Leonardo and the Last Supper

by Ross King

  “This is the river that passes through Amboise,” Leonardo wrote in one of his final notes, beside a sketch of the course of the Loire.15 He and his patron, Lodovico Sforza, were both to die in the valley of the Loire, in France, twenty miles and eleven years apart: Lodovico in a dungeon, Leonardo in a royal château.

  Lodovico’s capture at Novara in April 1500 was, in the words of a chronicler, “a spectacle so abject that it moved even many of his enemies to tears.”16 The duke was ultimately imprisoned in the castle of Loches, 150 miles southwest of Paris. The chronicler eulogized his reign: “Thus within a narrow prison were enclosed the thoughts and ambitions of one whose ideas earlier could scarcely be contained within the limits of Italy.”17

  Lodovico was allowed the company of a jester and the occasional book or visitor, but otherwise the man who had commissioned one of history’s greatest murals spent his time with pots of paint, decorating the vault of his prison with snakes, stars, and mottoes. After almost eight years of captivity he briefly escaped by bribing his guards, who smuggled him out of the castle in a cartload of hay. But, lost in the woods around Loches, he was quickly recaptured and then kept in stricter confinement. His health finally broken, he died in May 1508, two months shy of his fifty-sixth birthday. The location of his remains is unknown, but in Milan he was fondly remembered by the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie who tried to have his body returned to Milan for burial next to Beatrice.18

  By the time of Lodovico’s death, Leonardo was back in Milan and in the pay of Lodovico’s captor and enemy, King Louis XII. The wheel came full circle for him when in December 1511, a dozen years after his first escape from Milan, he was forced to flee a second time after an invasion force of Swiss mercenaries ousted the French. More restless wanderings ensued. After several years in Rome he left Italy forever, departing in 1516 for France, where he became the court painter to a new French monarch, François I. With him went his notebooks—some twenty thousand pages of scribblings and drawings—and a clutch of paintings, including the Mona Lisa.

  Leonardo was given the manor house of Cloux at Amboise, only twenty miles north of the grim dungeon at Loches. The handsome red-brick château had a central tower, a spiral staircase, and views of the adjoining royal palace to which it was connected by means of an underground passageway: the better for an admiring François to pay “affectionate visits,” as Vasari wrote, to his celebrated painter.19 However, Leonardo no longer painted. Instead, he continued his geometrical studies, worked on designs for the king’s new palace, studied the flow of the Loire, and was involved in various court theatricals. By 1517 he had suffered a stroke, and his health declined. In April 1519, “duly considering the certainty of death and the uncertainty of its time,” he composed his last will and testament, making provisions for Salai, his assistants, and servants.20 Nine days later, on 2 May, at the age of sixty-seven, he died at his manor house and was buried, according to his instructions, in the cloister of the church of Saint-Florentin at Amboise. Sixty poor men of the parish carried candles.

  Word did not reach Leonardo’s family in Florence until the following month. Then, sometime in June, a letter arrived from France, from Francesco Melzi, one of Leonardo’s assistants, informing them: “Each of us must mourn the loss of a man such that nature is powerless to create another.”21

  “What is fair in men passes away,” Leonardo once wrote, “but not so in art.”22 Alas, what is fair in art also passes away, as The Last Supper proves only too well. If Leonardo’s style was superlative, his technique, sadly, was not. The Last Supper suffers from what the most recent conservator calls—with sublime understatement—the paint’s “defective adhesion” to the wall.23 Because Leonardo did not paint in fresco, the pigments were not permanently bonded to the plaster, which meant they began flaking within a matter of a few years. Montorfano’s Crucifixion, in its good state of preservation apart from Leonardo’s portraits of the Sforza family, which are now wholly obliterated, points accusingly from across the refectory at the tragic flaw in Leonardo’s approach.

