Balance in art is the way a picture spreads its visual weight so that it feels steady instead of about to tip over. It comes in three main kinds: symmetrical, where the two halves mirror each other, asymmetrical, where unequal parts still hold each other up, and radial, where everything turns around a center.
The painting where balance is easiest to see is Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, made between 1495 and 1498 for the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
Visual weight has little to do with real size. A face, a patch of bright color or a stretch of empty space can pull the eye as hard as a large dark mass, which is why a painter can set a small thing against a big one and keep the whole picture level. The simplest way to get that steadiness is a mirror image: put the figure that matters in the middle and match everything on either side of it.
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In The Last Supper the mirror is almost exact. Christ sits alone at the center of the long table, and his body forms a calm triangle. The twelve apostles split into four groups of three, two groups on each side, each group reacting to him in its own way. Even the tapestries on the side walls repeat in matching sets on the left and the right.
Leonardo fixed that center with a nail. He drove it into the wall at the point where the lines of the room meet, at Christ's right temple, and stretched strings outward from it to lay out the perspective. The tiny hole can still be seen.
A picture built this carefully ought to be safe. The wall it was painted on was not. In 1652 it was cut open, right under the figure on which the whole mirror turns.
What was cut out of The Last Supper?
A doorway. In 1652 the monks' refectory in Milan received a new opening, and the opening took Christ's feet and legs with it…
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