Mediolanum is the pseudonym of the artist Milan, who took the name from the ancient city on the site of modern Milan, Italy, where Leonardo da Vinci once lived. His anatomically themed digital paintings, exploring what he calls the full spectrum of human nature, draw on Leonardo's anatomical drawings and on Jean-Michel Basquiat's use of Gray's Anatomy as reference.
Milan began creating digital art in 2020 during COVID-19 lockdowns, after discovering he could collage and distort images in Photoshop without needing to draw. He had already been reading about Ethereum and blockchain technology in 2019, and minted his first NFT on Rarible before finding his voice on Foundation. After graduating college in 2021, he gave himself two years to make a living from art rather than take a marketing job, a bet that paid off. A year after his first Photoshop experiments, he minted Martyrdom on Foundation, the work that marked the start of his sustained exploration of anatomy and human nature.
