The Last Supper by Leonardo: An Immortal Artistic Treasure (1498)
Jesus sits alone at the centre of a long table, his arms spread on the cloth, his eyes lowered. He has just said: "One of you will betray me." On either side, twelve men react at once, leaning back, jumping up, pointing at themselves, asking each other who it could be. Only one of them pulls away into shadow, a small bag clutched in his hand. Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, painted between about 1495 and 1498 on the wall of a monastery dining hall in Milan, is perhaps the most famous image in Christian art, and one of the most fragile. The picture below is our vintage poster version of the painting; the original is shown further down.
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Artist: Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519)
Date: c. 1495–1498
Medium: Tempera on gesso, pitch and mastic, on wall plaster, 460 × 880 cm
Location: Refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
Commissioned by: Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan
What does the painting show?
Earlier painters of the Last Supper usually lined the apostles up in a calm row and placed Judas alone on the near side of the table, so that no one could miss him. Leonardo does something new. He seats all thirteen figures on the same side, facing us, and chooses the most dramatic moment of the meal: the instant after Jesus announces the betrayal. The words fall like a stone into water, and the shock spreads outwards in waves.
The apostles are arranged in four groups of three. From left to right they are usually identified as Bartholomew, James the Less and Andrew; then Judas, Peter and John; then Thomas, James the Greater and Philip; and finally Matthew, Jude Thaddeus and Simon. Each group is a small drama of its own. Peter leans in angrily towards John, a knife in his hand. Thomas raises a finger towards heaven. Philip presses his hands to his chest as if to say "Is it I?". And Judas, in the same group as Peter and John, recoils into shadow, gripping the purse that holds his payment, his elbow knocking over a salt cellar.
At the centre, Christ forms a calm triangle against the bright window behind him. All the lines of the room, the beams of the ceiling and the tapestries on the walls, run towards a single vanishing point at his head. The whole architecture of the picture leads our eyes to him.
A masterpiece that began to decay at once
The painting was commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, for the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where the friars ate their meals beneath it. Instead of the traditional fresco, painted quickly into wet plaster, Leonardo experimented with tempera on a dry wall prepared with gesso, pitch and mastic. That let him work slowly and revise, but it did not bond with the wall. Damp did the rest.
Within decades the paint was flaking. In the 1550s Giorgio Vasari described it as a muddle of blots. In 1652 a doorway was cut through the bottom of the wall, removing Christ's feet. During the Second World War, in 1943, a bomb destroyed much of the refectory; the painting survived only because it had been protected with sandbags and scaffolding. Between 1978 and 1999 the restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon spent twenty-one years removing centuries of dirt and earlier repainting to recover what remains of Leonardo's own work.
Leonardo in Milan
Leonardo spent almost twenty years in Milan in the service of Ludovico Sforza, working as painter, engineer, designer of festivals and military adviser. In the same period he painted the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani known as Lady with an Ermine. Later he would paint the Mona Lisa and The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, where the same study of gesture and emotion appears on a smaller scale. For a much-debated image of Christ attributed to him, see Salvator Mundi.
How to see it
The Last Supper is still on the wall where Leonardo painted it, in the former refectory next to the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. To protect the painting, visits are limited to small groups for about fifteen minutes, and tickets must be booked well in advance through the official site of the Cenacolo Vinciano.
Leonardo’s Last Supper reimagined as an Art Nouveau vintage art poster by Sapiens Verbum.
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The Last Supper is one of the thirty pictures in our book The 30 Most Famous Paintings in the History of Art: The Myths They Hide, the History They Reveal. Each chapter takes one painting, the myth around it and the history behind it. On Kindle, in paperback, in hardcover and as an audiobook.
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Sources
Wikipedia, "The Last Supper (Leonardo)"; Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1568).
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