Digital restoration of the Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci and multimedia tools to experience edutainment

Da Vinci's masterpiece can be understand in a totally new way by digitally exploring the painting and examining details that have been lost for centuries. A Virtual Reality set is able to bring us back like a "time machine" to interactively explore the Last supper room as never seen before. The research, the work and the exposition is actually on show in Leonardo3 Museum, Piazza Scala Milan. (www.leonardo3.net)

Today, The Last Supper is faded and cracked. Thus, these brilliant, saturated colors may appear shocking, but this reconstruction is the closest representation of how the fresco must have looked like when Leonardo painted it, with all the missing parts reconstructed. It is a sort of virtual archaeological reconstruction. The high-definition pictures allowed us to localize the original pigments, "Pixel by pixel, we cloned da Vinci's original pigments, using virtual palette to restore areas where the color is irreparably lost.

In order to complete the fresco's missing parts we turned to contemporary copies of The Last Supper, such as the one by Giampietrino and others.

The reconstruction has indeed revealed some unknown details, such as an ideal city sketched in fragments to the left of Jesus' face, and a salt shaker that appears to have been knocked over by Judas. Multimedia software, and virtual reality has been realized to spread, history, science and heritage in the "edutainment" way, we believe is the future of knowledge.

The work will show the complete digital restoration of the entire arts, including parts that have never been seen before, and an interactive simulation will make everyone "paint" step by step the masterpiece. Virtual Reality as a time machine tool, to explore and understand history and heritage.