  Added to Leonardo’s ill-starred technique was a perfect storm of adverse conditions. The refectory sits on low ground, and Leonardo painted on the damp north wall, which was exposed not only to the steam and smoke of the convent’s kitchen but also the soot from candles and braziers burned in the refectory. Finally, the refectory itself was shoddily constructed (as Goethe gloomily observed) from decaying bricks and “the rubbish of old buildings.”24

  The painting began disintegrating within twenty years of its completion. A visitor to the refectory in 1517, Antonio de Beatis, recorded in his diary that the painting, though “most excellent,” was beginning to deteriorate, possibly, he speculated, due to the effects of humidity.25 So began a familiar chorus: exclamations about the painting’s stupendous power shot through with regrets about its poor legibility and seemingly eminent destruction. A generation after Beatis, Armenini reported that the mural was “half ruined,” and in 1582 Lomazzo found it “in a state of total ruin.”26

  Things soon got worse. If at first the painting suffered only from technical deficiencies and antagonistic climatic conditions, eventually other even more destructive forces intervened. In 1652, the true indignities began when the friars of Santa Maria delle Grazie in their wisdom decided to cut a door into the north wall, amputating Christ’s feet and loosening the paint and plaster with blows from their pickaxes. Several generations later, in 1726, the work had become so dim and illegible that the friars were gulled into hiring a painter named Michelangelo Bellotti. He shared little in common with his famous namesake: Goethe called him “a man very deficient in skill and knowledge.” Bellotti erected a hoarding in front of the work and then, concealed behind it, busied himself with his “nefarious proceedings.”27

  In 1770 it was the turn of another bungler, Giuseppe Mazza. He scraped the wall with iron tools and repainted the work according to his own tastes, taking his brushes to everything but the heads of Matthew, Thaddeus, and Simon. Under the impression that the painting was a fresco, he washed the wall in caustic soda. Scandal ensued. Mazza was sacked, while the prior responsible for the heavy-handed restoration found himself banished to another convent. Over the next two centuries the painting would be slathered with various agents—waxes, varnishes, glues, shellacs, resins, alcohol, solvents—in desperate attempts to halt the deterioration. The work was also repainted numerous times. One restoration turned Bartholomew’s foot into a chair leg and Thomas’s hand into a loaf of bread.

  In 1796, the French once more arrived as conquerors, this time under Napoleon, one of whose generals chose to use the refectory as a stable. The horses steamed and stamped, and the soldiers pelted the apostles with pieces of brick. Four years later came a flood. For fifteen days the water stood two feet deep in the refectory, with moisture penetrating the walls and covering the painting in green mold. A few years afterward, a visitor described touching the work (a practice not, apparently, discouraged) and feeling “little flakes” of paint come away in his hand: the ultimate in souvenirs.28 In 1821, a restorer named Stefano Barezzi, under the misconception that The Last Supper was a fresco, tried to remove all of the paint from the wall and transfer the entire work to a giant canvas. Failing in the attempt, he was reduced to trying desperately to glue the paint back on the wall.

  The mural’s obvious and dramatic decline made it a poignant emblem for the transience of earthly beauty. Keats turned out to be wrong: a thing of beauty was not a joy forever; rather, it decayed, perished, and threatened to pass into nothingness. In 1847 an English writer sighed that Leonardo’s painting “will never more be seen by the eye of man... The greater part is perished for ever.”29 This resignation perhaps explains why ten years later the refectory was used to store hay.30

  The Last Supper ultimately became as famous for its grievously impaired and imperiled existence—its status as art’s most famous and tragic endangered species—as it did for its artistic glories. The novelist Henry James called it
“the saddest work of art in the world,” comparing it to “an industrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions.”31 In 1901 the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio composed “For the Death of a Masterpiece,” recording his distress at “the marvel that is no more.”32 Efforts to revive the work in the first half of the twentieth century involved a spa-style treatment of wax injections and invigorating rubdowns with rubber rollers.

