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Here’s my new take on The Last Supper, this time attempting to stay as faithful
as possible to Leonardo
Da Vinci’s original:
Hundreds of years of deterioration and poorly executed “restorations” have left
it uncertain exactly how the original once looked, so I ended up basing my
version most closely on an early 1800s life-size mosaic copy from the
Church of the Minorites
in Vienna:
Below is the current state of the Da Vinci original after its most recent modern
restoration in 1989:
I was prompted to take another go at The Last Supper this week when I was
interviewed about The Brick Testament by my
local paper. In addition to running several sample
images from the Brick Testament website, they also wanted to get a photo of me
posing with a MOC from The Brick Testament in hand.
My old version of
The Last Supper immediately came to mind, since it’s iconic, relatively
portable, and one of the few scenes from The Brick Testament that I’ve kept
intact over the years. But I’d just recently sold it as an artwork to someone
who had seen it at the art gallery in
Bratislava, Slovakia I was invited to last Spring.
So I began working on a new “replacement” Last Supper. But since this was going
to be a stand-alone piece, I did not feel constrained to have the scene
necessarily match the version in my
Last Supper story from The Brick Testament. That version was, of course,
inspired by Da Vinci’s version, but it was by no means an exact replica done
in LEGO. I decided to keep the face of Jesus the same as it appears in The
Brick Testament, but everything else I was willing to change to match the Da
Vinci version. This meant new faces and outfits for the disciples; tile floors
and a new table design; and perhaps the most noticeable change is the trapezoid
shape of the room to mimic the perspective of the Da Vinci version.
Here’s the photo as it appeared in
the
article:
I’m pretty happy with this new third version of The Last Supper. I still see
room for improvements, though. I still haven’t tried adding in a ceiling (which
would make it much harder to properly light the scene), and the perspective
still doesn’t truly match the original (maybe a different camera lens would
help?). And finally, though I did try to have the disciples match the poses of
the Da Vinci version, it’s pretty impossible to get their arms into positions
that match the original. Unless I resort to flex tubing and other trickery.
Hmmm...
Unfortunately, it’s my comparatively crude
first version that has achieved the most notoriety to date (being the version
seen in Time
magazine, on Wikipedia, and
passed around on many blogs and forums). But what can you do?
-The Rev. Brendan Powell Smith
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Message has 5 Replies:
 | | Re: The Last Supper - Leonardo Da Vinci Style
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| Hey Brendan, Awesome recreation! I love the angled walls and the brick-built landscape. Also a great job on selecting torsos, heads etc to match the painting. You really should make a desktop wallpaper of this. BTW, I know that I've let a whole (...) (17 years ago, 27-Oct-07, to lugnet.build.ancient, FTX)
| | | Re: The Last Supper - Leonardo Da Vinci Style
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| Nice work as usual, Brendan. I don't know how you made the torso of Jesus, but I think I would have preferred a Futuron torso ((URL) It might not be as accurate, but the Space Logo could have been a nice little joke - da Vinci himself is rumored to (...) (17 years ago, 29-Oct-07, to lugnet.build.ancient, FTX)
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