The lifelike figures are a three-dimensional depiction of da Vinci’s celebrated 15th-century fresco painted on the wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie church in Milan, Italy. When making the figures, the artists planted thousands of strands of human hair one by one into the head of each. The younger Stubergh “was a master of wax figures, an artist of the first rank,” said Blake Kellogg, professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an amateur sculptor who studied under the Stuberghs. Malone, a former executive of the old Baptist radio-TV commission, began working on rescuing the Fort Worth art treasure when one of his congregants at Central Christian, the late Jane Sheets, “jumped all over me” when the commission closed the exhibit.

Tags: facts about leonardo da vinci, of, leonardo da vinci paintings, the, painting techniques, and, in, The Last Supper