  The painting’s most perilous moment came on 16 August 1943, when an RAF bomb struck Santa Maria delle Grazie, blowing the roof off the refectory and destroying a nearby cloister. The Last Supper, protected by sandbags and mattresses, miraculously survived, but for several months it was exposed to the elements with only a tarpaulin for protection. The refectory was hastily rebuilt, after which, as the painting began vanishing beneath mildew and dirt, came another restoration, this time using a coat of shellac to bind the flaking paint to the wall and (as one report enthused) such state-of-the-art 1950s technology as “heat rays, violet rays, laboratory tests, etc.”33 But with air unable to circulate under the layer of glaze, mold soon grew between the pigments and the wall.

  In 1977 the latest campaign began, taking a total of twenty-two years to complete before the unveiling in May 1999. This high-tech conservation involved a life-support system of heat and moisture monitors, along with batteries of diagnostic tests done with sonar, radar, infrared, and miniature cameras inserted into bore-holes in the wall, from which microscopic core samples were taken. The wall was stripped back to Leonardo’s pigments, with layers of shellac, grime, and the pigments of previous restorers removed using solvents applied with tiny blotters of Japanese paper. Passages where Leonardo’s pigments were lost the conservators filled with neutral tones in watercolor.

  The ruins of the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie after an RAF bomb during WWII miraculously spared The Last Supper

  Some critics have argued that The Last Supper is now 80 percent by the restorers and 20 percent by Leonardo.34 The mural’s restoration has become a puzzle of spatiotemporal continuity to match that of the ship of Theseus, the vessel carefully preserved by the Athenians, who eventually replaced every one of its rotting timbers and thereby caused philosophical disputes about whether or not it was still the same ship. What one sees after waiting in line today and then walking over dust-absorbing carpets and through a pollutant-sucking filtration chamber before entering the refectory for fifteen minutes of fame is a far cry, admittedly, from what Leonardo originally unveiled. However, the conservators’ efforts in stabilizing the painting and returning it to its original condition—as far as is humanly and technologically possible—were highly sensitive. We now know infinitely more about Leonardo’s technique (particularly his use of oils) and are better able to appreciate his virtuoso abilities: the transparency of the glasses, the plates of food, the ironed pleats of the tablecloth. More important, the faces of the apostles (which the restorers based, where possible, on Leonardo’s drawings) are no doubt closer to Leonardo’s original intentions, especially that of Judas, who is no longer the caricature of evil beloved of earlier restorers.

  The restorers were assisted in their task by the many early copies of the painting that revealed details lost or damaged in the original: Judas’s money bag, the overturned saltcellar, the expressions of the apostles, the colors of the robes. Most faithful is the large-scale oil on canvas version painted in about 1520 by Giampietrino, possibly for one of Lodovico Sforza’s sons. Giampietrino seems to have worked with Leonardo in the 1490s, giving him impeccable credentials as an interpreter: he might even have assisted the master in the refectory. In 1987, his twenty-five-foot-wide canvas was sent from Oxford to Milan to aid with the restoration.

  Giampietrino’s was only one of numerous versions. Such was the fame of The Last Supper that a demand grew for reproductions almost before the paint had dried. Churches, monasteries, hospitals, cardinals, princes: everyone wanted a copy, rather in the way that everyone wanted a relic of the True Cross or the finger bone of a saint. The Last Supper was engraved as early as 1498 by an unknown artist, and in the decades after its completion versions were done in fresco, panel, canvas, marble, terra-cotta, tapestry, and painted wood. Copies were produced in places as widely scattered as Venice, Antwerp, and Paris. The Certosa di Pavia even had two versions, one done in oils and another in marble.

