The painting these hands were drawn for burned. Dürer spent more than a year on it and quarrelled with his client about money throughout — he wrote that painting this carefully did not pay, and that he would not take such work again. The panel was later sold to Bavaria and destroyed in a fire…
Christ is barely visible in this painting. Peter blocks him, and his face is in shadow — what you actually see is an outstretched hand. That hand is a quotation. Caravaggio took Adam’s hand from the Sistine ceiling and reversed its meaning. In Michelangelo, God gives life. Here he takes away the life you had….
Here is a fact that stops most people in their tracks: The Last Supper was never painted on canvas. Leonardo da Vinci applied his pigments directly onto a dry plastered wall using a pioneering experimental technique — and within just a few decades of its completion, the paint had already begun to flake. The miracle…