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David & Art - The Last Supper

The story of one of the world’s most famous paintings is a story worth repeating.

It occurs to me that I haven’t written much about the Renaissance and its art. And as far as I can remember, I’ve never written about Leonardo, nor about his masterpiece known as The Last Supper. But to some extent I feel that everyone who writes about art and culture and history is eventually going to find himself or herself standing in front of this piece, trying to write about it. Trying to convey something about it in mere words.

The painting itself has echoed through western culture much like the event that it portrays echoes through Christianity. It’s familiar enough—has enough cultural resonance you could say—to have produced an ocean of memes before “memes” was even a word.

The painting itself is on the wall of a convent in Milan, Italy. Some people are surprised to learn that it’s not a painting on canvas or on a wood panel like the Mona Lisa. It’s painted directly onto the wall, and in a way that caused the paint to begin to deteriorate rather quickly. It’s also surprisingly large—almost 9 meters wide—that is, almost 29 feet. We don’t know exactly when Leonardo created it, but we do know that it happened between 1495 and 1498. There’s apparently a document from 1497 saying that it was almost done. This was about the time Columbus was making his third voyage across the ocean, and Vasco da Gama was about to lead a voyage from Portugal to India: the dawn of the age of European discovery, a world on the edge of change.

Technically speaking, with its amazingly skillful use of converging lines, and the way it directs your eye to exactly where the artist wants it to be, the work is in every way a masterpiece. As a painting, The Last Supper is a little like a group of portraits almost as much as it is one single coherent painting. What you have portrayed before you (and above you—it’s up above eye-level) is the moment when Jesus says one of his followers will betray him. And Leonardo writes emotions onto the faces of all the twelve. They’re individual reactions. Some of the disciples are surprised. Some are enraged. Some are incredulous, others stunned into disbelief. One registers no real expression, but you then notice he’s reaching for the same piece of bread that Jesus is reaching for.

In 1943, the convent and the church to which its attached was hit by an allied bombing raid. Leonardo’s mural had been thickly protected with sandbags, and the wall upon which it was painted, stayed up while many of the other walls of the convent crumbled. I’ve never seen it in person, but I’m glad it made it through the war.

Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper in the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy
Posztos Janos/Posztós János - stock.adobe.com
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Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper in the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy