On to the Last Supper

Our guide was young. We were much older then the other members of this tour. It was cold and raining hard. Dusk approached. We were soaked to the bone. All in the name of art. To make our appointment for "The Last Supper", we walked very very fast and sometimes the keep up, we nearly ran for two hours across town. We had one ten minute stop for coffee. You have to pay extra to sit in Italian coffee shops, but the proprietors had mercy on us and we sat without the extra fee. After a ten minute warm-up, our guide said we had another 15 minutes to walk. It was really 40. We were moving so fast I (Joanne) literally had to trot on what felt like cold bloody stumps to keep up. If we were late, we'd miss the "Last Supper". No exceptions.

We paused for a moment at a museum along the way that contained another Michelangelo masterpiece, only to be told it was closed, though we would have had no time to enter anyway.

And then: after what seemed to be an interminable period of misery...there it was. The reason for the day. In a non-descript unmarked building housing "The Last Supper"!

It was common to paint "Last Suppers in dining rooms in monasteries. There are other "Last Suppers" painted by other artists in dining rooms in many monasteries. I hear there is a beautiful one inf Florence. This "Last Supper" was in an empty room with an ungainly fresco by an unknown artist on the opposite wall.

Leonardo's work is a triumph in restoration as much as a triumph of art. One could spend a lifetime looking at it. Every square inch is perfect. Leonardo was a master at recreating facial expressions that provide a viewer with an interior reality. Each apostle's reaction to Jesus' statement that "one among us will betray me" betrays the quality of a personal relationship with Christ. The perfect position of each apostle's hand also tells a story in itself.

The right bottom corner of the table cloth is tied in a knot, because da Vinci knew that the last name he assumed (da Vinci) could be interpreted etymologically to mean "knot". As noted earlier, Leonardo was illegitimate and his father never let him use the family name, though he did see that Leonardo was brought up and apprenticed. His mother was a chambermaid, presumably a bright one.

The problem is that Leonardo painted in this masterpiece with oil on plaster rather than a doing a fresco, which would have mixed the paint into the plaster, like in the Sistine Chapel. A fresco would have been more lasting. "The Last Supper" began deteriorating within 20 years after it was finished in 1497. By 1799 it was so far gone, Napoleon used the room as a stable. Over the centuries, there have been many "refurbishings", most of them producing nothing less than a disaster. An amazing door was literally cut into the painting's wall, to make the kitchen more accessible, thus destroying "Jesus's feet" for Heaven's sake.

What is more amazing is that we have this"Last Supper" at all.

This masterpiece was restored in 1996 by a new method unknown to our guide, but the colors appear faded. But this restoration is a major blessing. It is truly a masterpiece, well worth the trepidation and suffering to get here.