The Last Supper's Everlasting Mark on Italian History
- vsanmartindiaz
- Jun 8, 2023
- 6 min read
The Biblical story of Jesus’s Last Supper recounts the time when Jesus shared a meal with his twelve disciples. He announced at this dinner that one of them would soon betray him.
Jesus took the bread and the wine on the table and asked God to bless it. He performed the first Eucharist and taught the disciples how to do the same. Little did these apostles know that Judas was the man that would betray Jesus at the table after their supper.
The Painter
The Kingdom of Milan in the late 1400s was ruled by the House of Sforza. They acquired the kingdom of Milan following the extinction of the Visconti family shortly beforehand. This family was characterized by their ruthless and powerful hands over the Milanese people.
In 1482 Duke Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan received a letter from a strange man. This man offered his services to the Milanese kingdom as a military engineer. Unaware of the man’s background, Ludovico accepted the request.
This great mind was none other than Leonardo Da Vinci, a scientist, artist, cartographer, geologist, and inventor. He was ready to move on from the city of Florence, where he worked as an artist, and wanted to put his mind to use in other ways, even though he had no background in military weaponry prior to moving to Milan.
Chiara Rocchetti is a tour guide in Milan who hosts daily six-hour walking tours for visitors to the city. She’s been giving tours of her hometown for ten years now. Every tour she does ends with tickets for her guests to see The Last Supper painting, where she explains in detail the features and history of the artwork.
Chiara said, “Leonardo Da Vinci basically invited himself to Milan before even talking to Sforza. He got bored of being an artist, and wanted to try his hand at something bigger, and challenge himself.”
Nevertheless, the two had a successful and prosperous work relationship, and Leonardo Da Vinci lived in the Sforza castle.
The Painting
Between the years of 1495 to 1498, Leonardo Da Vinci was commissioned by his now patron Sforza to create a painting for the Dominican church. The Dominican Convent was a Roman Catholic religious order. The best quality that they are most known for is their passion for holistic education as well as their pursuit of the truth.
The Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie was a church that needed painting. Churches in Milan liked to commission paintings to fill the blank spaces on their walls. They specifically requested images that captured the scene of Jesus’s last supper from the Bible.
Chiara explained, “Hundreds of renditions of The Last Supper were created by dozens of artists before Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous piece. They all, however, would place Judas on the other side of the Last Supper table. They would paint him separate from the rest of the disciples, but that would be inaccurate. If the Last Supper happened how it was supposed to happen, then all of the apostles would have been facing the same side of the table, as no one would have known who the traitor was yet except Jesus.”
This is how Leonardo’s paintings were different than other paintings of the Last Supper that came beforehand. Instead of painting the apostles how everybody else did, he decided to paint them all as they would be, together.
The painting of The Last Supper by Leonardo Da Vinci depicts the moment right after Christ said, “One of you will betray me” to his apostles. The shock and emotion on their faces are shown in the painting.
This, along with the additions of objects held by some apostles that symbolize different moments in the bible, the detailed facial expressions of each subject, and the body language of these subjects, allowed the painting to be deemed a masterpiece. The Last Supper was completed in 1497.
The painting was displayed on the wall of the church refectory (dining hall). It shared a wall with the kitchen of this Dominican church. Later on, after the painting was completed, the Dominicans decided to cut away the feet of Jesus in the center of the painting to make room for a doorway that would lead directly to the church’s kitchen. Though this piece of history is lost to time, artistic renditions of what that portion of the missing painting would have looked like have been created from Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketches of the original painting.
The Duke and the Dominicans loved the painting and proudly allowed it to stand for hundreds of years on the walls of their church. However, these walls began to crumble at the start of World War II.
In 1943, a German enemy air strike hit Milan destroying millions of buildings, churches, and historical monuments around the ancient city. Everyone at the time thought that among the rubble would lie the remains of what was The Last Supper.
However, by a stroke of luck, or maybe even divine intervention, a bomb landed just 80 feet from the church. Two out of the four walls of the room that held the fresco were destroyed by this explosion, but not the wall where the fresco was painted. This wall survived.
The building’s support beams and heavy structure allowed the painting to survive the explosion completely intact.
Though the painting was saved, the walls that protected it were now breached, and the Dominican church and the city of Milan let the painting sit, exposed to the elements, for 40 years.
Unlike other paintings created in the 1400s, which utilized wet plaster as the base for painting, The Last Supper was painted with pigments on a dry plaster wall. These pigments did not dry as quickly as wet plaster. Leonardo Da Vinci wanted to take his time with this painting and work on it for a number of years. Because of the technique he chose to use, the fresco has slowly begun to fade and chip away with time. This painting style along with its exposure to the outdoors as a result of the breached walls surrounding the fresco acted as the perfect storm for the painting's rapid deterioration.
Finally, in the 80s, restoration efforts began on The Last Supper by Pinin Brambilla and his team of restorers. Its restoration concluded in 1999.
The People
Brambilla brought life back into the world-renowned fresco, fixing the small imperfections and blemishes caused by time. These efforts allow visitors and tourists today to view Da Vinci’s masterpiece in all of its glory.
Currently, the Dominican church hosts The Last Supper painting for viewers on the same wall Da Vinci painted it on 600 years ago in the Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
The viewing area is tightly monitored and controlled to maintain the six different preservation efforts done to The Last Supper. This has made it difficult for passersby to see the fresco at a moment's notice.
Tickets to view The Last Supper must be purchased in advance for the specific date and time for viewing. Each ticket has the name of the person it belongs to, and for ticket-buyers to receive their entrance into the Last Supper, they must show official identification with their legal name along with their ticket to enter. Visitors must arrive at their scheduled meeting time at the church 30 minutes prior and can only view the actual painting for 15 minutes before having to leave.
Monica Weeden and Travis Weeden, a newly married couple on their honeymoon, came to Milan without any knowledge that The Last Supper was even in the fashion capital of the world. However, when they were able to see the piece in person on one of Chiara’s walking tours, it became the highlight of their trip.
Travis said, “Who knows how long [The Last Supper] will be here. It won’t be around forever. It’s very fragile. Who knows if it’ll be here in twenty years? It was amazing to see this up close and in real life. Being in person with the faces of the apostles really made me feel connected to the painting.”
Monica followed up when she added, “I was awestruck when I viewed the painting. I thought it was going to be extremely faded and deteriorated, but seeing it well-kept really made me glad to have seen it. Seeing how Leondardo depicted Judas and Peter, specifically, with Peter’s dagger pointed toward the back of Judas holding the bag of coins was so impactful, especially with Chiara, our tour guide, explaining every part of the painting.”
The Last Supper painting is still fading over time, but for now, visitors can appreciate this great piece of art before it is completely lost. Even today, Leonardo Da Vinci's signature can still be seen in the artwork. His way of signing off on his paintings was to include a knot of fabric within the piece, which can be seen on the bottom right of the table of The Last Supper.
The Last Supper painting is encased in a moisture-monitored environment. This room is installed with a sophisticated air filtration system. All guests enter through dust-filtering chambers before they are allowed into the room that holds the fresco.
Guests aren’t even allowed to shed tears in the room the painting is held in or they will be asked to leave by security. This highly protected artwork, though accessible to the public, stands to be one of the most exclusive and difficult paintings to view.
Though worn down and tattered by time, visitors can still come to appreciate The Last Supper in all its glory today. This masterpiece stands as a pillar for the historical events the painting has overcome since its inception.
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