Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper

A wall painting, but not a fresco

The first thing to understand, because it governs the whole destiny of the work, is a technical matter. The Last Supper is not a fresco in the strict sense. True fresco — buon fresco — is painted on damp lime plaster; the pigments penetrate the wall as it dries and become, chemically, part of the wall. But this technique imposes a relentless speed: each day's section of freshly laid plaster must be painted the same morning, with no repentance possible.

Leonardo, the painter of slow maturation and sfumato, could not work that way. He therefore devised a process of his own: painting a secco, in tempera and oil, on a dry wall prepared with a ground of gesso, pitch and mastic^[1]. The gain was immense — he could rework, blend passages, retouch for months on end. The price was just as great: with no chemical bond to the wall, the paint layer began to flake off almost as soon as the work was finished, in February 1498^[2]. The very genius that made the masterpiece possible is exactly what doomed it.

The refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie

The work covers the entire north wall of the refectory — the dining hall — of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The choice of subject is self-evident: religious eating their meals in silence were to keep before their eyes the Meal par excellence, the one in which the Lord gave himself as food. The commission came from Ludovico Sforza, known as il Moro, Duke of Milan, who was then turning the church and convent into a dynastic monument^[3].

Leonardo worked on it between 1495 and 1498; a 1497 document records it as almost finished^[4]. The painting measures about 460 centimetres high by 880 wide^[5]: at this scale, the figures are slightly larger than life, and the visitor standing in the hall finds himself, literally, at the foot of Christ's table.

The subject: the instant that precedes everything

Leonardo's subject is not the communion, nor the washing of the feet, nor the prayer. It is an instant — and an instant of speech. Christ has just uttered the words that shake everything:

"Amen I say to you, that one of you is about to betray me." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 26:21^[6]

Saint John, an eyewitness, notes the heartrending emotion of that instant:

"When Jesus had said these things, he was troubled in spirit; and he testified, and said: Amen, amen I say to you, that one of you shall betray me." — Gospel according to Saint John 13:21^[7]

Everything Leonardo paints flows from that single second: not the action, but the reaction. It is this displacement — from the fact to the inward reverberation of the fact on twelve faces — that makes the radical modernity of the work, and what the rest of this article will unfold.

A break with iconographic tradition

To measure Leonardo's boldness, one must know how the Last Supper was painted before him. The Tuscan tradition of the Cenacolo — that of Andrea del Castagno (Sant'Apollonia, about 1447) or Domenico Ghirlandaio (Ognissanti, 1480) — obeyed a stubborn convention: the eleven Apostles and Christ are ranged on one side of the table, and Judas, alone, on the other side, relegated facing them like a culprit already designated^[8]. The viewer spotted the traitor at a glance, by his place.

Leonardo breaks with this convenience. In his work, Judas is not isolated: he sits among the Eleven, on the same side as all of them, to Christ's left, in the second group. No bench, no barrier separates him from the others. He is no longer spotted by his place, but by what he does: he recoils into shadow, his face hardened, his hand clenched on a purse — the thirty pieces — his elbow perhaps overturning the salt cellar, a detail tradition has read as an omen of misfortune^[9]. The traitor is no longer pointed out by the composition; he is hidden within the group, exactly as betrayal hides within the heart. This is already a theological thesis before it is a painter's choice.

The storm of the Twelve

Instead of a hieratic row, Leonardo gives us a swell. Christ's words sweep across the table like a shock wave, and each Apostle answers according to his temperament. The painter, in his notebooks, called this rendering "the motions of the soul" (i moti dell'animo) through the motions of the body^[10]. Peter lunges forward, knife already in hand; John sinks, bowed; Thomas raises his forefinger — the finger that, eight days later, will want to touch the wounds; James the Greater opens his arms in a gesture of horror; Philip points to himself, as if to say "Is it I, Lord?"

This question — "Is it I?" — is at bottom the true psychological subject of the work. The Gospel puts it in the mouth of all:

"And they being very much troubled, began every one to say: Is it I, Lord?" — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 26:22^[11]

Leonardo does not paint eleven innocents and one culprit. He paints twelve men who doubt themselves — and it is before this table that the monk, and then the visitor, is invited to ask himself the same question.

The four groups of three

The apparent disorder is a hidden architecture. The twelve Apostles fall into four groups of three, two on each side of Christ. The number is not neutral: three for the Trinity, four groups for the four Gospels or the four cardinal points to which the news will spread. Christ, for his part, remains alone at the centre, isolated by an interval of emptiness on either side: his solitude is that of the One who knows, while the others stir.

The precise identification of the Apostles long rested on a workshop drawing kept at Windsor, which bears their names; it is now broadly accepted^[12]. But the label is not the essential thing: what matters is that each trio forms a complete little scene, with its own centre of gravity, its own glances — and that all of them, through a play of invisible lines, lead the eye back to the middle.