  These copies were the first artifacts in an industry that today encompasses everything from postcards and giclée prints to the seven versions found by Umberto Eco on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco, all done in wax. Today you can get a Last Supper tattooed across your chest, or be buried in a coffin with Leonardo’s scene carved on both sides. You can see a zoomable sixteen-billion-pixel version on your home computer, an online visualization that its creators, Haltadefinizione, claim to be “the highest definition photograph ever in the world.” Even greater visual pyrotechnics were unveiled in 2010, when the British filmmaker Peter Greenaway created a multimedia installation at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, complete with a life-sized “clone” not only of The Last Supper (produced by a inkjet printer) but of the entire refectory itself. Even copies of The Last Supper generate copies: Andy Warhol’s silk screens were inspired not so much by Leonardo’s painting itself (Warhol was unable to see the mural when he began work in 1985–86 due to the ongoing conservation) as by a whole range of copies: a famous nineteenth-century engraving by Raphael Morghen, children’s books, religious kitsch, and no doubt also the version that hung in the kitchen of his family home in Pittsburgh.35

  The Last Supper is arguably the most famous painting in the world, its only serious rival Leonardo’s other masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. But the painting’s tremendous fame is detached from what we see before us in the refectory. The world’s most famous painting, an Athenian philosopher could argue, no longer exists. But this ghostly evanescence has only enhanced its fame, making it available for endless interpretations and reinventions. Not only does it tell a story from the Gospels: it has become its own story, one of Leonardo’s miraculous triumph followed by centuries of decline, loss and—finally, five hundred years later—a kind of resurrection. Leonardo, perhaps, was right: what is fair in art does not entirely pass away.

  Color Insert

  Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin of the Rocks (Louvre version), 1483–c.1485

  Giovanni Pietro Rizzoli, later known as Giampietrino, copy of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, c. 1520. This copy of the mural by Leonardo’s former apprentice is among the most faithful ever produced

  Map of Milan from George Braun and Frans Hogenburg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum, showing the Castello Sforzesco at the top

  Leonardo da Vinci, detail of Christ in The Last Supper

  Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, Crucifixion, refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, 1495

  Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani (Lady with an Ermine), c. 1489

  Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1490

  Andy Warhol, The Last Supper, 1986

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to everyone who provided me with material assistance and/or moral support as I researched and wrote. It was a pleasure and a learning experience, as always, to work with my editor in New York, George Gibson, whose patient, tactful, and astute queries made the book much better than it would otherwise have been. My other profound debt is to Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University, who was extremely generous with both his time and his resources. He read the manuscript, answered various questions, and gave me access to the treasures of his Leonardo collection in the History Faculty Research Hall at Oxford University.

  Several other people also read the book in manuscript form and offered comments and advice. My friend Dr. Mark Asquith proved, as ever, an alert and probing reader. Another friend, Tom Smart, likewise read the manuscript and gave counsel and encouragement, as did my faithful literary agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stev
enson. Dava Sobel, Keith Devlin, and my brother, Dr. Bryan King, kindly responded to my questions about areas of Leonardo’s expertise that go well beyond my own. Dr. Matthew Landrus generously permitted me to use his perpective drawing of The Last Supper. Nathaniel Knaebel at Bloomsbury efficiently handled the transformation of manuscript into book, and I thank Paula Cooper for her excellent and attentive copyediting. Lea Beresford tracked down the images used in the book and provided other valuable logistical support. My thanks, too, to Bill Swainson and everyone at Bloomsbury in London.

  My indebtedness to Leonardo scholars is, I hope, adequately reflected in my notes and bibliography. I have been the beneficiary of the researches, writings, and insights of (to name only a few of the most prominent) Kenneth Clark, Martin Kemp, Charles Nicholl, and Carlo Pedretti. As well, one of the pleasures of researching my book was reading Leonardo’s own words—and glimpsing the frenetic stirrings of his marvelously inventive, magpie mind—in the edition of the notebooks first compiled and translated in 1883 by Jean-Paul Richter. For these and other volumes I am grateful to have had access both to the London Library and to Oxford University’s Sackler Library.

  Finally, thank you as always to my wife, Melanie, for her love, support, and patience during my Leonardo years. This book is dedicated to her father, Bunny Harris, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. He has long been a reliable source of conversation and good-natured moral support—to say nothing of unstinting food and drink—to both of us.