Brera

Seeing The Last Supper, painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie around 1498, was one of our major goals for our visit to Milan this year. Getting tickets was hard; tickets for the following quarter go on sale the 19th of the month preceding that period. You have to be quick and lucky to score them as the resellers, with their bots, scoop them all up as soon as they are released. You can take tours with the resellers but it can be expensive, and at least some of the offers are scams. We wanted official tickets.

Karl was at his computer at the magic moment and scored two official guided tour tickets. He couldn’t get an English tour, but figured our Italian was good enough for the Italian tour which was available.

Usually, an art work on a wall like The Last Supper was done in fresco, with the pigments being applied to wet plaster, a section at a time, into which they sink, making the fresco very durable; the colors are part of the plaster when it dries. Many very old frescos still look great.

The problem was that frescos have to be done quickly, before the plaster dries, and they have to be done right the first time, since once the plaster dries, they can’t be changed.

And Leonardo didn’t do quickly. Ever. He worked on many projects at the same time, going from one to the other, and never even finished many of the works he was hired to do. He drove his patrons crazy!

And, he didn’t do “get it right the first time”; he was constantly reconsidering his work and making changes. He worked on the Mona Lisa for 17 years!

So, he wasn’t going to do The Last Supper as a fresco. Instead, he used various pigments, painting on dry plaster. Or, more or less dry, as the refectory the work is in was damp and sometimes flooded.

His brilliant work began to deteriorate almost immediately; this was commented on within 20 years and it was referred to as being in total ruin within 90 years. The chapel it is in was bombed in WWII, and although the painting wasn’t badly damaged, that certainly couldn’t have helped.

It has been restored something like eight times, first in 1726, and some of the early restoration efforts were crude, by today’s standards. The most recent restoration was completed in 1999.

The restorations are very controversial; just how much of the work is still original, and how much it looks like the original, are very unclear. However, it’s The Last Supper one way or another, and we very much enjoyed seeing it. Certainly, da Vinci’s basic idea is still there, as is his very original use of perspective. Seeing it, especially from different parts of the refectory, was fascinating.Read more