Christ's open hands

At the centre of this storm, Christ makes but one gesture, yet it is the gesture that contains everything. He extends both hands, palms open, over the table: the left turned upward, the right laid flat, one oriented toward a piece of bread, the other toward a cup. The art historian Leo Steinberg, in his major study Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, showed that this gesture makes the work far more than the illustration of a single verse^[13].

For Steinberg, Leonardo superimposed two moments that the Gospel reports back to back: the announcement of the betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist. Christ's hands do not react to the betrayal; they offer — they point to the bread and wine that are about to become his Body and Blood. The image thus speaks at once of the sin that delivers and of the gift that delivers itself.

"This is my body, which shall be delivered for you… This chalice is the new testament in my blood." — Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 11:24-25^[14]

Christ's hand and Judas's hand

Steinberg starts from a troubling observation: Christ's right hand and Judas's left hand reach toward the same spot on the table, where lie a dish, bread and wine. Leonardo thus pictures, almost literally, another of Christ's words, which Cardinal Federico Borromeo already in 1625 judged even closer to the true subject of the work^[15]:

"He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, he shall betray me." — Gospel according to Saint Matthew 26:23^[16]

Betrayal and sacrament share the same cloth, the same dish, the same bread. That, in Steinberg's reading, is the theological heart of the image: the sin that delivers and the gift that delivers itself touch within a single space^[17]. The hand that betrays and the hand that gives itself are only a few centimetres of paint apart.

A Eucharistic catechesis without ostentation

Note what Leonardo does not do. He places no gleaming cup at the centre, raised like a goldsmith's chalice; he halos Christ with no golden nimbus; he sets out no radiant host. Everything is sober, almost domestic: broken bread, glasses, a table. The Eucharist is not shown as an object to be adored, but suggested by the gesture — the gift before the rite.

This discretion is itself catechetical. The Church teaches that it was precisely at this meal that the Lord "instituted the Eucharistic sacrifice of his Body and Blood", to perpetuate it until his return^[18]. Leonardo does not show us the completed rite; he shows us the heart of Christ at the moment he decides to give himself — including to the one who sells him. The doctrinal treatment of this institution is developed separately: see The Last Supper.

The vanishing point at Christ's temple

The Last Supper is one of the summits of Renaissance perspective, and this science is no decoration here: it is meaning. Leonardo builds the whole painted room — the coffered ceiling, the side tapestries, the table — on a single vanishing point perspective. And this single point toward which all the geometry of the image converges falls just behind Christ's right temple^[19].

In other words, the entire space is magnetized by Christ. The lines of the world meet in him; he is, in the mathematical sense of the painting, the point from which all proceeds and to which all returns. Perspective becomes a profession of faith:

"And he is before all, and by him all things consist." — Saint Paul, Letter to the Colossians 1:17^[20]

The viewer's gaze, whether he wills it or not, is led to the face of the One who keeps silent.

The extended refectory: the monks at the Lord's table

Leonardo goes further still. He calculated his perspective so that the painted room seems to extend the real room of the refectory. The side walls of the painting continue the walls of the hall; the painted light comes from the same side as the real windows; Christ's table appears as one more table, at the far end, in the same space. The monks who ate there in silence thus took their meal in the visible presence of the Last Supper, as though seated at the same board^[21].

This illusion is no game: it is the crowning of the whole tradition of the sacred image as catechesis. The wall does not decorate the room; it opens it onto the mystery, making the daily meal the continuation of the Lord's Meal. This is exactly the function Western Christian art assigns to grand narrative painting — a function also carried on, in another language, by Romanesque art and the painting of cathedrals.

The three windows and the pediment

Behind Christ open three windows onto a landscape blued by atmospheric perspective — the distance Leonardo veils in evening light. Three openings, once again, like a discreet reminder of the Trinity; and above Christ's head, a curved pediment crowns the central bay, the only architectural element setting him apart, giving him, without a nimbus, an architect's halo. The light that nimbs him is not painted in gold: it comes from outside, natural — and it is this restraint that makes all the difference with the Eastern icon.

The absence of nimbi

Compared with a Byzantine icon, the Last Supper strikes by its absences. No gold ground, no chiselled nimbi, no Greek letters, no frontal hieratism. Where the icon of Christ Pantocrator presents the Lord face to face, motionless, outside time, as a presence to be venerated, Leonardo plunges Christ into a scene — a dated instant, a human drama, bodies moving in a measured space.

This is the classic difference between two theologies of the image. The icon, as justified by the theology of the icon after the Second Council of Nicaea, aims at the presence of the prototype and contemplation; the grand painting of the West, from the Renaissance onward, aims at the istoria — the narrative that touches, instructs and moves. Byzantine icons show the Kingdom; Leonardo shows the humanity of Christ and his friends at one precise hour of history.

