Paintings

Some scenes from Greek mythology seem to have been made to speak about something that keeps happening thousands of years later. Ulysses facing the sirens is one of them. John William Waterhouse painted it in 1891, at one of the most interesting moments of his career, and the result is a strange, unsettling image: a man tied to the mast of his ship while creatures with female faces, bird bodies and enormous claws surround him.

There are thirteen people around a table. No one has stood up yet. No one has fully reacted. But a single sentence has just changed everything: "One of you will betray me." Leonardo da Vinci did not choose to paint the betrayal itself. He chose to paint the instant immediately after: the exact second in which twelve men hear something they never expected to hear.

There is something quite curious about this painting. At first glance, nothing extraordinary seems to be happening: a group of men seated around a table, counting money, writing, absorbed in their coins. And then, from the right, two men enter. One of them raises his hand and points. That's all. But that gesture, a single instant frozen forever, is the center of one of the most revolutionary works in the history of Western art.

There are paintings that, at first glance, seem to have come straight out of Leonardo da Vinci's workshop. The same oval faces, the same light emerging from shadow, that almost hypnotic stillness in the gestures. Yet many of these works were not painted by Leonardo, but by an artist who worked alongside him and whom art history remembers by a curious name: Giampietrino. His is the story of someone who learned from the most influential genius of his time and who, precisely because of that, spent centuries living in his shadow.