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Leonardo and the Last Supper
by Ross King
Walker & Company
You gonna finish that?
The Dominican friars dining in candle-lit silence at Santa Maria della Grazie convent had to be wondering that very question, as Leonardo da Vinci occupied their refectory with disruptive scaffolding, odorous paint fumes and his own looming perfectionist presence — for three long years.
A fresco on the opposite wall — a crucifixion scene by the painter Montorfano — was finished in 12 months. And here was Leonardo, some days working furiously from dawn to nightfall and other days stroking his beard for a couple hours before walking out without lifting a single brush, much to the monks’ annoyance.
And when he finally did remove the scaffolding in 1498 and present to the world a 15-by-29-foot mural that would soon be hailed as the most sublime artwork ever created, the monks barely looked up from their bread and water. Hundreds of years later, they even cut a door in the wall, taking out Christ’s feet.
The colorful back story is restored and revealed in “Leonardo and The Last Supper,” a new book by British author Ross King that quickly dispenses with the outlandish myths spread by “The Da Vinci Code” novel — while showing that history is in many ways more surprising than Dan Brown’s popular fiction.
At the time of his commission, Leonardo was 42 (when life expectancy was about 40) and considered something of a disappointment in the art world. Those who owned his portraits in private collections raved of his genius, but by 1494 and without a masterpiece visible in a public cathedral or piazza, it appeared that Leonardo had missed his shot. (He’d even once sent an anonymous letter recommending himself for the job of designing bronze doors for Piacenza’s cathedral, writing that there was no other “capable man” besides Leonardo the Florentine.)
An earlier commission by Duke Lodovico Sforza to sculpt a great bronze horse in 1484 was scrubbed because the warring duchy of Milan had an emergency need for the 75 tons of bronze for forging into cannons to repel French invaders.
Despite his artistic talents, Leonardo was more interested in architecture, hydraulics (he invented a water-powered alarm clock) and, given the fractious era in the Italian peninsula, military engineering. He designed swivel-mounted cannons, a rudimentary submarine and a “spike-wheeled chariot armed with head-high rotating blades.” Yet his engineering ideas were ignored as too farfetched.
Leonardo considered it an “extreme defect” for artists to copy faces or poses used by any other artist. Other paintings of the Last Supper existed, but Leonardo’s idea was an amalgam of two events: a Eucharist context (“This is my body . . . This my blood”) from Christ, who sits at the center of the work — its focus and “vanishing point” — and whose gaze and lowered left hand leads the viewer’s eye down to a loaf of bread; and secondly, and more vividly, to depict the moment immediately after Jesus announces to his disciples that one among them at the table would betray him. Spoiler alert: It was Judas.
As this announcement would cause a frenzy of tumult at the table, for his models, the artist used men who would sit and gossip in the piazzas — the sersaccenti delle pancacce (roughly translated in Italian to “know-it-alls of the benches”).
As a model for Christ, the author speculates it was a young captain of the militia named Giovanni Conte, a man whom Leonardo met through his connections with aristocracy.
“The Last Supper” is technically not a fresco, a technique in which the pigments are mixed with wet plaster and literally bond into the wall. Instead, Leonardo stubbornly chose to paint over the plaster and a coat of white primer, an “oil tempera” method that allowed him to create more luminescent hues — but sadly for art historians led to fading and flaking that began within 20 years after its completion.
(A series of “restorations” in the 17th and 18th centuries foolishly employed other artists to literally paint over Leonardo’s work — one accidentally turned Bartholemew’s foot into a chair leg and Thomas’ hand into a loaf of bread. Thankfully, a 22-year restoration utilizing infrared light, which was completed in 1999, stripped away those aesthetic atrocities.)
Color is a large part of why Leonardo is hailed as perhaps history’s greatest artist. For his paints, King writes. “A flesh tone could be made from grinding up reddish crystals from a place he called Rocca Nova, and a green from mixing verdigris and lemon juice.” Even his shadows are tinged with a bluish color — including the one shadow darkening an apostle’s face, that of Judas.
For the blue mantle over Jesus’ left shoulder, he used ultramarine, the most brilliant and expensive pigment in Italy — 1 ounce would cost 8 ducats, more than the annual rent of a typical Milanese citizen.
During the three years he worked on the masterpiece, Leonardo would periodically be called away for some lesser assignment from his patron, Sforza, to paint a hall in the duke’s castle or even the duchess’ bedroom (Leonardo drew the line there and walked off the job). But even when at Santa Maria della Grazie, his work schedule was sporadic. To the frustration of disturbed friars — who no doubt considered a painter in that time more craftsman than genius — it was not unusual for them to see the mercurial Leonardo enter their dining hall, “clamber up onto the scaffold, swiftly apply only a touch or two of paint, and then go.”
Reports of Leonardo’s pay vary widely. A best guess is about 2,000 ducats (about $350,000 today), roughly enough to buy a grand riverside home.
Finally, for the menu, the avid vegetarian eschewed the usual lamb served in previous depictions of the Last Supper. Of the four Gospels, three indicate that it was a Passover meal, and thus lamb would be the traditional choice. Leonardo went with the Gospel of John, the one account that places the Last Supper several days earlier.
With that meatless loophole, he set out on the table a feast fit for a pescatarian. Along with bread rolls and glasses of wine, platters are piled high with fish and even filets of eel garnished appetizingly with thick slices of orange.