The psychological drama as catechesis

It would be wrong to oppose these two paths as the true against the false. The West simply developed another way of serving the same mystery: no longer the motionless window onto eternity, but the living mirror in which the faithful recognize themselves. Before the icon, one adores Him who is; before Leonardo's Last Supper, one examines oneself: which group am I in? What would I do at this table?

That is why this painting, despite its realism, remains a sacred image in the full sense: it does not recount an anecdote, it sets the viewer in the presence of a mystery of salvation and involves him in it. The boundary between such an image and a mere illustration lies entirely in this power of spiritual questioning — the same that distinguishes, elsewhere, the icon from the idol and the profane image.

A foretold ruin

The material fate of the Last Supper is almost a parable. Scarcely born, the work begins to die. As early as 1517, witnesses note its deterioration; by the middle of the sixteenth century, the damage is advanced. Giorgio Vasari, who had celebrated it in his Lives as a "most beautiful and marvellous" work, describes it as early as 1556 as reduced to a "muddle of blots" in which the figures have become unrecognizable^[22]. A few decades later, the theorist Gian Paolo Lomazzo in turn describes it as entirely ruined^[23].

The first cause is the a secco technique; but the damp of the refectory, the vapours from the neighbouring kitchen and two clumsy eighteenth-century restorations — Michelangelo Bellotti in 1726 (oil repaints, overall varnish), Giuseppe Mazza in 1770 (almost total repainting, halted by public indignation) — aggravated every wound. The Last Supper is doubtless the most copied and the worst preserved masterpiece in art history: what we see is, in part, a learned reconstruction of a largely lost original.

The door, the soldiers, the bomb

To the wear of time were added the violences of men. The chronology of outrages is edifying:

That the work survived a pierced door, two centuries of damp, Bonaparte's soldiers and a 1943 bomb is almost a miracle of patience. Each generation thought it lost; each generation handed it on a little more fragile, and a little more loved.

The restoration of Pinin Brambilla Barcilon

The last and longest of the restorations ran from 1978 to 1999, directed by Pinin Brambilla Barcilon^[24]. Twenty-one years of work with scalpel and microscope, in the light of infrared reflectography, to remove layer upon layer of the repaints of previous centuries and recover, where it survived, Leonardo's pigment. Where nothing was recoverable, the gaps were filled in watercolour, in neutral, muted tones, so as to remain discernible from the original: legibility is restored without cheating over what is lost.

The refectory is now an air-conditioned, sealed hall; entry is only in small groups, for a measured time, through airlocks that filter dust and damp. Completed on 28 May 1999, this restoration gave the world a Last Supper clearer than it had been for centuries — and more fragile than ever. Since 1980, the whole of Santa Maria delle Grazie and the Last Supper have been inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list^[25].

Recognizing oneself at the table

The greatest spiritual lesson of the work lies not in its history nor in its technique, but in the question it puts to whoever stops before it. Leonardo painted twelve men asking "Is it I, Lord?" — and he placed the viewer just low enough, just close enough, to feel himself the thirteenth guest, summoned in turn to answer.

The saints never looked at the Supper otherwise. Before this meal, they did not count themselves on the right side of the table; they recognized themselves as capable of betrayal, and still more as objects of mercy.

"But let a man prove himself: and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of the chalice." — Saint Paul, First Letter to the Corinthians 11:28^[26]

The bread given even to the traitor

There is, in Leonardo's image, a terrible gentleness: Christ stretches out his hand toward the bread at the very moment he knows who delivers him, and without withdrawing that gift from anyone. The hand reaching toward Judas is not a threatening hand; it is a hand that offers. Whether Judas actually communicated belongs to another file — see Did Judas Receive Holy Communion at the Last Supper? — but the image has already decided in advance about Christ's heart: he gives to the end, even to the one who betrays him.

"O sacred banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the soul is filled with grace, and a pledge of future glory is given to us." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, antiphon O sacrum convivium^[27]

It is this banquet that Leonardo painted on the threshold of the Passion: not the idyll of a group of friends, but the mystery of a God who gives himself as food to men who, all of them, will abandon him that very night. Before the Last Supper, Christian art attains its goal: it does not merely make one admire a beauty; it sets the heart face to face with the love that delivers itself, and asks whether it too will sit at this table.

• The Last Supper — the Gospel event: the Upper Room, the washing of the feet, the institution of the Eucharist
• Did Judas Receive Holy Communion at the Last Supper? — the doctrinal question debated by the Fathers
• The theology of the icon — why and how the Church justifies the sacred image
• Christ Pantocrator — the face of Christ in the Eastern icon tradition
• Byzantine icons — the other great path of the Christian image
• Romanesque art and the catechesis of images — the image as teaching