself may have irked censors—the score by Alfred Schnittke “pushes sound to disturbing limits, demanding extreme range and technique from the instruments.” (Fans of surrealist animation may be reminded of 1973’s French sci-fi film, Fantastic Planet.) Although Khrzhanovsky’s film represents the effective beginning and end of surrealist animation in the Soviet Union, only released after perestroika, it stands, as you’ll see above, as a brilliantly realized example of the form.

The Glass Harmonica will be added to our list of Animations, a subset of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

Soviet Animations of Ray Bradbury Stories: ‘Here There Be Tygers’ & ‘There Will Come Soft Rain’

Watch Dziga Vertov’s Unsettling Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924)

Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019

in History, Music | December 10th, 2024

It’s easy to get the impression that enthusiasts of electronic music listen to nothing else. (Not that it isn’t true for some of them, who tend to relegate themselves to smaller subgenres: consult Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music for a map of the sonic territory.) And it’s equally easy to believe that, if you aren’t explicitly into electronic music, then you don’t listen to it. But in fact, its history is one of long-term integration so thorough that many of us frequently listen to electronic music — or at any rate, electronic-adjacent music — without being conscious of that fact.

Watch the video above, a 24-minute journey through the evolution of electronic music from 1929 to 2019, and take note of how many songs you know after hearing them for only a few seconds. Early experiments by the likes of Olivier Messiaen, Halim El-Dabh, and Rune Lindblad may ring no bells (and to the uninitiated, may not sound like music at all). Doctor Who fans will perk up when the timeline reaches 1963, with the appearance of that show’s theme song — a recording by Delia Derbyshire, incidentally, whose pioneering work we’ve often featured here on Open Culture. The first piece of full-fledged pop music is Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn,” from 1969, one of those songs whose melody we all know even if we’d never be able to come up with the title.

In the mid-seventies, the names now widely associated with the development of modern electronic music start to emerge: Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” in 1974, Tangerine Dream’s “Rubycon” in 1975, Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene” in 1976. But more important to the history of popular culture is the song that represents the following year: Donna Summer’s hit “I Feel Love,” which was co-produced by a certain Giorgio Moroder. Perhaps the defining figure of electronic music’s passage through the discos into the mainstream, Moroder made an even bigger impact in 1978 with his own instrumental composition “Chase,” which won him an Academy Award by being included in the film Midnight Express.

The movies did a great deal to sell the world on the fusion of electronic technology and pop music in the eighties. Who in the developed world — or indeed, in most of the developing world — could fail to recognize, for instance, Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F”? (And surely nobody who came of age at the time of A Night at the Roxbury can claim ignorance of Haddaway’s “What Is Love.”) As this video assembles its history, electronic music finds its way back to the dance floor in the nineties, and it more or less stays there through the twenty-tens; perhaps you would’ve had to spend a lot of time in the clubs in that decade to know such seemingly era-defining names as Marshmello, Armin van Buuren, Shapov, Major Lazer, and DJ Snake. But from an electronic-influenced hit like Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” alas, there was no escape.

How Giorgio Moroder & Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” Created the “Blueprint for All Electronic Dance Music Today” (1977)

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

The History of Electronic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Catalogues the Theremin, Fairlight & Other Instruments That Revolutionized Music

What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

A Huge Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music (1920–2007) Featuring John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart & More

Discovering Electronic Music: 1983 Documentary Offers a Fun & Educational Introduction to Electronic Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

How Leonardo da Vinci Painted The Last Supper: A Deep Dive Into a Masterpiece

The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948)

Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious Objects Flying Over New Jersey

The Ingenious Engineering of Leonardo da Vinci’s Self-Supporting Bridge, Explained with Animation

How Medieval Islamic Engineering Brought Water to the Alhambra

The Sinking of the Britannic: An Animated Introduction to the Titanic’s Forgotten Sister Ship

Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968)

Hear the Evolution of Electronic Music: A Sonic Journey from 1929 to 2019

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