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Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (in Italian, "Il Cenacolo" or "l’Ultima Cena") in the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan is one of the most important Italian works of the Renaissance if not of all time.
The church, finished in 1482 by Guinforte Solare, was built in the gothic Lombard style. In 1492 construction of a new gigantic tribunal designed by Bramante was begun. The marble door, the old sacristy and the small cloister ("delle rane") are also attributed to Bramante. Other Renaissance masters present in Santa Maria delle Grazie are Zenale, Butinone and Gaudenzio Ferrari.
In 1494 Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by Duke Lodovico Sforza to paint the northern wall of the refectory. The painting was completed in 1498 one year before the French invasion.
What remains of the original painting by Leonardo, revealed by the last restoration completed in 1999, is the scene of the last super of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Christian Bible. Though the representation of The Last Supper is typically found in church refectories this representation is unusual in that depicts the moment of the announcement of Judas’ betrayal.
In his initial drawings Leonardo followed the tradition of seating Judas opposite Christ and separated from the other characters, but he later changed this and seated all of the Apostles in groups of three on the same side of the table. He then drew the table as too short and narrow for the thirteen characters to sit around it comfortably and made Christ and the Apostles oversized so they were larger than life. Finally, to focus the eye on Christ, he placed three windows in the background with the largest directly behind His head, almost like a halo. Christ is shown as perfectly calm while the Apostles are in an obvious state of shock.
For this painting Leonardo rejected the traditional fresco technique of applying paint to wet plaster, a method unsuited to Leonardo's slow and thorough execution, and created the work instead with an experimental technique that involved painting directly on the dry plaster using chromatic oil and tempera pigments. With this renegade method and the excessive humidity that impregnates the refectory, Leonardo rendered one of the most enduring painting techniques volatile and unstable. Within 20 years of completion The Last Supper began showing sighs of deterioration. Added to these initial complications have been centuries of pollution, tourists, candle smoke, and the ravages of age, not to mention food fights in the refectory staged by Napoleon’s soldiers and Allied bombs in 1943.
Though fatigued by years of torment and mistreatment Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Super is still moving and inspiring.
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